Mr. Lincoln’s White House was originally created a project of The Lincoln Institute under a grant from The Lehrman Institute. The text was prepared by Richard J. Behn and the website was designed by Kathleen Packard of KathodeRay Media, Inc.
This web site would not be possible without the scholarship of the legion of Lincoln scholars who have not only interpreted the lives Mr. Lincoln and his contemporaries, especially those who have compiled important primary sources so they are readily accessible for research.
There are many important building blocks for any work such as this.
- The 10 volume compilation of The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln edited by Roy P. Basler and others in the 1950s.
- More recently, the Library of Congress has compiled much of the incoming and outgoing correspondence in its Robert Todd Lincoln on the Library’s Web site (http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/alhtml/malhome.html).
- Rodney Davis and Douglas L. Wilson were the guiding editors on that project. They are also responsible for another invaluable resource which they edited – Herndon’s Informants, which collects the letters and interviews conducted by William Herndon and Jesse W. Weik in the process of preparing their own biography. Less extensive interviews were conducted by other biographers and have been collected in periodicals such as the Journal of the Abraham Lincoln Association.
- Historian Michael Burlingame has edited a series of books compiling work by presidential aides and confidantes Noah Brooks, John Hay, John G. Nicolay and William O. Stoddard which are invaluable sources for what happened at the White House during the Civil War. Other Administration figures and friends – such as Attorney General Edward Bates, Senator Orville H. Browning, Treasury Secretary Salmon P. Chase and Secretary of the Navy Gideon Welles – compiled diaries which long have been available in published form.
- Finally, there are hundreds of autobiographies, memoirs, biographies and collections of letters for persons who knew Mr. Lincoln which contained important nuggets of information and insights into relationships.