Selling some Lincoln-collection items won’t erase debt

SPRINGFIELD, ILL. >> The acquisition of 1,500 documents and artifacts for the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum a decade ago firmly established Illinois as a leading repository of all things Lincoln, the prairie lawyer who led the U.S. through the Civil War.

So forgive the handwringing over the possibility some of it might have to be sold. The Lincoln museum’s fundraising foundation, which borrowed $23 million in 2007 to buy the trove from private collector Louise Taper, still owes $9.2 million on a note due in October 2019. Donations have slowed and state officials are reluctant to chip in.

An Associated Press review of the collection shows large parts that could be considered expendable. Does a collection of Lincolniana need five dozen playbills, letters and lithographs belonging to Junius Brutus Booth, the father of Lincoln’s assassin, John Wilkes Booth, who died eight years before Lincoln became president?

Does it need an 1874 invitation to the wedding of the daughter of President Ulysses Grant? A 1928 memo to the wife of the law partner of Lincoln’s son Robert Todd Lincoln? A 1948 limited edition copy of “John Brown’s Body,” the Stephen Vincent Benet poem?

Maybe not. But selling them would hardly make a dent in the Springfield museum debt. A copy of Benet’s Civil War folk epic from the same printing goes for under $100 online. A New York dealer sold an 1851 Junius Booth playbill several years ago for $400.

“You can’t take nine of those pieces and come up with $9 million,” said New Jersey-based appraiser Brian Kathenes. “You’d probably have to go after some of the better stuff or sell a lot more of it off.”

The museum predicament reminds Kathenes of “The Gift of the Magi,” the O. Henry short story of an impoverished couple buying gifts for each other: “You sell off the reason you exist to exist.”

Museum code of ethics prohibits the sale of items in collections for anything other than buying additional items.

Yet the Lincoln museum foundation says such a sale may be necessary. A foundation statement released last week says negotiations and fundraising — including a GoFundMe page — continue while material is culled for potential debt reduction “without selling off core items.” Foundation attempts for a state grant met resistance.

Harold Holzer, awardwinning author and Lincoln scholar, said museums routinely sell duplicative items or “second-rate things” acquired along with prized treasures.

“But not to pay the rent,” Holzer said, “because the temptation is too large to defenestrate the place in order to pay for the walls. The walls were built to protect the material. The material is not there to protect the walls.”

The Taper collection riches include Lincoln’s earliest known writings, his presidential seal with wax remnants from its last use; an 1839 Schuyler County legal brief that contains the signatures of Lincoln for the plaintiff and rival, Stephen A. Douglas, for the defense.

SETH PERLMAN FILE — THE ASSOCIATED PRESS Abraham Lincoln’s iconic stovepipe hat of questioned authenticity is photographed at the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum in Springfield, Ill. Historians say that the 2007 acquisition of 1,500 documents and artifacts for the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum firmly established Illinois as a leading repository of all things Lincoln. So forgive the handwringing over the possibility that some of it might have to be sold. The Lincoln museum’s fundraising foundation, which borrowed $23 million in 2007 to buy the trove from private collector Louise Taper, still owes $9.2 million on a note due in October.

SETH PERLMAN FILE — THE ASSOCIATED PRESS Abraham Lincoln’s bloodstained gloves he carried on the night of his death at the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum in Springfield, Ill.