Artist desired a more ‘real’ Lincoln 

By The Associated Press
Posted: 5:20 pm Fri, February 12, 2010

NEW YORK CITY — Abraham Lincoln had piercing eyes, a muscular neck and was not given to slouching or looking downcast as some artists portrayed him at the time, according to eyewitness accounts collected by an early 20th-century sculptor and published in a new book.

The previously unpublished recollections described the 16th president as a forceful figure with an engaging smile but one who also loved children and invited them to play at the White House.

The descriptions of Lincoln’s appearance, personality and leadership made sculptor James E. Kelly conclude that many artists depicted him incorrectly, and it became his dream — which went unfulfilled — to create a statue of the president as “an active, vigorous” and caring leader, not an aloof, godlike figure on a pedestal.

The stories, collected after Lincoln’s death, are the subject of the recently published book, “Tell Me of Lincoln, Memories of Abraham Lincoln, the Civil War and Life in Old New York.”

William Styple, a historian from Chatham, N.J., published the collection after spending five years sorting through 24 boxes of Kelly’s handwritten material — hundreds of pages of more than 60 eyewitness accounts of Lincoln — in the stacks of the New York Historical Society and at the Smithsonian Institution. It was material Kelly had hoped to publish one day.

One of the reminiscences was from Alfred Denton Cridge, who recalled how as a 4-year-old boy he was invited to the White House with other children shortly after he was caught stealing flowers on the grounds of the White House. He said the president gently explained how it hurt the flower to be pulled and that the right way was to cut flowers.

“He illustrated it by pulling a single hair from each of our heads and then by cutting several hairs,” Cridge said.

Cridge, whose father prepared reports for Lincoln, said he often sat on the president’s lap as he regaled the children with stories. He said the president met with a number of children “three times a week, sometimes oftener” in a small grove in the rear of the White House.

Decades after Lincoln’s assassination, Lt. William Scott, who served in the 115th U.S. Colored Troops during the Civil War, remembered the strength in the president’s neck. “It was strong and muscular. He did not have a scraggy neck!” he said.

“I never saw him droop,” exclaimed Judge Wesley Rogers Batchelder in attacking as “grotesque” a 1917 statue in Cincinnati by George Grey Barnard.

Batchelder, who served as Gen. Benjamin Butler’s secretary, said he never saw Lincoln “bowed with sorrow.”
“He was not that kind of a man,” he said.

Beginning in 1919 and for the next several years, Kelly, who was only 10 when Lincoln was assassinated, interviewed former Civil War soldiers, civic leaders, politicians and common people

Among his subjects was a young drummer in the 20th New York Regiment who found inspiration in Lincoln’s eyes.

“I think of our Savior having eyes like that,” William Vallete, who met Lincoln at a White House reception, said. “They say he was homely and awkward … No one who ever saw Abraham Lincoln can say anything like that.”

“Make him living, for he was the most ‘all alive’ of men,” William Stoddard, one of Lincoln’s personal secretaries, told Kelly. “I have seen his face light up as if God had kindled a bonfire behind it.”

Jerome Walker, a young man assigned to take Lincoln through a base hospital of wounded soldiers in 1865, said Lincoln’s face “looked careworn.”

But, he said, “Every once in a while it would light up with a smile and that smile would take away all the furrows.”

Kelly jotted down these interviews in small pocket-size notepads, on legal size paper and on torn scraps of paper held together with rusty paperclips.

His interview subjects wanted the president “on that pedestal but they wanted him accessible,” said Daniel Weinberg, owner of the Abraham Lincoln Book Shop in Chicago. It was a “reaction against the martyrdom syndrome.”

Kelly left behind a few rough sketches of his proposed Lincoln monument, including one of the president delivering the Gettysburg Address and another of him raising the flag at Independence Hall in 1861. He created one bronze bas relief of Lincoln — under enemy fire at the Battle of Fort Stevens in 1864, which can still be seen at the fort in Washington, D.C.

Before he turned to sculpting, Kelly was an illustrator for Harpers Weekly and Scribner’s Monthly and his subjects included Thomas Edison, Mark Twain and Oscar Wilde.

He died, destitute, in 1933 — laid to rest in an unmarked grave in St. Raymond’s Cemetery in the Bronx — at the age of 77. Through Styple’s efforts, a tombstone was erected in 2006.