President Lincoln’s Cottage – A Home for Brave Ideas

The Cottage:
During the sultry summer of 1862, President Abraham Lincoln and his family found respite in a cottage in northwest Washington D.C. It was here where Lincoln formulated one of the key documents of his presidency, the Emancipation Proclamation.

Joan Cummins, associate director for Learning Initiatives at Lincoln’s Cottage, shared insights into Lincoln’s life at the cottage during a presentation in AARP Virginia’s Tuesday Explorers series.

The cottage, situated on a hilltop overlooking Washington, was built in 1842 for banker George W. Riggs and represents one of the earliest examples of Gothic revival architecture in the United States. In 1851, the federal government purchased the cottage for the purpose of developing a home for veteran soldiers.

Washington can be stiflingly hot in the summer, and the Soldier’s Home invited the Lincoln family to stay at the cottage where the air was much cooler. The family spent the summers of 1862, 1863, and 1864 at the cottage. This enabled Lincoln to escape the pressures of the White House during the Civil War, and give him a quiet place to gather his thoughts.

Cummins said Mary Lincoln also welcomed the opportunity to escape the proximity to the Potomac River and its possible diseases associated with that River. Two of Lincoln’s sons, Willie and Tad, suffered from typhoid early in 1862. Tad survived but Willie did not. Having lost another son a few years earlier, Mary was protective of her two remaining sons.

When the family was in residence, the 150th Pennsylvania Company K known as the Bucktails for displaying a deer tail in the stems of their hats, served as guards to protect the President and his family from the Confederates.

Young Tad Lincoln was enamored by the soldiers who camped on the grounds of the cottage, aspiring to become a soldier himself. The Bucktails presented Tad with a uniform and presented him the honorary rank of 3rd Lieutenant.

When the Lincoln family stayed at the cottage, 19 wagons of belongings were transported from the White House and returned when they left. As a result, said Cummins, “we really don’t know what the cottage looked like when the Lincolns were there.” Aside from a reproduction of the desk Lincoln used to draft the Emancipation Proclamation, the cottage is furnished with a few period pieces of furniture from the 1860s to suggest how the cottage might have looked at that time.

Several of Lincoln’s successors as President, including Rutherford B. Hayes and Chester A. Arthur, also spent portions of their presidencies at the cottage. During the early 20th Century, the cottage was used by the Soldier’s Home as a dormitory and for other purposes.

The Emancipation Proclamation:
“Lincoln made many decisions while at the cottage,” said Cummins. In addition to working on the Emancipation Proclamation, he was in residence during the Battle of Gettysburg in 1863.

Cummins said Lincoln’s views on slavery evolved during his presidency. In 1860, he campaigned on the promise of preventing slavery from spreading to the territories. By 1862, he focused on freeing the enslaved. Later in his presidency, he advocated for the 14th Amendment which provided birthright citizenship and equal protection under law for citizens.

At the time of the Civil War, slavery played a complex role in the United States. In addition to the southern states that seceded to form the Confederacy, there were border states where slavery existed but they remained loyal to the Union. These states were Delaware, Maryland, Kentucky, and Missouri, and West Virginia after breaking away from Virginia in 1863.

Lincoln knew it was critical to keep the border states loyal. By 1862, he looked at different things he could do as President to deal with the slavery issue.

One idea was emancipation compensation where the enslavers were paid by the government for those they freed as “loss of property.” Emancipation compensation had already been enacted in the District of Columbia where slave owners were paid $300 for each freed enslaved person.

However, border states were not interested when emancipation compensation was offered to them.

Lincoln presented the Emancipation Proclamation, which was the equivalent as a President’s Executive Order today, to his cabinet in July 1862. The proclamation gave the Confederate states 100 days to rejoin the Union. If they agreed, they could keep their slaves. If they did not agree or respond, all enslaved people would be freed.

The proclamation only applied to the Confederate states but not the border states. And within the Confederacy, it only applied to a specific list of states or parts of states. If a state or portion not covered by the proclamation had been captured by the Union, as was the case with many Louisiana parishes in 1862, the enslaved were not free because their owners were considered loyalists.

According to Cummins, besides the moral motivation and effort to unify the country, Lincoln wanted to free the enslaved and used these Black men to boost the ranks of Union soldiers. Lincoln was also committed to allowing Black soldiers to become U.S. citizens and vote. Unfortunately, it was this commitment that enraged John Wilkes Booth, leading to his assassination of Lincoln in April 1865.

Full abolishment of slavery would not occur until the 13th Amendment to the Constitution was ratified in 1865 after Lincoln’s death. He also did not witness the 14th Amendment to establish birthright citizenship and equal protection under the law come to fruition.

A National Monument:
In 2000, President Bill Clinton declared the cottage where President Lincoln resided and its surrounding grounds a National Monument. The cottage has been carefully restored and was open to the public in 2008.

Today the cottage provides visitors an opportunity to learn about Lincoln and the challenges he faced during the difficult years of his presidency. For more information, visit https://www.lincolncottage.org/.

This program is available on AARP Virginia’s YouTube Channel. AARP Virginia’s Tuesday Explorers series continues every Tuesday through April. For information about upcoming programs, visit the Tuesday Explorers webpage.