Lincoln Editor

              October - December 2004 Volume 4 Number 4
SUTTLES ACCEPTS POSITION WITH PRESIDENTIAL LIBRARY
In November, Dennis E. Suttles resigned from the
project after fourteen years of service. He left to
become Genealogical Librarian at the Abraham Lincoln
Presidential Library and Museum in Springfield, Illinois.
In July 1990, former director Cullom Davis hired
Suttles to be part of the traveling research team to locate
Lincoln documents in Illinois county courthouses. During
the next ten years, Suttles was one of thirteen researchers
who conducted research throughout the state. Suttles
traveled to twenty-five counties during that time, locating
thousands of Lincoln legal documents. His service to
the project has been invaluable, and he was an important
part of the successful completion of The Law Practice
of Abraham Lincoln: Complete Documentary Edition,
published in 2000. His knowledge of Lincoln, nineteenth-century
law, and Illinois history has been enormously
beneficial, and the project will greatly miss his expertise.
Suttles helped train several of the project’s court-house
researchers, including Assistant Director and As-sistant
Editor John Lupton. Of his relationship with
Suttles, Lupton stated: “Den-nis
had substantial courthouse
research experience at that
time, and I sought his advice
and opinions on many matters
related to that tedious task. I
can certainly point to Dennis
as one of my mentors, who
assisted a minor research as-sistant
in his first major task.”
Upon hearing the news
of Suttles’s departure, Cullom
Davis noted that the project
“Looking for Lincoln” will miss Suttles because he
Christian County,
Illinois, 1991
“brought seasoned research
skills and boundless curiosity
to our work together.”
Suttles’s intellectual
and historical curiosity also
contributed to the second
phase of the Lincoln Legal
Papers. Since the publication
of the complete edition,
Suttles has been the lead
editor for ten of the fifty-five
chapters the editorial staff is
completing for the selective
book edition, scheduled for publication in 2007. In that
role, he has transcribed legal documents and conducted
research on such varied topics as steamboat history,
nineteenth-century bridge construction, statutes of
limitations, and slander.
Suttles has also served as the recording secre-tary
of the editorial staff in the gradual establishment of
editorial principles and procedures. He has tirelessly kept
track of editorial policy as it has evolved over time and
has been quick to quote chapter and verse from the “Edi-torial
Policy Manual” when any editor deviated from
previously set standards.
Over the course of his tenure, Suttles has earned
the respect and friendship of his colleagues. Director
Daniel Stowell noted that “we will miss his penchant
for puns, his ardent love of all things British, his
commitment to superior transcriptions, and his careful
attention to detail in recording the policies the editors
adopt. Most importantly, we will miss the daily
interaction with a good friend and colleague. Fortunately,
he has not gone too far away.”