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The Bryant Cottage Historical Site

The Bryant Cottage
Located	Bement, Illinois
Address	146 E. Wilson Ave.
Constructed	1856

The Bryant Cottage State Historic Site is a simple, 1856 four-room house located in Bement, Illinois in the U.S. state of Illinois. It is preserved by the Illinois Historic Preservation Agency as an example of Piatt County, Illinois pioneer architecture and as a key historic site in the 1858 Lincoln-Douglas debates between Abraham Lincoln and Stephen A. Douglas. Part of the sequence of events that led up to those debates was a meeting of the two men as guests on the evening of July 29 at the Bryant Cottage. Bement had no newspaper at the time, and so it was there that these guests were treated with a respect and discretion that was totally lacking in the harsh, highly partisan news reports of their other meetings.

The meeting of Lincoln and Douglas is soundly documented and without any reasoned, factual refutation. That history has been endorsed by Lincoln scholars, the New York Times, Voice of America, the BBC, and Arnold Toynbee.

One book on the history of the debates says the meeting in Bement was merely the first step in the culmination of a much longer debate about slavery in the U.S.: "When Lincoln and Douglas met at Bement to arrange their joint canvasses, they had already been engaged in political debate for nearly twenty years." Indeed, the author says, "The road to Bement stretched back in time—all the way, perhaps, to the founding of the country…"

This compares with the treatment often the meeting in general interest works. In those works the meeting is often little more than an object of bucolic buffoonery. Moreover, over the years this history has become incorporated into and become secondary to a significant body of spurious hyperbole featuring people and places with no association with the Cottage or the village of Bement. These entertaining, but highly spurious, "histories" relegating the history of the Bryant Cottage to "rumor" or "folklore" are totally at odds with the undisputed contemporaneous press accounts of the day. As such, the story of the Bryant Cottage is a sobering case study in historiography.

The Meeting of Lincoln and Douglas

The events leading up to the meeting are extensively documented in archives as early as 1860, but especially in histories such as those of Edwin Sparks and Roy P. Basler.

Lincoln challenged Douglas to the debates in a letter dated July 24, and Douglas responded with a letter brimming with complaints and problems that precluded the debates but said he would confer with Lincoln "at the earliest convenient opportunity in regard to the mode of conducting the debate and the times of meeting at the several places"

The two men dined together a few days later in a Decatur restaurant to discuss the debates, but once the word got out where Douglas was, that dinner turned out largely to be the occasion for and endless retinue of Douglas' supporters to pay homage to him. The dinner offered the two men no opportunity for a quiet, reasoned discussion; Douglas had no opportunity to tell Lincoln he had responded to his proposal. Lincoln later read Douglas's letter in the newspaper before he ever received the letter from Douglas.

Both men went to Monticello, the Piatt County seat, the next day, and Douglas made a speech there. He then left for Bement and had a brief encounter with Lincoln who was on the road to Monticello. Three newspaper accounts of the conversation all agree that Lincoln said he did not come to Piatt County to make a speech, but rather to reply to Douglas's proposal, that the men did not exchange letters or discuss the debates at that time, that Douglas told Lincoln he would be staying with the Bryant's that evening.

Press accounts agree that Lincoln did not make a speech at Monticello (at least not by the standards of the day of what constituted a speech) but merely read his letter to Douglas offering problems and complaints he had about Douglas. The letter did not include a postscript.

One report said that instead of giving speech as expected "he left suddenly on the midnight train for Springfield." That train was from Bement.

There was no newspaper in Bement at the time, and that evening the two men found a place where they could have a conversation out of the merciless public eye at the home of Bryant, who honored their wishes not to publicize the meeting. By the time Douglas penned a letter to Lincoln the next morning headed "Bement, Piatt Co., Ill., July 30, 1858" the problems and complaints of both men had been resolved. Lincoln's letter had gained a postscript that was a dramatic change from rest of the letter. The letter Lincoln had read in Monticello had offered a lengthy argument that he had not been following Douglas; the postscript said he would not do it any more. And Douglas nailed down "the mode of conducting the debate and the times of meeting" he had said in his letter to Lincoln he wanted to discuss with him.

Lincoln's colleague, friend and confidant, Henry Clay Whitney, had this to say about the efforts of Lincoln and Douglas to arrange the debates:

The discussion was ended at the private house of Frank Bryant, who had, in partnership with my father, a store, coal and lumber yard, etc., in a small village called Bement; Bryant being a dyed in the wool Democrat.

Bryant's obituary in the New York Times offered this information about him:

He was a warm friend of Judge Douglas, and it was at his house in Bement Ill., that Douglas and Lincoln held a conference and arranged for their public debates, which became so important a part of the history of the State and Nation.

George N. Black was a neighbor and political appointee of Lincoln, and a founder and early Secretary of the Illinois State Historical Library. He did not indulge in personal anecdotes about Lincoln and was very dedicated to keeping questionable material about Lincoln out of that library collection. Black wrote in the Chicago Daily Tribune that Lincoln and Douglas met at the Bryant residence

and on that evening in the parlor the primary arrangements of the noted debates were made, Mr. Lincoln and Judge Douglas spending the evening together in a friendly manner while the details of the plan were being gone over.

The noted Lincoln historian Albert Beveridge:

So when Lincoln's Monticello meeting was over, he went back to Bement and in the Parlor of the Bryant residence the two men arranged the dates and details of their joint meetings.

Beveridge's account was based on George Spear's account from his 1878 History of Bement:

At the conclusion of the speaking Mr. L. set out for Bement to meet Mr. Douglas. On arriving at Bement he called at the place appointed and was cordially received.

They repaired to the parlor, and entered into a conversation which led to great results in the future.

That conversation involved matters of national importance. It was with reference to making arrangements for the great senatorial contest and debate which was soon to follow.

The Spear history was repeatedly reprinted and endorsed within the memory of people living during the event it documents.

Paul M. Angle, an historian for the Illinois State Historical Society spent a decade and a half studying Lincoln's activities during these years, largely in day-by-day detail and often in seemingly hour-by-hour detail. He edited a 1940 reprint of Whitney's history and said in a footnote "Exactly what took place between Lincoln and Douglas at Bement will probably never be known." But, he said, "It is unlikely that at Bement the two men did more than work out the details of an arrangement already agreed upon in principle."

The 1955 the centennial celebration of the village of Bement hosted, among others, Everett Dirksen, Hubert Humphrey, Adlai Stevenson, and Carl Sandburg. That celebration did not make any flamboyant or dramatic statements about the history of the Bryant Cottage. The centennial pageant was broadcast on the BBC, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation and the Voice of America. Arnold Toynbee noted that in the midst of the cold war "the conflict in the world today is the same as it was in the time of the Lincoln-Douglas debates (which were discussed by the two great orators in Bement.)" He therefore suggested as a theme for the celebration: "Can the world exist, half slave and half free?")

As part of that centennial celebration a student of Central Illinois history, geography and especially railroad transportation surveyed history, geography and rail transportation of the area to conclude "Lincoln spent the evening of July 29, 1958 in Bement, doubtless conferring with Douglas."

Sloppy Journalism; Sloppy History

The treatment of the journalistic and historical record has been sloppy indeed. Sparks offers a two sentence lead-in to the three newspaper accounts that Lincoln did not give Douglas his letter at their brief encounter on the road. However, Sparks says in that lead-in to those accounts that Lincoln "met Douglas by accident...and tendered him the paper."

Pratt said "Lincoln hands Douglas his reply to Douglas' letter" on the road south of Monticello and that "[T]here is a tradition that Lincoln and Douglas met some time in the evening at the Francis Bryant home."

The sloppy journalism and history about meeting at the Bryant Cottage was exacerbated in that it served as the basis for and incorporated into a endless body of entertaining embellishment and buffoonery by and about other people and places.

In 1882 a history of Piatt County was published which purported to offer the Spear history of the Bement meeting. However, that history confused or combined two different visits Lincoln made to Monticello. The meeting at Bement was treated as a more or less incidental aftermath of a grand celebration at which Lincoln spoke for hours to 5,000 people before enjoying a sumptuous banquet at Monticello. It was "the greatest day Piatt County had ever seen".

In 1917 Frank Shonkwiler authored another history of Piatt County that in large part merely replicated paragraph after paragraph of the earlier 1882 history. That history reflected no particular knowledge of or interest in F.E. Bryant.

Sloppy History: Multiple contemporary undisputed newspaper reports document that Lincoln and Douglas did not discuss the debates here.

The next year, however, Shonkwiler was largely instrumental organizing the unveiling of an historic marker celebrating the "accidental meeting" of Lincoln and Douglas on the road outside Monticello: "Here on July 9, 1858, Abraham Lincoln and Stephen A. Douglas first agreed to meet in joint debate in Illinois." The Journal of the Illinois State Historical Society report of the celebration mentioned the meeting at the Bryant Cottage more or less in passing but called the meeting on the road south of Monticello

doubtless one of the most eventful in American history for it probably changed the whole current of the history of the United States. If they had not met then and there the series of joint debates in Illinois might not have been held.

Over time, Shonkwiler came to portray himself a close friend of Bryant and expositor of a dramatic, embellished, Bryant family history, a history that, among other things, has Lincoln hitching a ride with Shonkwiler's father in a prairie schooner from Bement to Monticello (contemporary press reports say Lincoln was in a carriage) and Douglas coming down the stairs in his nightshirt to meet Lincoln (the cottage has always been a single story building).

At least one effort to distinguish history from dubious, but entertaining, embellishment and fiction had just the opposite result. Albert Beveridge, In an effort to untangle "another of those curious tangles that so often confuse the student of Lincoln's career" first discusses the historical record and quotes Spear. He then offers in the Spear footnote a paragraph of the Shonkwiler foolishness based on that history. However, at least one subsequent history quoted the footnote paragraph and treated it, including the coming down stairs in nightshirt anecdote, as history according to Beveridge based on family tradition.

It is perhaps important to note at this point that neither the family or heirs of the Bryant cottage have ever been a part of espousing or promoting "family tradition." They honored the wishes of Douglas and Lincoln during the careers of both men that the meeting not be publicized. And once that history began being embellished so ridiculously, both the family and the village tried even harder to distance themselves from anecdotes and buffoonery and focus instead on the soundly documented history and contemporary press reports. In short, there is no body of "local folklore" or "family tradition."

The Bryant Cottage as a Case Study in Historiography

A recurrent, and often over-riding, factor in the history of the cottage is an antipathy for any notion that anything significant could have happened at the modest little cottage. The 1900 article in the Chicago Daily Tribune cited earlier drew a response some days later. Based on the 1860 transcripts of the letters and debates, the author of the article came to the following conclusion:

While I have no question that this house was the scene of a pleasant visit and perhaps of a conference upon political matters by these distinguished men, I think there must be an error in the writer's statement concerning the arrangement for the joint debates

In the same vein, a 1991 story in the Champaign-Urbana (Ill.) News-Gazette is a microcosm of the disdain with which the history of the Bryant Cottage is often treated today. The article admits that the history of that meeting "rings true" and that "major historians" accept that history without reservation. Nevertheless, the whole point of the article is that the Bryant Cottage should be held in scorn and disdain befitting a "little cornbread-and-beans place".

Such ridicule, however, misses the whole point of the meeting. It was, indeed, at a little cornbread-and-beans place where the two men were treated with respect and discretion that Lincoln and Douglas met to finalize plans for their debates.