Lost Silent Film About Abraham Lincoln Recovered at Greenport Film Archive

Greenport is a place full of history. One of the former colonial-era whaling port’s most notable landmarks is an old jailhouse that would be at home in a Clint Eastwood Western. Adding to its rich past is the recent discovery of a silent film about Abraham Lincoln that has been missing for a century.

A film student working as an intern at Historic Film Stock Footage Archive, which preserves old film and works with filmmakers who may need it, recently recovered The Heart of Lincoln, a 1915 feature-length silent film directed by and starring Francis Ford. The film follows Lincoln and his leadership through the Civil War.

How The Heart of Lincoln Was Found

Joe Lauro, co-founder and owner of Historic Films, said the discovery was made while sifting through a trove of old film cannisters that were donated.

“One of the people that I had a relationship with, I think it was at Kent State, said, ‘Joe, we want, we want you to have the entire library,” Lauro recalled. “We’re not using it anymore. We can’t afford it. We’re going to give it to you, and not only are we going to give it to you, but we’re going to send a truck to you.

“So, sure enough, about a month later, a truck with about 10,000 16-millimeter prints arrived at our office in East Hampton, and we promptly put it in a foam vault,” he continued. “Through the years, we have slowly gone through it. Most of the stuff is useless. It was either too damaged and used or films that we just simply couldn’t do anything with because they were owned by other people. We sifted through it, and we kept going through it.

“The last batch, I had an intern, a film student named Dan Martin,” he added. “I tasked him with going into the vault and organizing the last batch of these films coming, getting each title search, doing copyright searches, and trying to figure out what we’re going to do with them. He came into my office with this little stack of six reels. And he goes, ‘Joe, I think we have something really special here.’”

Martin’s instincts proved correct.

“We look at the description and it says The Heart of Lincoln,” Lauro said. “I told him to spend the rest of the day and do some further research on this. Dan went through the Library of Congress, which has all the lost American silent feature films, and probably 70% of those that were made are lost to this day. Sure enough, The Heart of Lincoln was there.”

According to Lauro, brothers Francis and John Ford were “obsessed” with Lincoln, evidenced by other films in their bodies of work including Young Mr. Lincoln (1939), When Lincoln Paid (1913), The Battle of Bull Run (1913), The Heart of Maryland (1915), and more.

“Lincoln was a benevolent leader,” Lauro said. “He was a president with compassion. He grieved over every decision, and a lot of the decisions he had to make during this course of the Civil War are portrayed in this film, and always with Lincoln giving them great thought.”

One of those decisions in The Heart of Lincoln, Lauro says, involves a young man who fought for the Union, and heard that his mother was dying back home. He deserted in order to see her, but was captured by the troops, and Lincoln’s war cabinet wanted to make an example by executing him.

“Lincoln had to sign the death warrant,” Lauro said. “And the film portrays how difficult it was for him to do that, because he saw each one of these situations as an individual tragedy. He realized what was going on with these soldiers in this war. This is the way that he was portrayed by the Ford brothers. Ultimately, he refuses to sign it – that is the heart of Lincoln. I wish we had a Lincoln today.”

The Significance of Preserving The Heart of Lincoln

Finding and saving this film is not just about the story of Lincoln from a 1915 perspective. A large part of it is the revival of early cinema.

“A great percentage of the films from that era are lost to time,” Lauro said. “They were made on 35 millimeter nitrate stock, which was perishable and plus, the studios had no ancillary rights. After a film finished playing in the theater, unlike today, it was done. So, the studios didn’t take care of these films.

“That’s why so many are lost,” he continued. “They didn’t preserve them. They had no other use. They were ephemera. They had no other use back then, until the 1950s when TV emerged and, all of a sudden, the studios that preserved their films were able to relicense with the television to give them a new life. Back in the silent era that didn’t exist. The films were perishable.”

To make sure this one isn’t lost again, Lauro is digitizing the movie, adding a score, and will re-release it.

Lessons from the film

Abraham Lincoln is regarded as one of the greatest presidents in U.S. history, with C-SPAN’s 2021 presidential historians survey listing him as No. 1. Both his leadership and personal qualities, Lauro says, are lacking today.

“You don’t have to be a Democrat or Republican to feel that people need to be more compassionate to each other, and you have to hope that the people that lead us are able to do that,” Lauro said. “I leave it up to everyone else to decide whether that’s being done or not.”