Lincoln and Ewing were able to correspond quickly at the time of this letter because Lincoln was in Washington, DC. As competition for the job intensified, William H. Henderson and Josiah Lucas, Lincoln supporters living in Washington, DC, had urged Lincoln to come to the nation’s capital to personally lobby for the position. Lincoln arrived on or before June 19. Ewing and Lincoln corresponded several more times on the topic of letters of recommendation Ewing and the Department of the Interior received concerning Lincoln’s candidacy for commissioner. Ultimately, neither Morrison, Edwards, nor Lincoln received the appointment; the job went to Butterfield instead. See the General Land Office Affair.

Lincoln later wrote Ewing that he waited until July 8th before opening this package of letters, then found the letters of Richard W. Thompson and Elisha Embree missing. Lincoln suspected that these two particular letters were purposefully omitted by someone at the Department of the Interior in order to give Butterfield an advantage over him in the competition for the job. Ewing, however, insisted that President Taylor had seen both Thompson’s and Embree’s letters, after which they were then forwarded to him and retained due to departmental policy which did not permit the return of any letters of reference or recommendation which were addressed to Taylor or which contained statements about anyone other than the person being recommended. Lincoln later wrote John Addison that his loyalty to both Taylor and “the great whig cause” induced him to remain silent about his suspicions. Thompson’s and Embree’s letters of recommendation have not been located.

Eventually, on April 22, 1850, the Democrat-controlled U.S. House of Representatives formed a committee under William A. Richardson to investigate Ewing’s role in and handling of patronage appointments as well as his management of pension payments and Department of the Interior accounts. On June 8, 1850, the New York Herald reported that Butterfield’s appointment as commissioner of the U.S. General Land Office was one patronage appointment that the Richardson Committee was investigating, particularly with regard to letters missing from the file on Lincoln that was shown to President Taylor prior to Taylor selecting the final appointee. However, when the committee filed its final reports on September 4-7, 1850, it made no finding regarding Butterfield’s appointment. The Whig-controlled U.S. Senate also exonerated Ewing of all charges, although suspicions remained in some Whig circles that Ewing had indeed suppressed letters of recommendation from Lincoln’s file.