Many facts about Lincoln still unknown

What more is there to learn about Abraham Lincoln, the most studied, most written-about president of the United States?

Plenty, according to Douglas Wilson, director of the Lincoln Studies Center at Knox College in Galesburg, Ill.

“We have not yet discovered all of the important written materials” of Lincoln, Wilson told about 100 people during a lecture Sunday night at Kansas University’s Dole Institute of Politics.

Wilson was the opening speaker in a nightly series of lectures about the nation’s 16th president, which will continue through Thursday. The lectures are designed to commemorate the 150th anniversary of the Kansas Territory.

One of the most intriguing pieces of information still to be discovered is the first ending to Lincoln’s second inaugural address given in 1865. It was covered with a slip of paper as a new ending was written, Wilson said.

Many previously unknown insights to Lincoln’s personality are to be found in thousands of documents, such as letters he wrote and from others who knew him, Wilson said.

Scholars have learned that he liked Shakespeare more than he liked fishing, and that he had an emotional collapse over a woman he was in love with in the early 1840s.

New efforts are under way to study more of Lincoln’s papers by the Illinois Historic Preservation Agency and the Abraham Lincoln Assn. Also, details are being catalogued about the cases Lincoln handled as a lawyer in court, Wilson said.

Lincoln took advantage of his own writing abilities as president and wrote letters to newspapers about key issues, Wilson said.

Abraham Lincoln scholars will speak this week at the Dole Institute of Politics. The free lectures begin at 7 p.m.Tonight’s speaker is Allen Guelzo, professor of American history at Eastern University in St. Davids, Pa. He won the 2001 Lincoln Prize for “Abraham Lincoln: Redeemer President.”

“He discovered that he could make things happen — shape public opinion through his public writings,” Wilson said.

Wilson’s lecture was interrupted for several minutes when a woman became ill and passed out. An ambulance was called and paramedics examined the woman, who was going to be OK, said Jonathan Earle, the Dole Institute’s associate director for academic programming.

The woman had traveled from Winfield and had planned to stay in Lawrence the entire week to take in all of the five lectures, Earle said.