Cleaning Up the Record, Pt. 1
There are a few “witnesses” I’ve come across in the historical record that I feel comfortable outing as liars. Some of them may have believed their own stories–and most were simple attention-seekers, not acting out of malice. It is not surprising that so many people tried to insert themselves into the Lincoln legend, though it is a tiny bit surprising how easily some of them did so. But the media likes a good story. Nothing new about that. I intend this series to be a Hall of Shame without much shaming–where someone was particularly egregious, I will call them out. It was usually pretty boring deceit.
When they come to mind, I’ll write them up to warn others. I’m sure some have been questioned already. If anyone thinks I’m wrong, let me know–I definitely don’t want to wrongly accuse someone, especially when they are not around to defend themselves. But I feel pretty confident about the ones I bother to expose.
Helen Brainard Cole’s alleged relationship with the Lincoln family, as their nurse, was heavily publicized, especially around 1930. Examples can be found here. A lot of time had passed, so it was hard for anyone to refute her stories. They were pretty harmless, and most of them seem to have been built off of real accounts she read, so some of them contain accurate information.
I realized most of her comments tracked those of actual Lincoln family nurse Maria Hall, and that she must have been basing her comments on that account. Hall’s story has gotten more publicity in recent years, but I’m not sure where she got access. In any event, the smoking gun is a 1923 news story about an event for Civil War veterans and women who had participated in the war effort.
“The . . . program closed with the reading, by Mrs. Helen Brainard-Cole, of a paper written by Maria Hall-Richards,a young army nurse of Lincoln’s time and of the martyred president’s younger son, Ted, when the latter was suffering from a serious illness at the White house. The paper is replete with interesting find intimate glimpses of Lincoln’s domestic life and engaging characteristics,’ and while it is too extended to fit verbatim into this succinct report of the Veterans’ Day program, it is eminently worthy to be published in its entirety in these columns as soon as space permits this to be done.”
The Sheboygan Press, October 29, 1923.
I can’t find that later publication, but it seems that she began assimilating those stories into her own biographical account in subsequent years. She seems to have been a somewhat theatrical person. It is possible that she was losing her mental faculties with old age, and that people around her were confused about the source of the stories, leading to this misunderstanding. Again, it was a pretty harmless fabrication, but one worth pointing out, because I often see it quoted in stories about the Lincoln family.