Abraham Lincoln's black stovepipe hat is an icon. It seemed to enhance his height, emphasize his dignity and, I suppose, keep his head warm.
There is a stovepipe hat at the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum in Springfield, Ill., soiled and slightly brown with age. Lincoln is said to have given it to William Waller, a farmer and political supporter in Jackson County, Ill., and kept by his family for decades.
But that veracity of Lincoln's hat has been questioned. This week several members of the state panel that oversees the Lincoln library called for the Illinois State Police to conduct DNA testing of the hat to see if Abraham Lincoln ever really wore it.
"I think we have a credibility gap with this hat," said board member Tony Leone.
Waller's family had kept the hat, along with the story that Lincoln had given it to the farmer as a token of thanks for his support at one of his famous 1858 debates with Stephen A. Douglas. But the Chicago Sun-Times has discovered a 1958 affidavit in which a Waller descendant says Mr. Lincoln gave her father-in-law the hat "during the Civil War in Washington."
Of course there was no cellphone camera to record the moment the hat was handed over; no tweet to bleat, "Look what some Illinois pol gave me instead of a windshield scraper!"
Louise Taper, the California collector who donated the hat to the library, says she is untroubled by what the newspaper takes to be a discrepancy.
"Family stories get muddled and mashed together all the time," she told us.
By the way: The hat fits. It's 7 1/8 inches — Lincoln's head size — and in those days, top hats were custom-made. It also bears the mark of his Springfield hat maker.
Over the years, every scrap of paper on which Abe Lincoln scribbled is preserved and analyzed. But when William Waller got that hat, be it in Illinois or Washington, Abe Lincoln was on the edge of failure — losing a senatorial campaign or a civil war — not the kind of fame that got his face carved into mountainsides.
But farmer Waller kept that hat his whole life and passed it on to his son, who was a five-term state legislator who died in 1956. His second wife sold it to a collector and attached that affidavit.
James Cornelius, the Lincoln library's curator, told us that calls to test the hat for DNA are even worse than a bad idea." DNA tests on a 160-year-old hat would not be conclusive and could harm what is, after all, not a bloody shirt in a murder trial, but something that's been deemed a historical artifact. And the suggestion that the hat be vacuumed for traces of Abe Lincoln's dandruff just made him laugh. In the end, Lincoln's legend is larger than a size 7 1/8 hat.
Copyright 2021 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.
