Watchmaker Jonathan Dillon admitted in 1904 that he inscribed: 'The first gun is fired. Slavery is dead. Thank God we have a President who at least will try.'
Posted on 03/10/2009 3:15:49 PM PDT by nickcarraway
For nearly 150 years, Abraham Lincoln's pocket watch has been rumored to carry a secret message, supposedly written by an Irish immigrant and watchmaker named Jonathan Dillon.
Dillon, working in a D.C. watch repair shop in 1861, told family members that he -- by incredible happenstance -- had been repairing Lincoln's watch when news came that Fort Sumter had been attacked in South Carolina. It was the opening salvo of what became the Civil War.
Dillon told his children (and, half a century later, a reporter for the New York Times) that he opened the watch's inner workings and scrawled his name, the date and a message for the ages: "The first gun is fired. Slavery is dead. Thank God we have a President who at least will try."
He then closed it up and sent it back to the White House. Lincoln never knew of the message. Dillon died in 1907.
The watch, meanwhile, was handed down and eventually given to the Smithsonian Institution in 1958. It didn't run anymore. No one had pried open the inner workings in ages. The old watchmaker's tale was just that.
And then Douglas Stiles, Dillon's great-great grandson, alerted Smithsonian officials to the family legend last month. He was a real-estate attorney in Waukegan, Ill., he explained. He'd heard the legend around the dinner table as a kid, but had just discovered a New York Times article from 1906, quoting Dillon as telling the story himself.
Truth? Lore?
This morning, in a small conference room on the first floor of Smithsonian's National Museum of American History, officials decided to find out.
(Excerpt) Read more at washingtonpost.com ...
The audience, watching on a monitor, gasped.
Split into three different sections to get around the tiny gears, was this razor-thin etching: "Jonathan Dillon April 13, 1861. Fort Sumter was attacked by the rebels on the above date. Thank God we have a government."
I love a well told story. Thanks Tucker (even if you are a MSM liberal who hates conservatives...)
“the 4-way election with sectionalist division and threats over an outcome of lincoln winning had to be just scary as hell. Not having a seated government had to have been an expected possibility.”
Yes, this engraving was much more revealing about the fears and uncertainty of the time, his message will color my reading on the War more than anything else has in many years.
As a Southerner that attended pre NEA schools I vaguely remember that the schools did a better job of teaching about the magnitude of the divisions, spending less time on emotionalism and pat answers and doing a better job of describing how the nation was truly in conflict and it’s future was in doubt.
I find the man’s message a little sobering.
Well said Ansel12. We forget sometimes how badly history gets corrupted sometimes by historians. That’s one reason I collect old books.
“That’s one reason I collect old books.”
My oldest book is from the 1700s, my oldest American History book is from 1834, oldest medical book is dated 1838, and my oldest “Universal Formulary” (apothecary recipes) is 1854, some get pretty obscure but nothing is better than reading books from an actual era.
I love old books and also look for modern reprints of classics like “Life Among the Apaches” 1868” “Diary of an Early American Boy” 1805 and “Our Wild Indians: Thirty-Three Years’ Personal Experience Among the Red Men of the Great West” 1883, and so on.
I also read some of the very obscure old books and small biographies from past centuries that are being put on the internet for free, for me that is a good source for books that are by trappers and women and others that were little known and aren’t famous today.
I also dig Project Gutenberg. There is more stuff there now, than one could possibly read in a lifetime.
You're right.
But so was I. The notion that some watchmaker scrawled something about ending slavery being a goal of "Honest" Abe in April 1861 in Lincoln's watch was BS. Reasonable people might wonder how it is such a story arose, and why only now has someone opened the watch to reveal that the story was and is BS.
ML/NJ
further in the article
In a 1906 article in the paper, an 84-year-old Dillon said no one, including Lincoln, ever saw the inscription as far as he knew. 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."
In his own words it is what he meant.
Thats really interesting! LOL Damn taggers.
Neat little bit of history though.
Don’t feel silly, you were right! :)
you can not fool all of the people all of the time. - A. Lincoln
I don't think it says so much about the way people remember things as it does about people exaggerating something when they think no one will ever find out the truth. He probably wished he had inscribed the watch with those words and so that is the way he told it. He probably even came to believe it himself after many years of telling it that way.
At least the basic story was correct. Another thing, he may have told the family what he really wrote in the watch and the family added to it over several generations.
Read the story, he didn’t mention slavery in his inscription, so your statement is wrong.
From the link in 111
further in the article
In a 1906 article in the paper, an 84-year-old Dillon said no one, including Lincoln, ever saw the inscription as far as he knew. 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.”
In his own words it is what he meant.
In his own words after years of telling it. I said that he probably added the slavery bit later to make it more impressive since he thought no one would ever see it. I stand by my words and see no reason for you to take exception to them. Read my original comment again. You might try to comprehend it this time, it will be good practice for you. You might start getting more out of articles after you learn about how to comprehend what you read.
After all those years his memory was faulty, not surprising. he probably changed his mind during engraving, just a s we often change our minds when making posts.
So, take your personal attacks and stick them where the sun doesn’t shine.
Watchmaker Jonathan Dillon admitted in 1904 that he inscribed: 'The first gun is fired. Slavery is dead. Thank God we have a President who at least will try.'
I would love to see where Dickens made that statement.
People tend to view the past through the lens of things that happened or were found out later. I don't think any conscious desire to deceive was at work. Because the war ended slavery the watch repairman convinced himself that he knew at the time that the beginning of the war meant the end of slavery and inscribed the watch that way. Maybe it was like the game of "telephone" where a message gets altered by being repeated from person to person, but in this case, it was one person over a period of half a century or so.
I shouldn't have implied that everybody remembers things that way. But look at what Obama said about his uncle liberating Auschwitz. He remembered something that his uncle said about a concentration camp and Auschwitz was the concentration camp he'd heard most about so he put the two together, even though it was actually the Soviets who were active on that front. Oral traditions tend to change in that way if people don't have fixed text sources to turn to.
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