Disunion follows the Civil War as it unfolded.

At midnight on July 26, 1947, the Library of Congress opened Abraham Lincoln’s papers to the public. As the librarian unlocked the safe that held the documents, 12 photographers and four newsreel camera operators recorded the scene. Among those present at midnight, and at 4 p.m. for an official ceremony scheduled for that time so that the various Lincoln clubs around the country could listen on radio, were Robert Todd Lincoln Beckwith, Lincoln’s great-grandson, and Ulysses S. Grant III, the general’s grandson. Scholars attended as well (14 authors who had among them published more than 100 Lincoln books), and they began almost immediately to search the index.

Roy P. Basler was also present. As executive secretary of the Abraham Lincoln Association, he was leading the effort to produce a definitive and annotated collection of Lincoln’s works. Basler’s efforts would result in “The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln,” published in nine volumes between 1953 and 1955. The collection consisted of 18,350 documents in 194 bound volumes. A microfilm edition was available for $645 and, unspooled, ran for two miles.

A careful observer might have noticed that one major speech was missing: Lincoln’s final public address, given on April 11, 1865, three days before his assassination. This wasn’t surprising: Lincoln often discarded or gave away his manuscripts. But for the actions of 12-year-old Tad Lincoln, Lincoln’s last speech might have ended up literally in the wind.

Following Robert E. Lee’s surrender at Appomattox on April 9, citizens appealed to Lincoln twice on April 10 for a speech. But he demurred, saying he was not yet prepared and, since journalists reported his every word, he wanted to make no mistakes. At one point, he deflected the importuning crowd by asking a band to play “Dixie,” a favorite tune. He joked the Union had now captured it as a prize of war.

Finally, on the evening of April 11, Lincoln appeared on the second-floor balcony of the North Portico of the White House. A vast assemblage greeted him with boisterous cheers and waves of applause. The manuscript rolled in his hand consisted of 12 pages, and after reading each page he allowed it to drop to the floor where Tad scampered about picking them up. Following the speech, a visitor found the president in his office “stretched at full length, resting on a large sofa from his oratorical efforts.”

The speech itself was not what listeners expected. They yearned for a rousing victory speech and heard a peace speech instead. Lincoln began by acknowledging the occasion — “we meet this evening not in sorrow but in gladness of heart” — and he applauded the army and navy. But he devoted the bulk of the address to Reconstruction, to securing a “righteous and speedy peace,” a subject that “has had a large share of thought from the first.”

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Lincoln defended his policies, which included the December 1863 Proclamation of Amnesty and Reconstruction, which provided a framework for the return of loyal states to the Union. Under that rubric, several states had held conventions and adopted new state constitutions that abolished slavery.

He then focused on Louisiana, where some 12,000 voters swore allegiance to the Union, held elections and adopted a free state constitution. But Congress, in its just concluded session, refused to seat the representatives from the state. This confounded Lincoln, who asked twice, “Can Louisiana be brought into proper practical relation with the Union sooner by sustaining or by discarding her new state government?”

Lincoln was appealing directly to the people. He wanted reunion to proceed swiftly and smoothly. Time and again in the previous two months he had spoken of mercy as well as justice. While in Richmond the previous week he told one officer who asked what to do with the prisoners to “let ’em up easy.” In his Second Inaugural Address, he invoked the Bible: “judge not that we be not judged.”

At the same time, he offered qualified support for black suffrage. Perhaps part of his motivation was to mollify the Radical Republicans who had opposed his wartime reconstruction plans. But Lincoln also understood that having the vote would help protect the freedmen from being victimized after the war by former Confederates. In March 1864, Lincoln had made his thoughts known privately in a letter to Louisiana’s governor, suggesting that the enfranchisement of the educated and those who served in the army was a way to “keep the jewel of liberty within the family of freedom.” Now, on April 11, he publicly endorsed black suffrage.

John Wilkes Booth lurked among the attentive crowd. “That is the last speech he will ever make,” he remarked as he and a co-conspirator, Lewis Powell, walked away. Three days later he made good on this threat.

Because of Tad’s playful efforts, the manuscript of Lincoln’s last speech was preserved. It must have been included among the papers that Secretary of War Edwin Stanton had sealed and that Lincoln’s secretaries, John Hay and John Nicolay, shipped to Illinois soon after the assassination. Those papers arrived under guard at the home of Associate Justice David Davis, whom Robert Todd Lincoln had asked to administer his father’s estate.

The papers remained sealed within the vault of the National Bank at Bloomington, Ill. In 1874, Robert Todd Lincoln had the papers sent to Nicolay in Washington for use in an exhaustive biography of Lincoln that he was planning with Hay.

Decades later, when Basler examined Lincoln’s last speech for inclusion in the “Collected Works,” he relied on a photocopy of a Photostat from the Library of Congress located in the files of the Illinois State Historical Society, which is now the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum. On the back of that photocopy appears “Original owned by Congressman James W. Wadsworth.”

How did Wadsworth end up with the manuscript of Lincoln’s last speech? One possibility is that Robert Todd Lincoln gave it to him. Wadsworth was a senator during the time of the construction of the Lincoln Memorial, and he had served on the nonpartisan Lincoln Memorial Committee of the National Republican Club in New York.

There was precedent for Robert Todd Lincoln’s generosity: In 1916, he presented the draft of his father’s November 1864 post-re-election speech to Representative John W. Dwight of New York for the role Dwight played as Republican majority whip in securing funding for the Lincoln Memorial. “I wish you to have something tangible as a testimonial of my feeling,” he wrote. No similar letter to Wadsworth exists. (In 2009, Christie’s auctioned this speech for $3.44 million; Dwight’s widow had left it to a hometown library in Dryden, N.Y., which sold it to raise money for building a library extension.)

There is another connection between Wadsworth and Lincoln, other than his grandfather’s service to the president and his own support for the memorial in Washington: Wadsworth was married to Alice Hay, John Hay’s daughter. The relationship with Hay raises the possibility that Lincoln’s secretary possessed the manuscript and passed it down.

This seems the more likely scenario. Nicolay had been custodian of Lincoln’s papers, but after his death in 1901, they were transferred to John Hay, who had risen to secretary of state under Theodore Roosevelt. He stored the papers at the State Department and after his death in 1905 the papers were transferred back to Robert Todd Lincoln.

Wadsworth married Alice Hay on Sept. 30, 1902. When Lincoln’s last speech surfaced, it was bound in half-red morocco with marbled boards. This supports the theory that Hay possessed the document — he often had important manuscripts bound in this way. Hay wrote Robert in April 1888, “I own a few of your father’s MS. which he gave me from time to time.” It is not a stretch to believe that, nearly three decades later, it was not perfectly clear which documents he had been given and which he simply had obtained. Alice Hay Wadsworth, for her part, was deeply invested in justifying the retention of Lincoln documents in her father’s personal papers, never more so than after 1909 when it was discovered that Hay possessed a draft of the Gettysburg Address.

Somehow, the bound original manuscript of the last speech ended up in the hands of James F. Drake, a prominent New York collector of autograph letters. While Wadsworth’s reasons for parting with the speech are unknown, it is revealing who purchased it: Joan Whitney Payson, Wadsworth’s niece. Her maternal grandfather was John Hay. Her mother, Helen Julia Hay, was Alice’s older sister. The speech had passed from one branch of the Hay family to another.

From here, the ownership story is straightforward. Joan Whitney Payson, heiress and founding owner of the New York Mets, died in 1975, and nine years later her children found the speech in a secret compartment of an antique table in her Long Island mansion. The family put it up for auction, and William Doyle Galleries sold Lincoln’s last speech on May 17, 1984, for $231,000 — a record price at the time for any presidential document.

The buyer was Malcolm Forbes, the multimillionaire chairman of Forbes magazine and a lifelong collector of Americana. Asked about the price he said: “I think it’s a bargain. It’s a better portrait of Mr. Lincoln than any other document or painting.”

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When Forbes died in 1990, he owned some 4,000 autographs and manuscripts of American presidents. Starting in 2002, his descendants turned to Christie’s to auction the Forbes Collection of American Historical Documents. Lincoln’s last speech was included in the first auction, held on March 27, 2002. Billed by Christie’s as “the last manuscript of a complete Lincoln speech still in private hands,” they placed the estimate at $1.5 million to $2 million. It sold for $3,086,000.

The buyer was anonymous and has chosen to remain so. To date, the manuscript has not been made available.

This is unfortunate. There is good scholarly reason to examine the original speech. In a copy provided by James Cornelius, the director of the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum, made from the same copy that Roy Basler viewed, pages one and two are marked A. and B., and the next 10 pages are numbered sequentially. Lincoln had undoubtedly written the first two pages to be delivered that evening; the remaining text was something that he had already composed, a rejoinder to Congressional accusations that Louisiana should not be readmitted because only a minority of potential voters had participated in elections and ratified a new constitution. Those criticisms had come in January and February. Examining the ink and paper of the original might help pinpoint the sequence of composition.

Lincoln’s last speech is not just any Lincoln document. It was his final public address to the nation in which he articulated his plans and hopes for peace, offered a stout defense of his policies up to that date, and looked ahead to a reunited nation in which some black men could vote. In some ways, it is the speech that got him killed.

On March 4, 2015, the Library of Congress displayed the original manuscript of Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Address. Thousands of visitors passed through the Great Hall of the Thomas Jefferson Building to view the address on the occasion of the sesquicentennial. Lincoln delivered his final speech less than six weeks after his second inaugural. Hopefully, the public will one day be given an opportunity to see it.

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Sources: The New York Times; The Washington Post; David C. Mearns, “The Lincoln Papers,” two volumes; Christie’s New York, “The Forbes Collection of American Historical Documents, Part One”; Robert Emerson, “Giant in the Shadows: The Life of Robert T. Lincoln”; Joshua Zeitz, “Lincoln’s Boys: John Hay, John Nicolay and the War for Lincoln’s Image”; Martin P Johnson, “Who Stole the Gettysburg Address,” Journal of the Abraham Lincoln Association 24 (Summer 2003). I am grateful to Daniel W. Stowell of the Papers of Abraham Lincoln and Michelle Krowl of the Library of Congress for information on the provenance of the last speech, and to James Cornelius of the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum for providing a copy of the speech.

Louis P. Masur, a professor of American studies and history at Rutgers University, is the author of “Lincoln’s Last Speech: Wartime Reconstruction and the Crisis of Reunion.”