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Signed book from the Lincoln family library: Life of George Washington, Vol. II, by Washington Irving. Later printing. NY: G. P. Putnam, 1860. Hardcover handsomely bound in full chocolate calf with marbled endpapers and fore-edges, and gilt-tooled spine, 5 x 7.5, 486 pages. Neatly signed on the first free end page in bold ink, "Mary Lincoln, 1860." Autographic condition: fine. Book condition: VG/None, with edgewear, minor running to boards, and Louise & Barry Taper Collection/Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library & Museum bookplate affixed to front pastedown.
Ex. Lincoln Family Library, with Mary Lincoln's ownership signature dated to the 1860 presidential campaign; Louise & Barry Taper Collection/Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library & Museum, with affixed bookplate.
Published during the campaign for Abraham Lincoln's eventual election year of 1860, and dated by the future first lady in the same year, this volume is part of the definitive five-part biography of George Washington completed by Washington Irving in 1859. On February 27, 1860, Abraham Lincoln delivered his critical Cooper Union address, which elevated him to national prominence. In that speech, Lincoln invoked the legacy of George Washington to argue for the constitutional limits on the expansion of slavery, quoting directly from Volume V of this very series: 'Some of you delight to flaunt in our faces the warning against sectional parties given by Washington in his Farewell Address.' Although this is Volume II, it belongs to the same series that Lincoln likely consulted and referenced while drafting his speech. Volume V of the set includes an entire chapter devoted to Washington's Farewell Address, the very source Lincoln quoted in his pivotal Cooper Union address.
Mary Lincoln's ownership signature from 1860—the same year her husband was campaigning and preparing to take the nation's highest office—makes this a profoundly symbolic artifact. It forms a powerful connection between George Washington, the nation's founding president, and Abraham Lincoln, who would soon be called to preserve the Union through its greatest crisis.
On July 26, 1862, Mary Lincoln wrote to Commissioner Benjamin Brown French to report that she had purchased books for the White House library using a $250 appropriation, spending $75 in Washington and $150 in New York. She noted that she had replaced the worn sets of Waverley and Shakespeare with new editions and mentioned that President Abraham Lincoln had personally paid for a history of Washington, acquired from New York bookseller T. J. Crowen. While the volume in question is not the same title obtained during that New York trip, it is reasonable to believe that President Lincoln, having completed Irving's works on Washington, began collecting additional related volumes just two years after the family added this set to their library and he was elected to the presidency.
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