F. Ray Risdon Collection of Lincolniana and American Political Life

Abraham Lincoln (1809-1865) was the 16th president of the United States. Before his election to the presidency in 1860, he had been a lawyer, a member of the Illinois state legislature and the U.S. House of Representatives, and had failed in two attempts at gaining a seat in the U.S. Senate. His career tracked the major political movements of the mid-nineteenth century, as his support of the Whigs shifted to the anti-slavery Republican Party after the former party split along sectional lines in the wake of the compromises on slavery in legislation of the early 1850s. Shortly after his triumph in the 1860 election, and even before his inauguration, the Southern states began the process of secession in reaction to the first election since 1848 (of Zachary Taylor) of a president who would not favor the pro-slavery faction in Congress. Lincoln’s conduct during the Civil War has placed him among the most renowned of presidents. John Wilkes Booth assasinated him on the night of April 14, 1865, and he died the next day.

F. Ray Risdon (1888-1958) was a Los Angeles lawyer, Republican party booster, and member of the Lincoln Fellowship of Southern California. Between 1910 and the mid-1950s he amassed what Lincoln bibliographer Jay Monaghan called, “the largest private collection of Lincolniana on the Pacific Coast.” Occidental Library Special Collections purchased these materials in 1957. Risdon’s primary source for Lincolniana and other rare books and manuscripts was Dawson’s Book Shop, which opened in 1905 and is the oldest continuously operating bookshop in Los Angeles. He collected broadly, buying, in addition to books and pamphlets, art, letters, legal documents, and many items not directly relating to Lincoln, but which provide contextual information about American politics of the nineteenth century. Risdon kept records of his purchases, and these receipts, along with his correspondence with other Lincoln collectors, are also housed in the collection. After his death, the collection received funding of approximately $500 per year until the late 1960s. This money was primarily directed to the purchase of new books, so that the date range of items in this collection runs from the late-eighteenth century to Richard Nixon’s first administration.