Three Outstanding Lincoln Collections

The Georgetown library has received the Swaim Collection of material dealing with the assassination of Abraham Lincoln and the alleged subsequent career of John Wilkes Booth. The collection, gathered by E.H. Swaim of Eden, Texas, and left to the library in his will, contains material which some historians have used in their claims that Booth was not killed at the Garrett Farm in Virginia following the assassination, but that he survived to die in Enid, Oklahoma, in 1903. Letters and affidavits from persons who were involved in the events surrounding the assassination, from members of the Booth family and their acquaintances and from individuals who claimed to have known Booth later in Texas and Oklahoma are in the collection. The library also has acquired the papers of David Rankin Barbee, Washington Post journalist and historian who studied and wrote about Lincoln. They were a gift of his daughters, Mrs. Robert C. Maxwell and Mrs. High Smith. The collection includes extensive correspondence with Albert J. Beveridge and Henry Steele Commager, Barbee's own research files and manuscripts of three unpublished works. Since he spent many years gathering copies of official records and documents from national and state archives and from institutions and individuals on all aspects of the assassination and the subsequent trial of the conspirators, the collections is a rich lode for Lincoln scholars. To supplement these two most noteworthy manuscript collections the library has acquired an important collection of over 1,000 books, pamphlets, journals and other printed material on Abraham Lincoln and the Civil War assembled by Mr. Earl C. Kubicek of Santa Fe, New Mexico. Nearly every book or pamphlet written on Lincoln in the past 100 years is in this collection. These three collections, added to our previous Lincoln collections, place this library very high on the list of academic institutions having premier Lincoln era research collections.