As funding dries up, search for Lincoln papers at National Archives might be halted The younger Griffith was "as fine a man as lives," his father wrote the president in 1863. He had voted for Lincoln, and spent eight months as POW. Now, "because he desired a voice in selecting his officers, he must be shot." David J. Gerleman, assistant editor of the Papers of Abraham Lincoln, came upon this stark Civil War vignette last week at the National Archives. It is one of thousands of Lincoln-related documents, large and small, that the project has been collecting there since 2006. But as the country approaches the 150th anniversary of Lincoln's Gettysburg Address in November, the project's work at the archives might soon end. Gerleman and Daniel W. Stowell, the Lincoln papers director, said Wednesday that, barring new funding, money for their archives research will run out in June, and their work there could stop well before then. The overall project, based at the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum, in Springfield, Ill., would continue. But the digging in the archives, where the vast majority of Lincoln documents are located, would be suspended. Stowell said a five-year, $1.4 million charitable grant ran out last month, and the project's Illinois state funding has been more than halved. The Papers, which has an annual budget of $775,000 to gather all things Lincoln, gets funding from federal and other private sources, he said, which make up only about 60 percent of its budget. "We need to replace that [charitable] funding . . . and the now-missing portion of our state funding," Stowell said. If not, "we would have to say come June of next year, "We can't go on."" He said the project would retrench, and focus mainly on its work in Springfield. And his small Washington staff might not wait until then to hunt for new jobs. But why search for Lincoln papers at all? With hundreds of books written about the assassinated president, don't we know everything? "No," Stowell said. A similar project in the 1950s, by historian Roy P. Basler, focused primarily on things Lincoln wrote, he said. This time, researchers are also looking for, among other things, documents Lincoln received. This "enriches Lincoln so much by giving the full cast of characters, by giving all of the people who are writing to him, giving their voices," he said. Some of them are hilarious, a lot of them are poignant, a lot of them are tragic, some of them are noble. . . . You get this swath of humanity. "We're building a new Lincoln Memorial," he said. We're building it not out of granite and marble, we're building it out of the words of Abraham Lincoln and all of his contemporaries. The file of the Griffith military court proceedings is an example. It contains entries by John Nicolay, one of Lincoln's personal secretaries; Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton; Union Gen. Ulysses S. Grant; and an endorsement by Lincoln.