Torn Lincoln Paper at St. Lawrence U. Is Digitally Reunited With Other Half

Call it a scholar’s birthday present to Abraham Lincoln. David J. Gerleman, an adjunct history professor at George Mason University, has digitially stitched together a torn document whose pieces are held by two different archives.

The lower half of document bearing President Lincoln’s signature is held at St. Lawrence University, in Canton, N.Y., while the upper half is at the Illinois State Archives, in Springfield. While the two pieces are still physically states apart, digital images of them have been pasted together to form an entire legal document with a coherent history.

Mr. Gerleman scanned the scrap with Lincoln’s name while he was visiting St. Lawrence in Novemeber. He is the assistant editor of the Papers of Abraham Lincoln, a project that collects digital images of documents written by or to Lincoln, which will make them available for free online in the future. He sent the electronic image back to project headquarters in Springfield, where it was matched with its other half at the Illinois State Archives.

The document was written in 1846 by an Illinois attorney to appeal the case Edgar County, Illinois v. Mayo to the Illinois Supreme Court. Lincoln, who was defending Mayo, added a note at the end to contradict the appeal.

Lincoln wrote, “In nullo est erratum,” followed by “Lincoln, p.d.” The Latin phrase means “In nothing there is error,” which Lincoln wrote to show that he believed the case was already decided fairly by the lower court. The “p.d.” after Lincoln’s name stands for “pro defendente” and shows he was Mayo’s attorney. Lincoln later lost the case when the lower court’s decision was reversed by the state supreme court the next year.

It is unclear why the document was torn, but Mr. Gerleman said someone probably ripped off the bottom half to take Lincoln’s signature.

“It’s not that unusual to find some of these documents in pieces and to have to reassemble them digitally,” Mr. Gerleman said. He added that he has come across many documents in the National Archives, in Washington, that have been cut or torn by “autograph hunters.”

Before the reunification, no one at St. Lawrence knew context of the signature, said Mark McMurray, curator of special collections and university archivist at St. Lawrence.

Mr. McMurray said that he did not know if the two halves of the document would ever be physically reunited, but that now, “it’s less important because of the digital reunification.”

“It’s a wonderful ending,” Mr. McMurray said. “It’s a piece of history that fits back to a piece of paper — literally — and becomes part of a larger Lincoln story.”