Heritage Auctions / HA.comFolding brass dividers once owned by Abraham Lincoln.
The Artifact
Abraham Lincoln’s Folding Brass Dividers
Condition
The dividers’ sharp steel points are slightly rusted in spots, but their fundamental condition is excellent.
Details
Little over a month after he was inaugurated on March 4, 1861, the firing on Fort Sumter thrust Abraham Lincoln into the role of wartime president. The newly minted commander in chief soon demonstrated his eagerness to stay informed on military matters, often camping out in the War Department’s telegraph office, where he found a trusted ally in its chief, Thomas Eckert, and would pore over military maps to plot strategy and stay abreast of developments at the front. During the Battle of Bull Run that July, for instance, Lincoln, General-in-Chief Winfield Scott, and other military and civilian officials crammed themselves into the telegraph office, where, according to an eyewitness, “With maps of the field before them they watched, as it were, the conflict of arms as it progressed.”
In analyzing those maps, Lincoln—who in the early 1830s had learned the importance of geography while serving as an assistant to the surveyor of Sangamon County, Illinois—used the folding measuring compass, or dividers, shown here, something he would have done frequently during the conflict. As his personal secretaries, John Hay and John Nicolay, would write after the war, “It is safe to say that no general in the army studied his maps and scanned his telegrams with half the industry—and it may be added with half the intelligence—which Mr. Lincoln gave to his.”
Quotable
On May 21, 1865, barely a month after his father’s assassination, President Lincoln’s eldest son, Robert, wrote to Eckert from the White House: “[John] Hay told me this morning that you were desirous of some relic of my father, and I take pleasure in complying, for I know how high you stood in his esteem. Nearly all of our effects have already been sent away, but I have found the pair of dividers, which he was accustomed to use, & with which you have doubtless often seen him trace distances on maps.”
Price: $83,650 (realized at Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, in November 2008)
“This is a superlative Lincoln relic that conjures an image of the president deep in thought, contemplating the movements, the strategies, and the purposes of the most momentous war ever fought on American soil,” a representative of Heritage Auctions noted at the time.
Related topics: Abraham Lincoln
