From the Library of President Theodore Roosevelt, Signed by Him and With the Roosevelt Family Bookplate: The Biography of Abraham Lincoln

Lincoln was Roosevelt’s “great hero”; a powerful and important association

During the Civil War, Mary and Abraham Lincoln welcomed Theodore Roosevelt, Sr., father of the future president, into their social circles. Mary invited him to dinners, Theodore Sr. worked closely with Lincoln to form the Allotment Commission, which routed soldier pay to their families. As president, Theodore Roosevelt told friends that Lincoln was “my great hero” and that he meant “more to me than any other of our public men.” Noting a Lincoln portrait he had hung on his office wall in the White House, he said, “I look up to that picture, and I do as I believe Lincoln would have done.”

Roosevelt considered himself the successor to Lincoln’s Republican administration, a man who helped heal the nation and free the slaves.

President Theodore Roosevelt’s copy of Lincoln’s biography with his bold signature in ink on the half-title, and the bookplate of the Roosevelt family, containing their its and motto “qui plantavit curabit”.  The first edition of the popular French biography of the 16th President, with a detailed analysis of slavery and its abolition.

Books from Roosevelt’s library are quite rare on the market; most of his extensive library remains intact at Sagamore Hill and at the Roosevelt birthplace in Manhattan.

Theodore Roosevelt had a mastery of French and read often read books in that language.

The book: Jouault, Alphonse. Abraham Lincoln. His Youth and His Political Life. The History of the Abolition of Slavery in the United States. (Sa jeunesse et sa vie politique. Histoire de l’abolition de l’esclavage aux États-Unis.) Paris: Hachette, 1875.

Octavo (170 x 110mm). French. Half-title. Wood-engraved frontispiece portrait of Lincoln. Publisher’s dark-green cloth, gilt; custom box.