Lincoln Editor

              July - September 2006 Volume 6 Number 3
NEW DOCUMENTS NOW AVAILABLE ON PROJECT WEBSITE
Since 2002, the Papers of Abraham Lincoln has been
actively obtaining high-resolution color images of
documents written by or to Lincoln. In a concentrated series
of trips over the past nine months, project editors have visited
more than one hundred repositories with small and large
collections of Lincoln documents. Teams of editors have now
scanned more than six thousand documents at these
repositories and in nearly two dozen private collections. The
team at work at the National Archives has scanned more
than 2,250 documents since June.
Many of the documents that project staff members
have scanned were written, signed, or endorsed by Abraham
Lincoln. Transcriptions of most of these documents appeared
in The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln, but
the project has uncovered several documents
written by Abraham Lincoln that
were not included
in that 1953
publication or the
two supplements
published in 1974
and 1990. Because
the scope of the Papers
of Abraham Lincoln
includes incoming
correspondence, project
editors have scanned
thousands of documents
written to Lincoln as well.
In response to
queries from several
supporters of the project, the
Papers of Abraham Lincoln has
now provided a sampling of new
Lincoln documents on its website at
www.papersofabrahamlincoln.org. These documents, all
written by Lincoln, are not published in the Collected Works.
Several are from repositories, but individual collectors and
manuscript dealers made others available to the Papers of
Abraham Lincoln. The website provides a title and date for
each document, along with information about its current
location in a repository or private collection. Selecting a
thumbnail image of a document will display a larger digital
image. The documents presented on the website are only a
tiny fraction of the thousands of documents now being located,
imaged, transcribed, and annotated by the Papers of
Abraham Lincoln.
Clockwise from left: Lincoln to Edward R. S. Canby; Lincoln to Edwin M. Stanton; Lincoln to
Henry W. Hoffman and Francis S. Corkran; Lincoln Endorsement.
Images courtesy of the National Museum of American History (Washington, DC); Wisconsin Historical Society
(Madison); Chicago Historical Society; Chapin Library, Williams College (Williamstown, MA).