Fuzzy memory and Lincoln’s pocket watch
A cool tidbit of history was unearthed when rumors of a hidden message inside of Lincoln’s pocket watch were put to rest by opening the historic relic. Indeed there was a hidden inscription! It was placed there by a Washington watchmaker, Jonathan Dillon, on the day the first shots were fired in the Civil War. It captured the moment with the words:
“Jonathan Dillon April 13 – 1861,” part of the inscription reads, “Fort Sumpter (sic) was attacked by the rebels on the above date.” Another part reads, “Thank God we have a government.”
Sounds like a logical reaction given the political climate at the time.
For many years, rumors of the inscription where passed down.
Dillon had a fuzzy recollection of what he had engraved. He told the newspaper he had written: “The first gun is fired. Slavery is dead. Thank God we have a president who at least will try.”
Sounds like somebody was injecting a little revisionist history.
While there is certainly no doubt that the largest benefit and historic impact of the Civil War was the abolishment of slavery, we often make the mistake of projecting this view upon the people of the time. In the modern view of history, we frequently make the assumption that the Civil War was fought over slavery. Keep in mind that equal rights was still a progressive view even for the north at the time. At the start of the war, President Lincoln’s primary objective was the preservation of the Union. It seems unlikely that someone reacting to the first shots of the war would have made a proclamation about slavery.
Mr. Glass, the museum’s director, said it came as little surprise that the message did not mention slavery after all; Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation in separate executive orders in October 1862 and January 1863.
“In 1861 the preservation of the union was the key issue, and the abolition of slavery came later,” he said.
The significance of the find is how an ordinary citizen reacted to a historic moment. It’s also an interesting comparison of how we initially react to historic events and how we later make revisions to those initial reactions. It’s important that we learn from events like this to better put history in perspective. We like to think that the Civil War was fought over slavery as we also like to believe that World War II was fought to liberate the concentration camps. While this is indeed the greater good, the politics leading into these conflicts were very different.
As a comparison, here is another (third party) reaction to the start of the Civil War:
So the case stands, and under all the passion of the parties and the cries of battle lie the two chief moving causes of the struggle. Union means so many millions a year lost to the South; secession means the loss of the same millions to the North. The love of money is the root of this as of many many other evils … the quarrel between North and South is, as it stands, solely a fiscal quarrel. – Charles Dickens, as editor of All the Year Round, a British periodical in 1862
