The Lincoln Legends - Part One: Larger Than Life

January 24, 2025 by Nathaniel Lloyd

The United States of America has been in existence less than 250 years. That may seem like a very long time, but consider that this is only 10 generations, that we can trace back through only 10 forebears to find an ancestor who was contemporary with the nation’s founding, and it becomes clearer how very young this country is. Think about your parents, your grandparents, your great-grandparents, and you’re already a third of the way to conceiving the length of ten generations. Though the U.S. is older than many another modern nation in the Americas, in the grand scheme of history, and in comparison to countries elsewhere in the world, it’s still quite young. Nevertheless, during the course of these 250 years we have accumulated much history and much mythology, immortalizing more than one American leader in the public imagination. This process of eternalizing the country’s most powerful and influential persons is nowhere more clearly symbolized than in the memorial at Mount Rushmore, where the likenesses of four perennially popular presidents have been carved into stone: George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Teddy Roosevelt, and Abraham Lincoln. If we can judge by the Presidential Historians Survey conducted by C-Span four times in the last 25 years, these remain the most popular, or rather the most highly ranked former chief executives based on leadership characteristics. The exception would be Jefferson, who consistently ranks seventh in the survey, replaced by Teddy’s fifth cousin, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who has ranked third in the last three surveys, just under George Washington. In all four surveys, presidential historians agree that Abraham Lincoln is number one, ranking highest in such categories as Administrative Skills, Economic Management, Moral Authority, Crisis Management, the Pursuit of Equal Justice, and Vision. Some of these are no-brainers, as Lincoln is the man who rose to the challenge of preserving the Union in the face of Civil War and freeing the enslaved, setting in motion the long struggle for racial justice and equality that continues today. But more than these accomplishments, he is admired today as a peacemaker, as a gracious and empathetic politician, who reached across the aisle in assembling his cabinet, as described by Doris Kerns Goodwin in her classic book Team of Rivals. He is also held up as a genius of oratory and as an exemplar of the American Dream because of his humble origins. Despite rustic beginnings, born into a poor family on the American frontier, lacking formal education, Abe Lincoln taught himself, became a lawyer, an enthralling public speaker, and reached the highest office in the land through sheer bootstrappery. Then, of course, his tragic murder, which traumatized the country, led to his being viewed as a martyr, and martyrs tend to develop a halo of legend around them. One perfect example of this mythologizing of Lincoln relates to his humble birthplace. To be sure, he had been born in a humble log cabin in rural Kentucky. Lincoln himself confirmed as much. However, during the decades after his death, around 15 different sites were claimed to be the birthplace farm. The National Park Service only ever accepted one of these locations as genuine, and on it there stood a log cabin that was said to be the actual cabin in which Lincoln had come into the world. A temple was built to house this national landmark, and tourists visited it in droves over the years. Ten years after the Lincoln Farm Association was incorporated and work on this National Historical Park was begun, the Lincoln Logs were invented by architect Frank Lloyd Wright’s son, becoming a hit children’s toy. Lincoln was now synonymous with log cabins, and the authenticity of the cabin in Kentucky would not be questioned for nearly thirty years, when finally a historian questioned the provenance of the log cabin in an academic article. As it turns out, while the farmland may indeed have been the birthplace of Abe Lincoln, when it was purchased, there was no cabin there. The speculator who bought the land moved a cabin from a nearby property onto it, believing that it was the former Lincoln log cabin and had been previously moved off the land. Even if that were the case, though, in the wake of Lincoln’s assassination, this speculator disassembled the cabin and took it on a promotional tour around the country, reassembling it in various exhibitions, and between stops, it was disassembled again and again and stored with another exhibit, the supposed log cabin birthplace of Jefferson Davis. The fact is that the logs seem to have been hopelessly mixed up and interchanged before the Lincoln cabin was finally reassembled in the temple built to house it. In 2004, a dendrochronologist finally put the controversy to rest, confirming that the oldest tree used in the cabin dated only back to 1848, making them about forty years younger than Abraham Lincoln. Today, the temple still stands and draws visitors to Hodgenville, Kentucky, but the Park Service now calls it a “Symbolic Birth Cabin.” This itself is symbolic of our memory of Abraham Lincoln, remembered today as the greatest of American Presidents, but also misremembered and surrounded by myths and frauds. Unsurprisingly, as we will find, most of those myths surround his assassination and the conspiracy to kill him. The Secretary of War Edwin Stanton is said to have stated at Lincoln’s death, “Now he belongs to the ages,” but as we have seen over and over, the ages often change how we remember things, regardless of what really happened.

It must be acknowledged here that I don’t intend to discuss all the myths and legends and other supposed misconceptions surrounding Abraham Lincoln. For example, I don’t intend to examine the historical research Lincoln’s sexuality in any detail. In brief, some biographers have suggested that Lincoln was attracted to men and that he had a secret relationship with his longtime friend, Joshua Fry Speed, as well as one of his bodyguards. These ideas are based on speculations about his relationship with Mary Todd Lincoln, a few details about sleeping arrangements when Lincoln shared a bed with these men. The only direct evidence for it, a diary supposedly kept by Speed, is widely deemed to be a hoax. Likewise, I will not expend much effort looking into the rumors of Lincoln’s alleged romantic relationship with Ann Rutledge, which likewise was promoted by a writer who claimed to have discovered a diary that was forged. I may discuss these claims further in a patron exclusive, but for now, they serve only as further examples of how our memory of Lincoln changes through the ages, evolving with our greater understanding but also becoming muddied by misinformation. This has long been the case. The story of Lincoln’s romance with Ann Rutledge appeared just after Lincoln’s assassination, spread by Lincoln’s law partner, who may have promoted it specifically to hurt Mary Todd, whom he disliked. Many of the myths surrounding Lincoln’s personal life in fact have their origin in slanders made against him. Another is the notion that Lincoln was an illegitimate son, that his mother, Nancy Hanks, actually bore the child of one Abraham Enlow, in North Carolina five years earlier than Lincoln himself believed he had been born, and that Thomas Lincoln only took his mother in and raised Abe as his own. These claims of Lincoln having been a bastard first arose in mudslinging attacks when he was nominated for president. Some claimed he was an illegitimate son of other famous politicians, like John C. Calhoun or Henry Clay, but the most believable was the claim about Enlow, which gained currency decades after Lincoln’s assassination through oral traditions in North Carolina, which is a very academic way of saying gossip. However, the very existence of Abe’s older sister, who would be his younger sister if the rumors were true, and the records of Thomas Lincoln’s whereabouts during the time when he would have had to have been in North Carolina marrying a pregnant girl, and the fact than many other women named Nancy Hanks, different women from Abe Lincoln’s mother, have been found to have been living in North Carolina back in 1804-05, all goes to prove that this was little more than defamation. Stories like these feel inconsequential and too uncertain to pin down, but they do show how uncertainty has grown around Lincoln’s life in the years since his death.

A depiction of the Lincoln birthplace cabin, courtesy Library of Congress.

Myths surrounded not only Lincoln’s personal life, but also his inner life, his thoughts and feelings and views on important matters, and these too persist today. So for example, in recent times, a myth has surfaced that Lincoln actually owned slaves. While it is true that he inherited slaves from Mary Todd’s family, who happened to be the biggest slaveholders in Kentucky, and an affidavit was recently published indicating that he sold them instead of emancipating them, the reality is more complicated and doesn’t warrant a recasting of Lincoln as some sort of crypto-slaveholder. It is absolutely true that Lincoln made a lot of statements about the social distinction that slave ownership conveyed, saying once that “people who don’t own slaves are nobody,” and that he long aspired to be of the slaveholding class. It is also true that he had made a career for himself representing slaveholders as an attorney, often in legal actions relating to their attempts to recover fugitive slaves. He was, however, also known to defend those who harbored fugitive slaves. It has been pointed out that, at the time, it was typical for lawyers to accept the first client who approached them to obtain their services, regardless of their personal feelings. And these attacks on Lincoln hearken back to early attacks on his policies as his star rose in the Republican Party. Lincoln had been known for a decade as an abolitionist, but in 1860, the more progressive Wendell Phillips asserted that Lincoln was just not anti-slavery enough, that if elected, he would surely dither and do nothing to abolish the institution. It is true that Lincoln was a product of his time, that he did play politics when it came to presenting himself as an abolitionist and carrying out abolitionist policies, and that, as I mentioned before in my episode about the 1619 Project, he did believe that whites could not coexist in equality with freed slaves, that the best solution may be for freed slaves to be sent elsewhere, out of the country, to create their own colony. It may be that Frederick Douglass was accurate in his estimation that Lincoln “shared the prejudices of his white fellow-countrymen.” Nevertheless, and regardless of all the political calculations that went into it, he did sign the Emancipation Proclamation, and he did write, at the time, “I never in my life, felt more certain that I was doing right than I do in signing this paper. . . . If my name ever goes into history it will be for this act, and my whole soul is in it.” The problem here is a great man, who did great things, was also just a man, with faults and flaws. Yet in remembrance of him, he is elevated and venerated like a saint, such that he is either presented as impossibly virtuous or surprisingly wicked, when really, like all of us, he was somewhere in between.

Like any saint, the story of Lincoln has been crafted by hagiographers, his life, especially his youth, mythologized. Unlike the Golden Legend of Catholic Saints, though, Lincoln’s legend took the very American form of the tall tale. Stories about Honest Abe’s integrity abound, about how he trekked miles to give a customer back the few cents he had accidentally overcharged them when he worked as a store clerk, or that, like George Washington, when asked by his schoolteacher whether he had broken the antlers of a buck’s head mounted on the classroom wall, he couldn’t tell a lie and confessed he had done so while showing off his amazing height to classmates. There is simply no evidence for the veracity of such tales, and their very fictive quality indicates their fictional nature. Perhaps the most obvious tall tale is the one that has Lincoln wrestling a bear like he was Davy Crockett or something. The fact is that he really was an accomplished wrestler in his youth. There are primary source documents that bear this out. But the closest indication we have that he ever came near a bear is a poem he wrote called “The Bear Hunt,” which maybe indicates that he himself went hunting bear during his frontier youth in Indiana. The hunt described in it, though, is conducted by riflemen on horseback, commanding teams of hunting dogs. In it, after the bear has been taken down, a mongrel hunting dog who had fallen behind suddenly appears and sets on the already dead bear: “With grinning teeth, and up-turned hair— / Brim full of spunk and wrath, / He growls, and seizes on dead bear, / And shakes for life and death.” This seems the closest Lincoln ever came to wrestling a bear, in his imaginings of a “conceited whelp,” a foolish dog that thinks himself responsible for taking the beast down. The fact is, though, that we don’t much know what kind of lad Lincoln was or what adventures he really may have had. Even if Lincoln had told such stories himself, on the campaign trail, for example, they may have been embellished or entirely made up for rhetorical effect. The bare facts we have are that, after moving from Kentucky to Indiana, his mother died. Though he appears to have preferred reading and writing to physical work, his father relied financially on his labor, and he grew strong. He took up wrestling, and another tale has it that he confronted a local band of ruffians, Clary’s Grove Boys, and earned respect in the community by besting the gang leader, but again, there is no telling how real this story might be. So removed from reality is the youth of Abraham Lincoln that some physical landmark is longed for to make it seem real, as we saw with the fake birthplace cabin. Also present at the Lincoln Birthplace memorial park is a site marked as the location of a certain tree, the “Boundary Oak,” that is revered as a “living link” to Abraham Lincoln because it is presumed he may have interacted with it in some way. Perhaps he read beneath it or climbed it, many have wondered, but the fact is that Lincoln was only 2 years old when the family moved to another cabin in nearby Knob Creek, making it quite unlikely that he had much interaction with that tree at all. Nevertheless, though the Boundary Oak is nothing by a stump now, it remains venerated, like the relic of a saint, and the same is true of other places from his life. The Boyhood Home at Knob Creek is another part of the historical park in Kentucky, and at the Soldiers’ Home Cottage, where Lincoln lived for much of his Presidency, there are similar myths. A certain copper beech tree on the grounds is called a Witness Tree because of claims that Lincoln sat and wrote beneath it, but when a core sample showed in 2002 that it was only 140 years old, this proved that it would have been little more than a sapling when Lincoln lived there.

19th century depiction of young Lincoln reading by the fire. Courtesy Library of Congress.

Perhaps the most visited sites associated with Lincoln are Ford’s Theatre, where he was shot, and Petersen House across the street, the boarding house where Lincoln was taken after the shooting, where he died. And it is here, at the violent end of his life that the most myths and misconceptions surround Lincoln, as we will see for the remainder of this series. One popular story promotes the idea that Lincoln had been having some sort of premonition of his death in the days preceding his visit to Ford’s Theatre. According to Ward Hill Lamon, Lincoln’s close friend and bodyguard, the president had confided in him, mere days before his assassination, that he’d been greatly disturbed by a dream in which he’d been walking through the White House hearing people sobbing and weeping in another room. When he found the source of the sound, he discovered people gathered around a corpse lying in state. When he asked who it was lying dead in the White House, according to Lamon, one of the soldier’s guarding the catafalque told him it was “the President; he was killed by an assassin.” It’s quite a story, but it’s one that Lamon did not tell until after the assassination, which may have colored his memory of Lincoln’s dream. Moreover, it seems Lincoln himself didn’t think the dream was premonitory, as Lamon says he further explained that "In this dream it was not me, but some other fellow, that was killed.” Nevertheless, it is easy to interpret this as some sort of precognitive event, even if Lincoln himself did not view it as such. There is, however, a far simpler explanation, one that does not require us to believe in a clairvoyant President. That is simply that Lincoln was troubled. There is much scholarship about Lincoln’s supposed melancholy, exploring the widely held idea that the president struggled with lifelong depression. When viewed in this context, his dream might be considered the result of a preoccupation with death, a common symptom of depression. His melancholy seemed to surface in the wake of the deaths of loved ones, such as his mother and sister, and later in life, two of his four sons, and might therefore be interpreted as standard grief, but he was also known to suffer bouts of gloominess in the wake of especially bloody battles in the war, such as the Second Battle of Bull Run. If Lamon is to be believed about this dream Lincoln had, the President spoke about it only a few days before his assassination, and he said that the dream had occurred 10 days earlier. That would be very early April, 1865. During the last year, General Sherman had employed his “scorched earth” tactics during his March to the Sea, one of the most destructive periods of the war. And the very month before the dream, Sherman had clashed with Confederate forces in the Battle of Bentonville, the bloodiest battle yet to have been fought in North Carolina. Therefore, it is entirely possible that Lincoln was suffering a bout of melancholy at the time because of the terrible loss of life and destruction resulting from a war that continued to drag on, and that this depression manifested psychologically as a symbolic dream about murder within the White House.

It is not exactly surprising, after all, that Lincoln would have been preoccupied by thoughts of assassination. At the time the dream occurred, he was about to undertake a risky visit to the front, to Richmond, which was then being occupied by Union soldiers. Certainly there would have been many discussions about safety precautions while he was there. After all, he was no stranger to threats on his life. Just 4 years earlier, as President-elect Abe Lincoln was headed by train for his inauguration, the Pinkerton Detective Agency, who were then investigating the destruction of railroad property along Lincoln’s whistle-stop tour, purportedly uncovered numerous assassination plots against him. In order to get Lincoln to Washington safely, they kept a low profile on their trip, canceling appearances along the way. When the reason came to light in the newspapers, the Pinkertons and their claims of assassination plots were doubted, and Lincoln himself was ridiculed, portrayed as unmanly, sneaking about in a disguise like a coward. Nevertheless, the reality of assassination threats must have been impressed on Lincoln. In fact, just a year before his death, someone seems to have taken a shot at him. Lincoln was riding home to his cottage alone one summer night when he heard a rifle shot. His horse bolted, speeding him to the cottage and causing his silk hat to fly off his head. The next day, the two guards on duty went to investigate and found Lincoln’s hat on the road with a bullet hole through it. Lincoln reportedly dismissed the incident as a hunting accident, but it is telling that, afterward, he never again rode to the cottage alone and went instead by carriage, accompanied by soldiers. Surely these facts make a troubling dream about being assassinated far less astonishing and provide a simple explanation with no need to resort to claims of supernatural prognostication. In the ensuing days, however, it seems Lincoln’s spirits finally rose. Richmond fell, his visit to the front was a success, and on his way home, General Lee surrendered at the Appomattox Court House. Just two days later, he addressed an adoring public on the White House grounds, declaring “the reinauguration of the national authority” and speaking about conferring “the elective franchise upon the colored man.” In the crowd, not far from him, was a handsome 26-year-old, a celebrity famous for his Shakespearian acting. His name was John Wilkes Booth, and it was later testified by one with whom he conspired that when Lincoln spoke about giving those citizenship rights to Black people, Booth resolved to murder the President. One claim has it that he said, in that moment, “That is the last speech he will ever make,” but this seems to be a later embellishment of Booth’s actual remarks, which included a racial slur and a verbal threat to take Lincoln’s life. The night before Lincoln’s visit to Ford’s Theatre to see the acclaimed British play Our American Cousin, the city of Washington celebrated the end of the war with fireworks. That night, as he apparently shared the next day, Lincoln had another dream, one that he did believe was premonitory. He told his staff that he had dreamed of standing alone on the forward deck of a ship as it sailed toward a mysterious shore, and he said that he had had this same dream many times just before something important occurred in the war. Therefore, he was convinced that it meant something important was again about to occur. And though my skepticism encourages me to believe that the recurring dream, which of course never predicted his death when he’d had it previously, was simply a coincidence, his interpretation of it did turn out to be prescient.

Contemporary newspaper artist’s impression of Booth’s leap to the Ford’s Theatre stage.

It was Good Friday, April 14th, 1865. After meeting with his staff, Lincoln enjoyed the spring weather in an open air carriage ride with his wife, Mary, and according to her, he was like a new man, his spirit rejuvenated. He spoke about overcoming their grief for their 11-year-old son, Willie, who had passed away a few years earlier, about trying to bridge the gulf that had opened between them and finding a way to be happy again. “I have never seen you this happy,” she wrote in a note to her husband later that day, and that evening, they decided to take in a show, arriving late to Ford’s Theatre as their production was already underway. The players stopped when it was learned that the President had arrived, and the band played “Hail to the Chief” as he took his seat in the Presidential Box with Mary and his two guests, Major Henry Rathbone and his fiancé Clara Harris. It is here, at the very scene of the murder, that the myths and misconceptions about Lincoln’s assassination really begin to accumulate. Illustrations of the event have Booth firing his pistol point blank into the back of Lincoln’s head and then leaping over the railing and onto the stage like Erroll Flynn, breaking his leg in the process, but still enough in control of himself to deliver his dramatic one-liner, “Sic Semper Tyrannis!” or “Thus always to tyrants.” In reality, Booth was some four or five feet from the president when he entered the room, and he had to fire from the entryway, for if he entered further, Major Rathbone, who sat on a sofa near the entrance, would have seen him. We know Booth did not fire from point blank range for two reasons; one is that there were no powder burns observed on Lincoln’s head, and the other is that Rathbone heard the pistol’s report just behind him. He sprang up to seize the assassin, and was stabbed in his upper arm by Booth, who had also come armed with a dagger. When the shot was fired, Lincoln was actually leaning forward over the railing, making Booth’s shot extremely lucky. In all likelihood, the assassin had been aiming for the President’s back and had missed his shot. Rather than escaping by some deft leap to the stage, Booth actually became entangled in a flag draped over the railing, his spur becoming caught in its fabric making his awkward fall somewhat farcical, resulting in the cracked fibula. When he shouted out the Latin phrase, it was not some dramatic flourish. That phrase was actually the state motto of Virginia, and he followed it up by yelling, according to some witnesses, “The South is Avenged,” or “Revenge for the South,” making his motivation exceedingly clear. Then again, some witnesses heard him say “I have done it,” or heard nothing at all, so again, the truth of the matter is obscured. Despite the awkwardness of his getaway from the Presidential box, Booth made good his escape despite his injury, jumping on a waiting horse and riding to Maryland, where his co-conspirators waited. Exactly who was involved in this conspiracy and exactly what became of Booth at the conclusion of the 12-day manhunt for him has become the subject of much speculation, myth, and conspiracy theory, as we will see in the rest of this series.

The first doctor to examine Lincoln had him laid on the ground and searched him for wounds. When he found the bullet wound in the back of Lincoln’s head, he pushed his finger in, searching for a bullet he might remove. He felt none. After being resuscitated and stabilized, Lincoln was carried out of the theater and into the street, where the owner of the lodging house across the road offered a room. It was a very small room, 9 by 17 feet, with a typical spool bed, wooden framed with spool-shaped spindles and railing for the foot and headboards, and it was far too small for Lincoln, whom they had to lay across it diagonally. Two other doctors stuck their fingers in his head wound that night, likely worsening his condition, though this was common practice at the time. By morning, Abraham Lincoln, 16th President of the United States, died in this bed that was too small for him, larger than life to the very end. During the night, his wife Mary and his oldest son Robert came to his bedside, and so too did several cabinet members and other officials, though few could be admitted into the room at the same time, it being so small. Afterward, Currier & Ives and several other printmakers began to sell lithographs of the scene of Lincoln’s deathbed, based on descriptions of those who had been to see him in Petersen House. These lithographs became hot sellers, such that they became a common feature of many American homes. And here we find an apt example of the mythmaking process. At first, the engravings made of the scene were relatively accurate, They might have portrayed the deathbed at the center of the room rather than pushed against a wall as was the case in reality, but this can be forgiven as a necessity of artistic composition. Strangely, though, as more and more such portraits were created, the scene changed. Lincoln’s youngest son Tad was added, though he had never been there, and when Mary Todd Lincoln became unpopular because she was too grief-stricken to attend state funerals or vacate the White House, she was removed from the scene even though she had been by her husband’s side. It was common to picture several officials surrounding the bed, even when they could not have fit into the room at the same time, and each portrait featured a different and growing assemblage, removing one figure when it was deemed more important to include another, such as Vice President Andrew Johnson, who had not previously been pictured but who would be pictured after ascending to the Presidency. The number of people in the room grew until it was absolutely absurd—one later print featured 47 men crammed into the room—such that the small room at Petersen House came to be called the “rubber room” for how much it would have had to stretch to accommodate everyone.

A good example of the “rubber room” portrayals of Lincoln’s deathbed in Petersen House, with 26 historical figures present with the dying president.

Many know the words spoken at Lincoln’s bedside as he took his last breaths, or at least, we think we do. It has been immortalized in countless history books that Edwin Stanton, the Secretary of War, wept as he said them: “Now he belongs to the ages.” Interestingly, however, some historians have begun to question this, suggesting that the quote has long been misreported and that Stanton actually said “Now he belongs to the angels.” There is actually a pretty strong argument for both, and we likely will never truly know which remark was uttered in the moment, but this dichotomy, between the idea of Lincoln belonging to history and of his being borne aloft by angels speaks further to the fact that he has consistently been mythologized since his death, venerated as a martyr, beatified like a saint, and even deified as a fallen god. Some of the later portraits of the scene in the rubber room at his death even began to portray angels above him, and the spirit of George Washington welcoming him to the heavens, or even to portray the godlike figures personifying Britain and America, Britannia and Columbia, visiting him at his deathbed. As we already saw, at the national park memorializing his birthplace, the symbolic cabin there is enshrined within a temple, as though pilgrims to the site are expected to worship him. And this deification of Lincoln is nowhere more apparent than at another pilgrimage site, the Lincoln Boyhood National Memorial in Indiana, especially during the 30s and 40s, when it was slowly developed and constructed. Making much of the fact that Lincoln was killed on Good Friday, the comparison to Christ was explicit there, where the entire memorial was landscaped as a huge cross. In fact, until the sixties, the whole memorial was dedicated not to Lincoln himself, but to Nancy Hanks, his mother, who was venerated there as if she were another Virgin Mary. And between his mother’s grave and the replica of his boyhood cabin, the designers installed the Trail of Twelve Stones like the stations of the cross, each supposedly a stone taken from a place that represents an important location in Lincoln’s life—one from the White House, one from Gettysburg, etc. And it is not just these birthplace and boyhood memorials that engage in Lincoln worship. Even the most famous of his memorials, in Washington, D.C., is designed as a classical temple, within which his gargantuan statue, enthroned like a god, proves that he remains larger than life even in death.

The Roots of the Christmas Tree (Another Very Historically Blind Xmas!)

January 13, 2025 by Nathaniel Lloyd

The podcast this holiday season was somewhat overshadowed by a few grim realities, but also by the dark and grisly subject matter that precedes this post. It is pretty difficult to transition from a series on Jack the Ripper to a festive episode. In some way, then, the podcast can be likened to Whitechapel and really all of London in December of 1888, with the awful reality of the horrific murders and the uncertainty over when the killer would strike again still hanging over the city like a pall as many attempted to make merry. There is, though, I think, one interesting connection between the story of Jack the Ripper and the topic of Christmas and its origins, and that is the figure of Charles Dickens. The great Victorian novelist died in 1870, almost 20 years before the Ripper murders, and yet he is inextricably linked to them through his depictions of the East End. In his earlier fiction, he writes about the East End, and even Whitechapel, as a genial and romantic place, the bustling and exciting setting of comedies like The Pickwick Papers. But later in his career, he depicted it as “a jungle of decaying slums housing a starved, feral people,” a squalid and crime-infested district from which, as Madeleine Murphy, author of Dickens and the Ripper Legend states, he suggested “some unknown beast will spring.” Dickens, then, by this view, anticipated the emergence of the Ripper. And he also anticipated the emergence of Christmas, or at least, its most lasting and popular iteration, which hearkens back to Victorian England, when many of the traditions and iconography that persist today began to take definite shape. Dickens is almost synonymous with Christmas. As I write these words, my wife is watching one of the many film adaptations of his classic story, A Christmas Carol, the one starring Patrick Stewart as Ebenezer Scrooge, and within the week, we will be enjoying ourselves at the Dickens Fair here in California, where they attempt to recreate Victorian London, celebrate all things Dickens, and engage in eggnog-fueled holiday revelry for a full month between Thanksgiving and Christmas. There at Dickens Fair the mythology of Dickens is on full display. In some ways, he is responsible for constructing the public conception of Victorian England. Most depictions of Victorian England in fiction and film are perhaps more Dickensian than historical. And he is further credited as the man who invented Christmas. This is no exaggeration. A film by that very name appeared in 2017, based on a book published in 2008, but the notion goes all the way back to an early Dickens scholar, F. G. Kitton, who wrote an article by that name in 1903. What Kitton remarked on, however, was not really the invention of the holiday, or any of its traditions, but rather its resurgence. It is true that the bubonic plague, the collapse of the feudal system, and the Puritan war on Christmas merriment had reduced the holiday to a more sedate and private affair than it had previously been in England, and it is further true that the enormous popularity of Dickens’s A Christmas Carol did much to popularize the holiday again in England, or as fellow novelist William Makepeace Thackeray put it, the novella “was the means of lighting up hundreds of kind fires at Christmas time; caused a wonderful outpouring of Christmas good feeling; of Christmas punch-brewing; an awful slaughter of Christmas turkeys; and roasting and basting of Christmas beef.” There is even a case to be made for Dickens being the person responsible for associating Christmas with snow, since when he wrote about the holiday, he associated it with the bitterly cold winters of his youth, when the River Thames would freeze over, which became a lot less common after the end of the Little Ice Age in the early 19th century. But this too is a dubious credit, since the holiday, even in antiquity, has always been tied to the end of the year and winter solstice, the shortest day, after which come the coldest days. Surely, then, Dickens was not the first to associate the holiday with snow and ice. Perhaps the element most associated with a Victorian and Dickensian Christmas, indeed the tradition and image most associated with the holiday today, second only, it can be argued, to Santa Claus, is the Christmas tree, and this too, it can be said, was popularized by Dickens, who wrote an essay about them in 1850, describing the Christmas tree as a “pretty German toy,” a very new tradition that was then catching on in the English speaking world, and which Dickens used as a metaphor to wax nostalgic about childhood and the lessons of life. Here we find Dickens again at the forefront of a Christmas tradition for which he can’t really be given credit. He was not the first nor even the most effective champion of this tradition, and just exactly how new it really was in the mid-19th century, and where it came from, remains one of the most complicated and debated topics related to Christmas. So join me now, around our tree, so brightly festooned with glittering ornaments and lit tapers, as I welcome you to yet another Very Historically Blind Christmas, this one all about the Christmas tree and its roots.

I have spoken on the topic of Christmas trees and their origin before. In my very first holiday special, all the way back in 2018, talked about it in a couple of paragraphs, and it came up again last year, in my patron exclusive about the bizarre mushroom theory of Christmas, but it is a topic that proves far more complex and full of uncertainty and mystery than I managed to show in those brief mentions. As I said back then, there are a great many notions, perpetuated by social media meming, that the Christmas tree is some sort of very ancient pagan practice, and that Christians are somewhat foolish in thinking it’s not a pagan survival that they co-opted. One bible verse typically thrown in their faces is Jeremiah, Chapter 10, verse 3 and 4, “For the customs of the peoples are false: a tree from the forest is cut down..they deck it with silver and gold….” What is typically omitted or glossed over is the part that says the felled tree is “worked with an ax by the hands of an artisan,” and that in the context of the actual verse, it is talking about the carving of wooden idols plated in silver and gold and fastened to a wall with nails, not a tree hung with ornaments. It is a blatant misconstruing of the scripture to attack Christians, and that’s just bad form. Really, we don’t need to rely on falsehoods to reveal the hypocrisies of many Christians. In truth, the Christmas tree, as we today recognize it, did not really appear until the 19th century, and in a narrow way, the Dickens movie, The Man Who Invented Christmas, gets it right. In it, the actor Dan Stevens, who plays Dickens, has a decorated tree in his parlor and remarks that “The Germans call it a Tannenbaum. It's a tree for Christmas. A Christmas tree, I suppose. Now the royal family have got one, it'll be all the rage.” Now, it’s wrong to suggest that a tannenbaum is a Christmas tree, or that the song O Tannenbaum can be accurately translated as O Christmas tree, as is common in English. In truth, a tannenbaum is just a fir tree, and the subject of the 18th century song was a living evergreen, persisting through the bitter cold and remaining alive. To associate it with a tree that we cut down for decorative purposes rather misses the point, but that is exactly what happened in the 19th century, when the song was first rewritten to take on a more festive seasonal symbolism and then was translated into English as referring explicitly to a Christmas tree. The film is right, however, in ascribing a German origin to modern day Christmas trees, and in crediting the British royal family for popularizing them. The film is referring to Queen Victoria, or more specifically to her German consort, Prince Albert, who in 1840 imported some spruce trees from Bavaria to uphold his German Christmas tradition in England. It is not entirely accurate that the tradition would have spread to the Dickens home by 1843, the year he published A Christmas Carol, as the film depicts, however, because it did not really take off as a popular tradition until some years later, when the press publicized it as a yearly tradition in the royal household. In 1848, the Times and the Illustrated London News both published stories describing the royal christmas tree, along with engravings illustrating it, and by the following year, the tradition had taken hold, and the same newspapers were printing stories with recommendations on how Londoners might decorate their own trees. Hence the 1850 essay in which Dickens effused about the newfangled German Christmas tree. But as new as it may have seemed to the English public in 1848, there was, indeed, as many have claimed, a longer history to this practice.

An pretty edition of the Dickens essay on the Christmas Tree.

Even within England, the practice was not unknown. Queen Victoria herself reminisced about a Christmas season from her youth, in 1833, during which she remembered “trees hung with lights and sugar ornaments.” It may be, then, that the decoration of a tree at Christmas was only a tradition at court before Victoria and Albert popularized it, for as is frequently pointed out, there is record of an earlier British royal putting up a tree. In 1800, George III’s wife Queen Charlotte apparently put up and decorated a yew tree with wax candles and clusters of fruits and nuts to delight the children attending a holiday party in the Queen’s lodgings. This appears to have been the beginning of the trend among the upper classes in England. The fact that in previous years, Charlotte had only put up and decorated a single bough of a yew tree, as was common practice in the German duchy of Mecklenburg-Strelitz, where Charlotte was from, has led some to speculate that she was the Christmas tree “inventor,” that she was the first to innovate the decoration of a whole tree rather than just a branch. Supporting this is a description of the tradition in Mecklenburg-Strelitz as observed by the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge in 1799: “On the evening before Christmas Day, one of the parlours is lighted up by the children, into which the parents must not go; a great yew bough is fastened on the table at a little distance from the wall, a multitude of little tapers are fixed in the bough ... and coloured paper etc. hangs and flutters from the twigs. Under this bough the children lay out the presents….” However, while in this particular duchy the tradition was the decoration of a single bough, it is clear that elsewhere in Germany, the tradition was to bring in and decorate a whole tree, in some places a yew, in others a box tree, and elsewhere a fir tree. The first mentions of these German trees extends much further back, especially around Strasbourg, on the Rhine in the Alsace region in what is eastern France today. In the middle of the 17th century, theologian Johann Konrad Dannhauer wrote about “the Christmas- or fir-tree, which people set up in their houses [and] hang with dolls and sweets,” and like many a historian and theologian since, he too was baffled by the origin of the tradition, saying, “Whence comes the custom, I know not.” By his time, it had firmly taken root, it seems, but at the very beginning of that century, in 1605, an anonymous writer had described the same tradition in the same place, “They set up fir trees in the parlours at Strasburg and hang thereon roses cut out of many-coloured paper, apples, wafers, gold-foil, sweets, etc.” And it appears that the practice of cutting down trees for Christmas was widespread even midway through the previous century, as in Upper Alsace, in 1561, a limit on the number and size of pines that people were allowed to cut down was imposed.

According to one legend, the tradition originated some 500 kilometers from Strasbourg, in Wittenberg, on the other side of Germany. It is claimed that the German church reformer Martin Luther took a winter stroll one night and admired the stars shining through the evergreen canopy of the trees overhead. According to this tale, Luther cut down a tree and brought it home, hung lit candles in its branches to simulate what he had seen, and turned it into a sermon for his family about the Christmas star. This story just sounds totally false, and sure enough, it is entirely unsupported by any historical documentation. There is a far better case to be made that Martin Luther originated the Christkind or Christkindle traditions of a Christmas giftbringer who could be likened to the Christ child, wanting to take emphasis away from the Catholic Saint Nicholas, but this claim about the Christmas tree seems bogus. It does appear to be the case, however, that Christmas trees were largely a Protestant tradition when the custom did take root. In fact, they came to be called Lutherbaum, or Luther trees, and by the 19th century, Catholics derisively referred to Protestantism as the “Tannenbaum religion.” However, the first confirmed Christmas tree in Wittenberg, where Luther supposedly invented them, would not appear until a couple hundred years after Luther’s death in 1546. And since, about a hundred years after Luther died, the aforementioned Lutheran theologian Johann Dannhauer still had no idea where the custom had originated, it seems very unlikely that Martin Luther invented it. In fact, all signs point to Strasbourg, in the Franco-German Alsace, as the birthplace of Christmas trees. Strasbourg today boasts that it is the capitale de Noël, the Capital of Christmas, as its Christmas market was held as far back as 1570, and its annual raising and decoration of a Christmas tree in the Strasbourg Cathedral is said to have taken place as far back as 1539. Going further back, into the 15th century, the Strasbourgian town clerk Sebastian Brant attempted to forbid the cutting down of trees around the end of 1494, so widespread was the practice of bringing felled trees into the home. And in 1419, a record from a Fraternity of Baker’s Apprentices in Freiburg, just south of Strasbourg, mentions a tree inside the Hospital of the Holy Spirit that was decorated with gingerbread, wafers, tinsel, and apples. This is what we find when searching for the invention of the Christmas tree—each time we think we find its “inventor,” Queen Charlotte, Martin Luther, when we look further back we find still the Christmas tree standing and shining, the beacon of a festive winter holiday.

Queen Victoria and Prince Albert popularizing the Christmas tree.

Now we’ve traced the Christmas tree back to the tail end of the Middle Ages, to Alsace in the Rhineland, then a part of the Holy Roman Empire, and the earliest of descriptions we can find, in Freiburg, has them decorated with bright red ornaments, such as apples, and other edible ornaments, including wafers. One idea for the medieval origin of the Christmas tree has to do with various legends surrounding trees and plants miraculously blossoming around Christmastime. According to one 1430 account, an apple tree in Nuremberg “bore apple blossoms the size of a thumb on the night of Christ’s birth,” causing citizens to keep vigil around it. This lone incident could not have been the origin of Christmas trees, since we have already seen the tradition in earlier reports, but this one corresponds generally to many traditions about miraculous blooming in midwinter, most of them having to do with plants that, strangely, bloomed or bore fruit in this unusual season, most of which are now largely associated with Christmas, like holly, mistletoe, the poinsettia, also called the Christmas Star, and the hellebore, or Christmas Rose. Indeed, there is a story out of the Middle Ages of the miraculous blooming of actual red roses associated with Christmas. It is said that St. Francis of Assisi discovered a rosebush miraculously in bloom in the snow at Christmastime. There are different versions of this legend, which helps to demonstrate its mythological character. In one, Francis is leaving a convent in San Damiano and tells the sorrowful nuns there that they will see him when the roses bloom again, whereupon they see the miracle of the winter roses. Another version has it that he laid down on the thorns of a barren rosebush one night in order to feel the pain that Christ felt, and in the following days the roses bloomed. The simple fact, though, is that a miracle having to do with roses was quite common in hagiography. Often it was the transformation of other things into roses, but in the case of Saint Elizabeth of Hungary and Our Lady of Guadalupe, the appearance of fresh roses in winter became an established motif. While there is little evidence to support that these legends evolved into a tradition of cutting down evergreen trees and adorning with red ornaments to represent a miraculous blooming, there is some clear sign that these miraculous blooming traditions contributed to other Christmas customs, such as bringing cuttings from certain trees, including hazel, linden, cherry, plum, and apple trees, into the warmth of the home and placing them in water so they would bloom unseasonably around Christmas. These not being evergreens, though, it would seem an entirely separate tradition from Christmas greenery and Christmas trees, with perhaps the crossover being the common Christmas tree decoration of paper flowers that we later see.

While these miracle blooms of apple blossoms gets us closer to the trees hung with apples, it is another theory on the origin of the Christmas tree tradition that takes us all the way there, one which I and most scholars find the most convincing. In the Middle Ages, in Germany and elsewhere in the Holy Roman Empire of Central and Western Europe, there was a predecessor to the nativity play we usually associate with Christmas time. These were called Paradise Plays, or Genesis Plays, and they reenacted the events of Adam and Eve’s original sin and banishment from Eden. During the height of the scribal system, when many could not read and books were a luxury possession of the church, read and copied by monks, and of royals tutored in Latin, such mystery plays were a common vehicle by which to teach the public about major scriptural narratives and doctrinal points. These plays in particular, depicting the Biblical Creation myth, Satan’s temptation of Eve, and the Fall of Man, may seem like an odd play to stage on Christmas Eve, but it must be remembered that December 24th was the Feast of Adam and Eve. In focusing on the story of original sin just before Christmas Day, Christians of the Middle Ages were reminded of why Christ was born, about the need for redemption that he fulfilled. So though it may seem an entirely unrelated story, it was not viewed as such. This much can be clearly discerned in medieval art, in which the Christ child is commonly seen accepting an apple from Mary. As you might imagine, these Paradise Plays had reason to depict an apple laden tree in the garden, the fruit of which Adam and Eve were forbidden to eat. The problem was, apple trees were bare, their fruit having been harvested already. Nor would it have been practical to cut down a healthy, fruit-bearing tree to serve as a prop. This being wintertime, it was therefore common to cut down a fir tree for these productions and adorn them with apples. According to the current best guess of scholars, Germans kept this tradition past the Middle Ages, bringing these Paradise trees into their homes, adorning them not just with apples, but with eucharist wafers to further represent Christ’s atonement for Original Sin. Parallel to this tradition was one that arose out of the Ore Mountains in Western Germany of having a so-called Christmas pyramid, or wooden carousel of shelves lit with candles and decorated with Christian scenes, like the Nativity. Originally, this was called a Lichtergestelle or “light-stand,” and was meant to brighten spirits during dark and cold months. It was adorned with evergreen cuttings to further raise spirits. As near as most scholars can discern, then, somewhere in the murky Middle Ages, in the homes of common Germanic folk in the Holy Roman Empire, the custom of raising a Paradise tree and of making a Christmas pyramid merged, and the Christmas tree was born, lit with candles to ward off the dark, decorated gaily with bright and colorful baubles—something like apples or miraculous winter blooms—and with edible treats to raise spirits—something more tasty than the eucharist wafers of old—and eventually the origin of the tradition was forgotten.

A depiction of Martin Luther celebrating with a Christmas tree.

Or at least, this is current scholarly consensus, lacking definitive evidence of the custom’s step by step evolution but making perfect sense chronologically, geographically, and culturally. So that’s the end of it, right? Not quite. Many are the claims that the origin of the Christmas tree stretches much further back, deriving from ancient pagan customs, and therefore serving as an example of pagan survival within Christianity. I am open to such theories, as I have indicated in previous episodes on Christmas, but I am also very critical of them when they lack evidence and logic, as was the case, for example, in the mushroom theory of Christmas, which attributes everything Christmasy to the practices of Siberian shamans and their use of psychotropic mushrooms. So let’s look at these theories. The most widespread is that the Christmas tree is some sort of Scandinavian tradition derived from pagan Norse belief. At first blush, there is some weight to this in that Scandinavian peoples are Germanic, and there was cultural and ethnic migration, such that traditions could have been transplanted from Northern Europe to Central and Western Europe. Relatively early evidence of Christmas trees does extend northward from Germany, as well. In Latvia, for example, a merchant guild’s records indicate the appearance of a Christmas tree as early as 1510. This is indeed early, but not as early as other records I’ve discussed, making their claim that it was the first Christmas tree relatively easy to refute. North of there and 70 years earlier, other records suggested a decorated Christmas tree was put up for a dance. Some of these records are questionable, however, as the brief descriptions don’t indicate whether it was an evergreen tree with foliage or more of a stripped tree decorated as in maypole traditions. Looking at the actual pagan beliefs of the Norse, it is clear that, after their conversion to Christianity, their festive winter solstice traditions, yule, have made a big impact on Christmas traditions, and several of them are indeed comparable to the Christmas tree custom. First, decoration with greenery was central to yuletide celebration, and several of the specific plants sacred to the Norse have since become deeply associated with Christmas, including holly, ivy, and mistletoe. Indeed, one of the central ceremonies of yuletide related to the cutting down of a tree and bringing it into the home. But it wasn’t an evergreen, and they didn’t put it up and decorate it. It was likely a birch or oak, and they stripped it, treated its wood, and burned it slowly over the twelve days of yuletide. More than that, the Yule log custom did not noticeably change to become some other tradition, for it remained a tradition of warming the home with a single slow-burning log, although elsewhere in Europe it came to be called a Christ log or Christmas log.

A depiction of the Tree of Life that indicates its similarity to Christmas trees.

Perhaps the most tempting connection to make between yule and the Christmas tree is the idea of sacred or holy trees and that the Norse worshipped them. The most prominent tree in their belief system is the World Tree, Yggdrasil, the meeting place of the gods, its roots and canopy uniting the heavens and the Earth. But why is Yggdrasil correlated with Christmas trees according to this theory? It’s never depicted as a fir tree, but more as an ash, and it’s not decorated. It cannot just be because they are both trees. By that logic, any mythological tree could be claimed to be the inspiration of the Christmas tree. Is it logical to claim that the sacred cypress that was said to have grown from a branch Zoroaster carried back from Paradise was the inspiration for the Christmas tree? Or that the Christmas tree was meant to represent the oracular Oak of Dodona from Greek myth? No, and the claim of Yggdrasil being its inspiration is equally untenable. But the myth of Yggdrasil may have spawned the common worship of numerous real trees by other Germanic pagans, such as the Irminsul, sacred to the Saxons, the tree at Uppsala in Sweden, and Donar’s Oak, also called Thor’s Oak and the Oak of Jove, worshipped by the pagan predecessors of the Hessians. All of these were destroyed by Christian missionaries, making it an odd claim that they would have incorporated tree worship into their own religion when they went to great lengths to stamp out the practice. But one account, that of Donar’s Oak, as told by proponents of the pagan survival view of Christmas trees, claims that St. Boniface cut down the pagan oak tree and in its place a young fir tree miraculously sprouted, converting all the pagans to Christianity. The implication, of course, is that Christmas trees originated as a remembrance of this miracle. First of all, all of these claims really rely on the notion that Christmas trees are worshipped, which an uptight iconoclast might make but which I find unconvincing. Second, even if this miracle story were true, which it obviously isn’t, being just another exaggerated tale about a saint told by a hagiographer, it doesn’t really explain why this symbol would afterward be cut down, brought home, and decorated. And third, if we actually check the source, the hagiographical Life of St. Boniface, written by an 8th century bishop named Willibald, it is not even true. According to the source, when Boniface notched the tree, struggling to actually fell such a massive tree, it suddenly “burst into four parts” and fell. There is no mention of a young fir tree sprouting in its place. It afterward says “four trunks of huge size, equal in length, were seen,” but whether this refers to new trees is not clear, as it seems to only be describing the four parts into which the original oak had burst. Regardless, after the incident, they didn’t start worshipping what was left; they used the wood, it says, to build a new structure, an oratory dedicated to St. Peter from which Christianity could be preached. So we find that the only feasible evidence for the idea that pagan Germanic tree worship transformed into a Christmas tree tradition is a completely embellished and revised version of an already dubious hagiography, a genre of literature known for its fantastical invention and lack of reliability as historical source material.

If the idea that Christmas trees originated in yule traditions is unsupported and lacking any strong evidence, this does not bode well for all the other theories of Christmas trees as pagan survivals, which are even weaker. Some claim it can be traced to Egypt in 3000 BCE, when palm branches were brought into the home to honor Isis, mother of Horus, who like Christ was said to have been born on the solstice. Yet no thought is given to how the tradition might have migrated to Europe or why it reappeared without precedent there thousands of years later. Also I saw claims that Druids decorated oak trees with golden apples and candles to honor Odin, but Druids did not worship Scandinavian deities. Some have attempted to draw comparisons between their pantheons, but to say they honored Odin or Woden as I saw repeated time and again is just patently false. Also, I saw no evidence for the claims about the decoration of trees by druids. It certainly wasn’t mentioned in the earliest writings about Druids by Julius Caesar. In Pliny the Elder, their religious ceremony surrounding an oak is described, which involved the veneration of mistletoe, which is at least a bit Christmasy, but nothing about golden apples and candles. So until I can find real support for this, and please send it if you have it, I have to consider it a frequently repeated myth. Myths like this about the pagan origin of Christian traditions get made up one time by unscrupulous writers and then live on, repeated in perpetuity as if they are fact. This is the case with many misconceptions about the origin of Easter iconography and traditions, which originated in the poorly researched purposely misinformative book The Two Babylons by Alexander Hislop, written as an attack on Catholicism, which I spoke about in an old episode. Well, as it turns out, Hislop contributed to the Christmas tree confusion as well. Based on an illustration of a coin depicting a snake wrapped around what looks like a tree stump, Hislop spins a fanciful story about King Nimrod’s wife deifying her dead husband. According to him, she said a young tree grew in place of a dead stump, symbolizing her husband’s rebirth, and that Nimrod came back to life every year on his birthday, which happened to be December 25th, and would leave gifts beneath that tree. This, it was claimed, was the origin of both the Yule log and the Christmas tree. No citations or sources are cited for this claim. Only the image of the coin with a snake around a stump, or maybe it is a ruined pillar? The coin also pictures a palm tree and a sea shell and reads “Tyriorum,” indicating some connection to Tyre, but no provenance or context whatsoever is provided. The illustration is labeled only “The Yule Log,” and a source is given: “MAURICE'S Indian Antiquities, vol. vi. p. 368.” This is Thomas Maurice’s Indian Antiquities, or Dissertations on Hindostan, published 1812, and the coin does not appear in it. It is quite apparent that Hislop, as he did in so many other claims, was just making stuff up. Yet in the 1980s, a pioneer of televangelism, Herbert Armstrong, founder of the Worldwide Church of God, promoted this misinformation in a booklet called “The Plain Truth about Christmas,” and now you can find it parroted on social media, along with a lot of other nonsense made up by Hislop, such as that Easter is really about the Mesopotamian goddess Ishtar, and you see it popping up on every major liturgical holiday. The reality of the survival of pagan traditions in modern Christianity is far more nuanced. Are there elements of paganism in the Christmas tree tradition? Insofar as the traditions of decorating one’s home with greenery is a custom with long pre-Christian roots, sure, but at a certain point, it’s impossible to differentiate what was pagan custom and what was simply a human habit. Some promoters of pagan survivalism in Christmas tradition will claim that singing is a pagan custom, and feasting, and bells, and lighting candles and fires, when in reality, people just sing and feast when celebrating, and since the invention of bells, it is common to ring them. Winter solstice is the longest night of the year, after all, marking the start of the coldest season. Can we really call the lighting of candles and the kindling of fires in the hearth a pagan tradition, when it is also just a way to stave off the dark and the cold? There is mystery and cultural heritage behind the Christmas tree tradition, but that doesn’t mean that we can trace it back through endless iterations to the furthest antiquity.