Lincoln Editor

              April - June 2003 Volume 3   Number 2
MAIL SURVEY UPDATE
PROJECT MOVES FORWARD DESPITE BUDGET CUTS
See BUDGET CUTS (on page 3)
On April  9,  2003,  the  Papers  of Abraham Lincoln
mailed information letters and response forms to
most  of  the  5,258  repositories  known,  suspected,  or
hoped  to  have  Lincoln  documents  (either  by  or  to
Lincoln)  in  their  collections.  The  first  response,  a
negative one, arrived by email from Canada on April 11.
Other respondents replied by regular email, using
the form on our website, phone calls, letters, or filling
out and mailing our form. The project has received a
steady stream of responses, climaxing on April 21 and
22  when  451  replies  arrived  over  the  course  of  those
two days. As of June 15, the project had received at least
1,440  responses,  of  which  at  least  184  repositories
believe that they have something relevant.
Richard  Schuldt  and  his  staff  at  the  Survey
Research  Office  at  the  University  of  Illinois  at
Springfield, conducted follow-up telephone calls May
6-June 6 with many repositories that had not responded
to the survey by May 6. The callers spoke with more
than 2,215 people, determining that well over 1,250 of
those remaining repositories do not have any Lincoln
documents.  Most  people  responded  to  the  survey
pleasantly and helpfully. We received many compliments
on  our  path-breaking,  ambitious  project,  and  many
respondents wished us good luck. Several respondents
thanked us for thinking of asking them. A few, however,
refused to cooperate. Interestingly, one of those was the
First White House of the Confederacy.
So  far,  the  search  has  uncovered  many
commissions, appointments, and correspondence, which
are no longer at the locations where Roy P. Basler found
them for The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln in
the  1950s,  and  some  interesting  letters  to  Lincoln,
including one from a Hawaiian missionary, written in
Hawaiian. A number of small repositories unexpectedly
have a document or two, while several repositories have
rather substantial collections.
The project thanks all respondents for their help
and hopes to hear from others.
project for more than two years and has aided the project
in many ways, including gaining intellectual control over
the thousands of documents published in The Collected
Works  of  Abraham  Lincoln  and  in  other  sources  by
refining  our  document  control  database.  She  has  also
been  instrumental  in  organizing  and  implementing  a
national mail survey to locate Lincoln documents. Boman
has been with the project for six months. He has been
heavily  involved  in  database  management  and  in
assisting with the mail survey. He will return to Michigan,
where his wife is a member of the faculty at Wayne State
University.
This  Spring,  Governor  Rod  Blagojevich  and  the
Illinois state legislature approved deep cuts to the
state budget for the 2004 fiscal year to offset a major
shortfall in revenues. These reductions have forced both
the project s sponsor, the Illinois Historic Preservation
Agency, and its cosponsor, the University of Illinois at
Springfield, to trim their financial support for the Papers
of Abraham Lincoln. Happily, both remain committed
to the long-term success of the project.
The immediate impact of these cuts is a reduction
in the size of the editorial staff. The loss of funding has
forced the lay-offs of Dr. Glenna R. Schroeder-Lein and
Dr. Dennis K. Boman. Schroeder-Lein has been with the