Category: Arts & Humanities, Text, Abraham Lincoln, Rhode Island
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About This Collection This database comprises sheet music from the McLellan Lincoln Collection at the John Hay Library and includes material written between 1859 and 1923. Music written about Lincoln ranges from popular song to compositions for orchestral performance. Although the focus is on Abraham Lincoln, these pieces offer an important resource for understanding the popular context of Lincoln’s life and presidency and, later, the significance of his legacy in American life. Between 1859 and 1865, popular music about Abraham Lincoln proliferated. Much more than simply suggesting 19th century musical fashions, Lincoln songs are an important source for understanding popular attitudes towards the Illinois candidate, later the 16th President, and his policy agenda.
About This Collection The Hay Library’s famed collection of manuscripts authored or signed by Lincoln, now comprising nearly 1,100 pieces in all, represents the accumulation of many years of active collecting by private individuals and Friends of the Brown University Library. These materials came to the Library in a number of ways. The original core of the collection included 134 manuscripts by Lincoln and another 183 by close associates of Lincoln. These materials came to the Library in 1923 as part of the Lincoln collection compiled by Charles Woodbury McLellan, one of the five great Lincoln collectors in the early 20th century. Since then, manuscripts have been added both by gift and by purchase. The first major addition to the collection was made by John D.
