Lincoln Cottage Was Lincoln’s Summer Home Photo Tour

The summer of 1864 was one of the bloodiest in American history. Against a background of the horrible battles of the last year of the Civil War, Abraham Lincoln and his family were moving to their summer home on a hill overlooking the city. Next to his cottage refuge was an army hospital and the nations first national military cemetery. The cost of war was visible to him every day of his presidency, even at his summer retreat.

Union soldiers were camped on the grounds outside Lincoln’s window. Disabled soldiers from different wars lived in the Soldiers’ Home across the path. A military cemetery behind the cottage was filling up  with the dead from the raging Civil War. As Americans by birth and Americans by choice fought to keep the country together and to end slavery, Lincoln’s thoughts turned to immigration as a way to restore the country’s vitality.

On July 4, 1864, President Lincoln signed into law “An Act to Encourage Immigration.” Historian Jason Silverman says that this act as “the first, last, and only major law in American history to encourage immigration.” According to Professor Silverman, “Abraham Lincoln viewed immigration as crucial to the destiny of the United States and he welcomed immigrants to the shores of the United States as their new home.” (1)

Several years ago, my wife Michele and I visited the “Lincoln Cottage” to see where the embattled president sought cool breezes in the hot Washington summers.

The site focuses on the summer cottage Lincoln stayed in each year of the war and the ideas and values Lincoln put forward there. In addition to his 1864 immigration law, other revolutionary policies were born there. In the summer of 1862, Lincoln wrote his Preliminary Emancipation Proclamation in this hilltop cottage.

The site also tells the story of the immigrants and African Americans who surrounded President Lincoln and his family at the cottage. These included his senior secretary, John Nicolay, a German immigrant, his trusted black butler William Slade, and runaway slave cook Mary Dines. After the war, Dines recalled that President Lincoln “stopped many times” at her contraband camp for freedpeople where he talked with former slaves. On one of his visits, she saw the president wiping “the tears off of his face with his bare hands” when he listened to their songs of slavery and freedom.²

The cottage is on the grounds of what was then called the Soldiers’ Home, an asylum set up for aged and wounded veterans. Here, the impact of immigrants on the Civil War Era military was inescapable. According to historian Matthew Pinsker, “Over 65% of the wartime residents at the Soldiers’ Home had been born outside the United States…Many of the immigrant soldiers found themselves separated from their families as they faced the catastrophe of physical disability. They were thus compelled to seek institutional support” from the government that they had served.³

A third of the disabled men at the Soldiers’ home were born in Ireland and a sixth were from Germany.⁴

The tour guides at the cottage invite visitors to talk with one another about what happened there between 1861 and 1865, but also about how current political debates reflect the issues Lincoln had to deal with. Our guide had us discussing slavery in 1861 and human trafficking in the 21st Century, Lincoln’s view of racial equality and abolition at the end of the Civil War and modern movements like Black Lives Matter. Our guide, Joan, is a public historian who did an amazing job of creating a safe space for the dozen of us, strangers to one another, to talk about potentially divisive issues of race, rights, and the underpinnings of democracy.

I was particularly impressed by the last room in the tour, where I found out that the cottage hosts a student conference each year to stimulate young people to work to end modern slavery and human trafficking.

The Lincoln Cottage does a fine job of incorporating the story of immigrants and freed slaves into what might, in other hands, have been just another house tour.

Resource: President Lincoln’s Cottage

Tickets may be purchased for tours of the Lincoln Cottage online.

Sources:

1. Lincoln and the Immigrant by Jason Silverman published by Southern Illinois University Press (2015).

2. Lincoln’s Sanctuary: Abraham Lincoln and the Soldiers’ Home by Matthew Pinsker Published by Oxford University Press (2003) p. 68.

3. Lincoln’s Sanctuary: Abraham Lincoln and the Soldiers’ Home by Matthew Pinsker Published by Oxford University Press (2003) pp. 172-173.

4. Lincoln’s Sanctuary: Abraham Lincoln and the Soldiers’ Home by Matthew Pinsker Published by Oxford University Press (2003) p. 173.

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