James W. Bollinger as a Collector of Lincolniana

In 1903 he received from his mother a small book bound in green cloth. Nancy Hanks, The Story of Abraham Lincoln's Mother by Caroline Hanks Hitchcock was his first Lincoln book and it was to be the start of an exceptional collection.¹ In such a way, the sixteenth president became his idol and he set out with enthusiasm and pleasure to build a collection of books and pamphlets by and about Lincoln. He found that collecting took effort and persistence. Accumulating books was far more than just possession: he began to live intimately with Abraham Lincoln in a comfortable "Lincoln Room." It was an extraordinary love affair.

James Wills Bollinger was born on April 10, 1867, in Geneseo, Illinois, the son of Albert Lester and Emily Diana Wills Bollinger. After service in the Civil War, Albert Bollinger married, and later ran a carriage shop. As a young woman, Mrs. Bollinger had seen Lincoln at the time of the Galesburg debate while she was attending Lombard College and during the Civil War she had scraped lint for wounds. In 1873 the Bollingers moved to Davenport, Iowa, where Mr. Bollinger went to work for Sieg and Williams, a wholesale heavy hardware business. Later his son would be chairman of the board of the Sieg Company. Young James attended grammar school from 1873 until 1881. In June 1885 he graduated from the Classical Department of Davenport High School and then entered The University of Iowa.

While a student at Iowa, James Bollinger was an active member of the Irving Institute, which was a campus literary society, the University Battalion of the Iowa National Guard, and Phi Kappa Psi fraternity. Politics was also part of the college learning experience. "Billy Kenyon and I were college mates, fraternity brothers, and each one of us made our first political speeches to a public audience the same night, same room, down in a little country town South end of Johnson County, Iowa."² William S. Kenyon later served as U.S. senator from Iowa. Bollinger received his Bachelor of Arts degree in 1888 and a Bachelor of Laws degree in 1889. In 1893 he was awarded a Master of Arts diploma.

At the time of his graduation from law school in June 1889, Bollinger was admitted to the bar and began the practice of law in Davenport. In 1895 he served as an alderman and between 1897 and 1911 he was an Iowa district court iudge for the Seventh Judicial District. For the rest of his life he bore the title of "Judge."

During the"Gay Nineties," Bollinger and another young lawyer took trips to Colorado, the World's Fair in Chicago in 1893, and even made a voyage to London and Paris. On November 1, 1899, in Davenport, he married Mary Elizabeth Gilman and began a happy domestic life.

The Judge's time was filled with more than legal activities and family affairs. Always active in various capacities in the Iowa State Bar Association, he was president in 1909. He was also involved in the business world and he served as president of a number of corporations: the Security Fire Insurance Company of Davenport, the Sieg Company, the Sickles & Preston Company, and the S. F. Gilman Milling Company. At one time he was president of the Davenport Public Museum. He liked to hunt and fish, play golf, and was very fond of horse racing. Membership in the Contemporary Club and the History Roundtable of Davenport brought pleasurable moments. Then, about 1925, he began in earnest to collect books and pamphlets by and about Abraham Lincoln.

One person who had an influence on the development of Bollinger's Lincoln library was Joseph Benlamin Oakleaf (1858-1930), of Moline, Illinois, who at the time of his death was the owner of the largest private Lincoln collection in the United States. In a letter to Oakleaf's son, Bollinger wrote: "Speaking very personally, I doubt if you ever knew how much he helped and cheered and encouraged, almost inspired me, in my attempt in Lincolniana. You see I first knew him as one of the 'Big Five.' But I believe it should be said of him that he was one of the 'Big Two.' Because there were only two of the five that gave the world bibliographies -- Judge Fish and J. B. Oakleaf."³ In December 1925, the Judge had fewer than a hundred items in his Lincoln Collection, but it was to grow quickly after that date.

In the spring of 1926 Bollinger purchased two unusual books from Brentano's in Chicago: William Neilson, Exercises on the Syntax of the Greek Language (New York: T. and J. Swords, 1825) and Epes Sargent, Wealth and Worth; or, Which Makes the Man? (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1856). Both books contained Lincoln's autograph and were said to be part of the president's personal library. Previously the books had belonged to John E. Burton, a famous Wisconsin collector. In addition to Lincoln's autograph in the middle of the free endpaper, Neilson's Exercises had some important marginalia. At the very bottom of page thirty-four is a sentence printed in parallel Greek and English: "Ye have loved me, and have believed that I came forth from God." The word God is crossed out with a pen and the words "from nature" are substituted, supposedly in Lincoln's hand. Both William E. Barton and Carl Sandburg used this substitution as evidence of Lincoln's denial of Jesus as the son of God.⁴ These two volumes were the most prized of any that Bollinger had in his collection of Lincolniana.

By 1931, the Judge had almost eighteen hundred items in his growing library. In that year he encountered a man named Harry D. Sickles, who had a suitcase of sheet music, maps, and books usually autographed "A Lincoln" which he was offering for sale. Many of the items were of value in themselves without the autograph. The Judge bought two or three items from him. Afterwards, the Judge told Paul Angle, executive secretary of the Abraham Lincoln Association, about his purchase, but Angle cautioned him regarding the material. In fact Angle sent a warning to all members of the association about these Lincoln autographs. Sickles said that he had obtained the material from a Black man who had been Mrs. Lincoln's coachman in the years following Lincoln's death. Mrs. Lincoln had given the material to the coachman and he was now offering it for sale. Bollinger turned the items over to Albert Sherman Osborn, an examiner of dubious documents in New York, who found that the signatures on the material purchased from Sickles were merely forged tracings.

At the time Judge Bollinger sent his Sickles material to Osborn, he also sent his copies of Neilson's Exercises and Wealth and Worth. Osborn believed the signature in Wealth and Worth to be genuine, but that the signature in Greek Exercises was spurious. However, he was not positive as to either signature. This opinion was a blow to Judge Bollinger, because he had taken such pride in the volumes. Of course, the evidence on which Barton and Sandburg had based their assumption about Lincoln's denial of the supernatural birth of Jesus was now destroyed. The Sickles affair did not end without some positive results. One item that the Judge purchased from him was absolutely rare, an edition bound in scrapbook format entitled Abraham Lincoln as Attorney for the Illinois Central Railway Company. This work was one of an edition limited to six copies.⁵

In April 1939, when his collection stood at 2,425 items, an article appeared in Better Homes & Gardens about Judge Bollinger's cooking and included some of his recipes.⁶ The Judge was famous for his love of good food. In his memoirs Paul Angle tells the story of a dinner of baked oysters before one of the annual meetings of the Abraham Lincoln Association.⁷ Shortly after the article appeared the Judge received a letter from a woman in Quincy, Illinois, concerning a pamphlet in her possession, a copy of a speech about Lincoln by one M. R. Butz.⁸ She was interested in selling the item. While he preferred to have the seller set the price, the woman did not know what to ask for this small bit of Lincolniana. The Judge sent her $10. Later Jay Monaghan, the Lincoln bibliographer, said the Judge's copy of the Butz pamphlet was the only one he had ever seen. Feeling a bit guilty, the Judge sent the woman some additional money.

Bollinger not only collected books about Lincoln, he read the books in his library with care. There can be little doubt that his favorite book was the biography by Lincoln's law partner, William H. Herndon. "After all Herndon is perhaps the most important of all, the very carburetor of a Lincoln library."⁹ The Judge accepted many of Herndon's conclusions and his view of Lincoln was essentially Herndon's. A close second in the race was Ward Hill Lamon's Life of Abraham Lincoln (1872). "Am just finishing reading it the second, maybe the third time. Every time I peek into it I like it better .... Has lots in it that Herndon doesn't have."¹⁰ Lamon was one of Lincoln's close friends and the book has merit. As a brief summary, the Judge liked Robert G. Ingersoll's essay on Lincoln. "In my humble opinion this little book of 100 pages, bound in cloth, is the very nicest thing, worded the nicest, the truest and best eulogy -- ever, ever written about Abraham Lincoln."¹¹

Specialized studies also held great appeal for the Judge. He considered A. A. Woldman's Lawyer Lincoln (1936) "the best work ever written on Lincoln as lawyer." It was an inclusive work based on printed sources that appealed to attorneys.¹² Perhaps his favorite monograph was Paul Angle's "Here I Have Lived": A History of Lincoln's Springfield (1935). The Judge's copy has an inscription on the front endpaper: "To James W. Bollinger -- one of the few men whose opinions of this book are of real concern to me. Paul M. Angle." The Judge had a high opinion. "This is the freshest-off-the griddle book I ever read .... It shows so much pick and shovel work .... Your style is your big asset. ... Perfectly wonderfully fine."¹³

If the Judge had his favorite books, there were also a few that he disliked passionately. The biography of Lincoln by Edgar Lee Masters published in 1931 was first on the list. "It is Copperhead through and through .... He seems to be a Lincoln hater from top to toe."¹⁴ The second book on the roster was written by an acquaintance and frequent correspondent of the Judge, Otto Eisenschiml's Why Was Lincoln Murdered? (1937). "Am all wrought up over the Eisenschiml book. He is a pleasant agreeable chap. Have met him personally. He has been studying his stuff for years. ... The result is that God-awful, sensational, 'unreconstructed rebel,' P. T. Barnum book... Besides his sin of sensationalism, the next worst thing about him I think is his awful blundering between premise and conclusion."¹⁵ After reading the book, one might guess that Edwin M. Stanton was one of those responsible for Lincoln's death. Such a surmise was highly unacceptable to Bollinger.

The year 1938 saw the publication of The Hidden Lincoln by Emanuel Hertz, a volume which printed source materials on which Herndon's biography of Lincoln was based. "Terrible. A 'cash in' proposition I call it .... He jumps to sex stuff." As an editor, Hertz was very deficient, in the view of the Judge, because his book could blacken the name of Lincoln.¹⁶

While the two volumes of James G. Randall's Lincoln, the President (1945) were scholarly, that historian came to conclusions on moot issues. For instance, he believed that McClellan was a good commander. "Did you really in all your life know of any one, author, talker, or any other kind of person, who took the McClellan side, that was not carrying Southern blood in his veins? I never did. Not one. Except, of course, many of the men in Mac's army were crazy about him because he did not get them into battles, and let thousands of them go on leave of absence." Bollinger went so far as to state that "the rest of his book is pretty fine," but he also believed that Randall was "nuts too on Ann Rutledge. But that's a different story. That comes from people who hate Herndon -- and I have ceased to discuss that."¹⁷

Probably every collector has some showy items, and the Judge was no exception. One of the most treasured books on the Bollinger shelves was Frederick Hill Meserve's Lincolniana, Historical Portraits and Views (1915).¹⁸ The Judge purchased his copy in 1930 from a friend. It was originally made by Mr. Meserve for his wife and was especially bound in full blue levant. Another prize that the Judge enioyed displaying to visitors was a book of etchings by Bernhardt Wall entitled Lincoln's New Salem (1926).¹⁹ Books about Lincoln in foreign languages were a specialty of the Judge. There were two early translations of William Makepeace Thayer's The Pioneer Boy, and How He Became President (1863), a Greek edition of 1865 and an Hawaiian translation of 1869.²⁰ The latter copy came as a gift in 1937 from Henry Horner, governor of Illinois. If youngsters were visiting his library, the Judge might show them his miniature books.

Aside from his great pleasure in gathering Lincoln books and pamphlets, wonderful friendships developed along with the collection. The Judge knew and corresponded with other famous collectors and authors, including Henry Homer, Oliver R. Barrett, Carl Sandburg, William E. Barton, Ida Tarbell, W. H. Townsend, Paul Angle, and Louis A. Warren. His papers are replete with letters from book sellers about purchases. Wright Howes and Daniel H. Newhall were two of his favorite dealers. However, the Judge was not above complaining about prices and he often tried to get a 10 percent discount as a favored customer.

Early in June 1929 the Judge and two of his friends from Davenport took a trip with stops at historic sites associated with Lincoln in Kentucky, Indiana, and Illinois. For some time in the 1930s a group of Lincoln enthusiasts came together and called themselves the Oakwood Lincoln Club. Most of the meetings took place at the seven-room log cabin on the Oakwood Farm near Peoria of M. L. Houser (1871-1951), a student of Lincoln's early life and education. One result of the club was a small pamphlet on the death of John Wilkes Booth. This nicely printed booklet was financed by Judge Bollinger, and he took great joy in giving copies to friends and fellow collectors. R. B. Garrett, An Interesting Letter about the Death of John Wilkes Booth Written by the Reverend R. B. Garrett of Portsmouth, Virginia to General A. R. Taylor of Memphis, Tennessee (Peoria, Illinois: Oakwood Lincoln Club, 1934), has an introduction by the Judge explaining that this is an eyewitness account to the death of Booth on April 26, 1865. The verso pages are a transcript of the letter and the recto pages are a facsimile of the Garrett letter.²¹

When Bollinger reached the age of 70 in 1937, he had the largest Lincoln library in the state of Iowa. In April of that year a group of the Judge's friends gave him a surprise party. The party included not only people from Davenport, but other Lincoln students such as Harry Pratt, Benjamin Thomas, Paul Angle, and Otto Eisenschiml. Later the Judge wrote to a California friend about the party: "And it was indeed a surprise and about the nicest thing that ever happened to me. And was perpetrated by the very finest people you ever heard of. It was so delightful."²² The gift to the guest of honor was a book printed in an edition of one copy, A Letter from William H. Herndon to Isaac N. Arnold Relating to Abraham Lincoln, His Wife, and Their Life in Springfield. The book was printed by the Freye Printing Company of Springfield, Illinois, from type set by M. & L. Typesetting Company in Chicago, bound by R. R. Donnelley & Sons of Chicago and preserved in a handsome leather pull-off case. The original Herndon letter is in the Chicago Historical Society. One year later the Judge decided to share his unique book with the people who had given it to him. So he had a facsimile edition of 29 copies made, and sent one to each man who had attended the party.²³

Before Christmas in 1943 the Judge and Mrs. Bollinger left for a California trip. Shortly after their arrival in Santa Monica, Mrs. Bollinger fell and fractured her hip. What had been planned as a vacation ended in a long hospital stay for the Judge's wife. There was only one bright spot. In January the Judge went with two friends to visit the Lincoln collection at the Henry E. Huntington Library in San Marino, where they examined manuscripts and books, in cluding Reuben Vose's The Life and Speeches of Abraham Lincoln (1860), an extremely rare book. "Never will forget what a good time I had."²⁴

The Judge's last Lincoln adventure occurred at midnight on July 26, 1947, at the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C., on the occasion of the opening of the private papers of Lincoln which had been given to the Library by Robert Todd Lincoln, with the condition that they be closed until 21 years after his own death. No opening of manuscripts was more eagerly awaited, and all of the nation's Lincoln experts were on hand. The Judge "called the gathering a rare collection of 'nuts.'"²⁵ At 12:01 a.m. the seal was broken on the papers that Lincoln left in the White House at the time of his death. While the papers contained no astonishing surprises, the collection was to be of value to scholars. For the Judge it was a solemn and reverent event that came near the end of his own long career of collecting.

Every year on February 12 a banquet was held in Springfield by the Abraham Lincoln Association. The Judge and a carload of friends from Iowa went almost every year during the 1930s and early 1940s. The group also attended the annual dinner of the Old Salem-Lincoln League which worked for the restoration of New Salem. In 1939 the Judge gave the after-dinner speech, his first at tempt to deliver a talk on Lincoln. The Abraham Lincoln Association was very important to the Judge. He was first elected a director of the association in 1943 and continued to serve in that capacity until his death.

Bollinger's fellowship with others interested in Lincolniana included many organizations. In November 1936 his name was approved for membership in the Lincoln Group of Chicago. Less than a year later, in July 1937, he was elected an honorary member in the Lincoln Fellowship of Southern California. Then, in 1941, he was given honorary membership in the Lincoln Fellowship of Wisconsin. That same year the Judge was elected to the Lincoln National Life Foundation Advisory Group, a representative group of Lincoln authors, collectors, educators, lawyers, and students who might advise the foundation. In 1943 Bollinger was appointed to the Lincoln Bibliography Committee, which was made up of five selected members of the Foundation Group. The task of the committee was to decide on the eligibility as Lincolniana of books and pamphlets coming from the presses. The items selected would appear in Lincoln Lore, the bulletin of the Lincoln National Life Foundation.

As a student of Lincoln, the Judge developed definite views about the life of the man from Illinois. Yet Paul Angle believed the Judge's "attitude toward Lincoln was a little too emotional for a real expert. Bollinger was sentimental. Lincoln meant a great deal to him, and various aspects of the Lincoln which he had come to cherish meant a great deal to him."²⁶ Lincoln's romance with Ann Rutledge was one of his favorite beliefs. "The story goes that Ann was lovable, was a sweetheart. Like the Santa Claus story, believe it, even if you know it is not true .... In the study of Lincoln there are surges. One surge almost made Lincoln a god and you are riding another surge that is attempting to drown out Ann Rutledge, the one sweet thing in Lincoln's whole life." Conversely, the Judge was not fond of Mrs. Lincoln. "She had lots of good qualities and was the making of her husband, but nobody likes her even now."²⁷

Although the Judge's Lincoln collection consisted primarily of books and pamphlets, he also had Lincoln pictures and busts in his Lincoln room. He took pleasure in studying pictures of Lincoln. "Pick out one good picture of Lincoln. Scan it scrupulously. Forget all the sad stories and struggles of his life and the greatness of the man and his martyred death. Just note the intelligence of the face, its gentleness, its firmness, and though its expression may be sad, answer to yourself honestly: Was he a homely man?"²⁸ The Judge did believe that "Lincoln was a sad man. Don't ever try to get that out of your noodle. He told stories to make other people laugh and to make him happy, but he was a sad man."²⁹

The best summary of the Judge's views on Lincoln is his own book, Lincoln, Statesman, and Logician, published in 1944.³⁰ He believed that Lincoln's common sense was the real source of success. The origin of this conviction was again Herndon. "However great the verbal foliage that concealed the nakedness of a good idea Lincoln stripped it down till he could see clear the way between cause and effect. If there was any secret in his power this surely was it."³¹ Carroll Coleman, one of America's finest typographic artists, designed and printed Bollinger's little book at the Prairie Press, then located in Muscatine, Iowa. The total cost for producing the book came to $436. Once more, the Judge took delight in sending copies to friends all over the United States. Words of praise for the book and its author flowed back. Most letter writers agreed with the one who wrote, "The breath of your personality ranges itself in the pages of your book along side the great personality of your Lincoln."³²

About 1936, Mason Ladd, law professor and later dean of the Law School at The University of Iowa, suggested to Bollinger that he place his Lincoln collection in The University of Iowa Libraries for permanent preservation. A year later the idea was seconded by Beniamin F. Shambaugh, head of the Department of Political Science at the University as well as superintendent of the State Historical Society of Iowa. Bollinger liked the notion and made a provision in his will that his Lincoln library should go to the University. About that time, the Judge wrote to Shambaugh concerning his Lincoln room: "Am much pleased with it myself. So much so that when I go I will regret I cannot take it with me."³³

By 1940 the Judge was corresponding with Eugene A. Gilmore, president of the University. A clause was added to the Judge's will providing that the collection come with the conditions that the books be cared for, kept intact, and that the University would add to the bequest. Although the library would not be moved to the University until his death, the gift was announced on the occasion of a public lecture at the University by Carl Sandburg on February 16, 1943. The Judge introduced Sandburg to the audience and revealed that he intended to give his collection to the University.

Judge Bollinger died at the age of 83 on January 30, 1951. On the eve of Lincoln's birthday in February 1951, the Bollinger Lincoln Collection of more than thirty-five hundred items came to the University's rare book room. It was opened to the public in formal dedication ceremonies held on the campus that November. Today this exhaustive library of Lincolniana has a place in the Special Collections Department in the Main Library of The University of Iowa.