Mr. Lincoln!
It was just thirty years ago earlier this month that my wife and I drove from New York City during the beautiful fall New England color scene on up to Boston, Massachusetts in search of the history of our nation. I was partially in search of more recent history as I wanted to visit the John F. Kennedy Library supposedly located on the Charles river. Boston is not the easiest of places to traverse and this day was no exception. We drove and sought directions for what seemed like an eternity and never did find the object of our search. At that time, less than twenty years after the thirty fifth presidents death, we finally concluded, like historians were also thinking, that possibly John Kennedy was lost to history as well as to us. Time, in the last thirty years, has been kinder to the Kennedy presidency although it is still in the seemingly eternal process of being reevaluated.
The Lincoln presidency is much older than the president who served in the White House exactly one hundred years later, but, like all of history, there are always new generations and new perspectives to be given. New life has come to the Lincoln presidency in the city of Springfield, Illinois in the form of the 2005 opening of the Lincoln library and museum. Unlike in 1982 Boston, there are signs everywhere pointing to it and the other Lincoln sites that dote the prairie landscape and the buildings housing the museum and library are twenty first century modern both inside and out. It is interesting to note that the earliest serving president to have a library devoted to him would have something this modern and innovative available for the public to see and for researchers to use.
Abraham Lincoln was one of the most common of originating people to ever serve in the White House and he truly did once live in a log cabin. It has been said that most presidential candidates would like for us to believe that they came from log cabin origins and, to even have us think as Bill Clinton has said that they built that log cabin themselves. There is no evidence that Lincoln ever built a log cabin but his strapping six foot four frame did split many rails for the fences that were comprised of them back in that time. When we were very young, the first family trip that we took back in 1955 included a stop at the Lincoln birthplace site in the state of Kentucky where there is an old black and white photo of us peering out from a hog house constructed of logs so our association with Mr. Lincoln goes even further back than we can really remember. It is that way with many who inhabit the state of Illinois where Lincoln artifacts and sites dot the landscape from Chicago on south to the site of one of the Lincoln/Douglas debates not far from here where both candidates for a United States senate seats droned on for hours in the pre sound bite era as was the custom of that time.
It is debatable how much time that Abraham Lincoln ever spent in southern Illinois but there is the lasting hand me down memory of him getting off of the train in Carbondale, Illinois to stretch those long legs where he spend a few sociable moments with an ancestor of a person who is still proud of that experience that her family has as a part of its heritage just because he happened to be in the right place at the right time. Lincoln, simply by his size, made an impression on people of his day. When he wore his stove pipe hat he came up to close to seven feet tall and when he appeared at the several debates around Illinois in 1858 with the much shorter Stephen A. Douglas who weighed in at five feet four and was known as “”the little giant” the contrast could not have been more apparent. Douglas won the senate seat because elections for that office in that day were indirect with the legislature voting for the candidates instead of the common voter. It was the only thing that Douglas ever took from Lincoln and we are sure that he would have traded that election for the one that he lost to Lincoln for the presidency just two short years later. Douglas died tragically just a few months after Lincoln’s inauguration, perhaps of a broken heart even though the diagnosis was rheumatism.
Lincoln and Douglas had known each other for a long period of time out there in the prairie society that existed in central Illinois and was centered around the still developing town of Springfield. The town had become Illinois final capital in the 1840’s and Lincoln had served four terms in the state legislature before his political career had come to an apparent climax after one term as a congressman from Illinois representing the Whig party from 1846 through 1848. At that time, the congressional seat was rotated among the available personages of the day and Lincoln had had his turn so he returned to his profession of law where he was more or less spectacularly successful. Lincoln had taught himself law from law books that he had borrowed from an acquaintance who was impressed by him early on and then read law under a well respected lawyer of the time in central Illinois. Lincoln combined the gift of gab and argument that came naturally to him with a penetrating mind that could develop a case and write effectively down what needed to be presented before a court of law. Abraham Lincoln handled over four thousand cases over his multi decade legal career that ranged from simple wills to complex cases that involved the Illinois Central railroad whom he had been retained to represent. In a manner of speaking, Lincoln was a corporate lawyer of his day.
Abraham Lincoln was also a confirmed bachelor who forays into love were severally mitigated by the amount of time that he spend riding the circuit in central Illinois arguing cases from the Mississippi river on over to the Wabash on the east. He had had a brush that lives on in mythology with a lady named Ann Rutledge that had only further made him determined to remain single. However, a lady named Mary Todd had other ideas about him and their tempestuous romance is also the stuff of some legend. It finally got to the point with Mary that it was reported, even down to this day, that she got the future president into her room one night with the resulting comment coming from Mr. Lincoln the next day that he supposed that he “would have to marry that damn woman!”
And so he did and settled into marital bliss with one eye on his pocketbook and the other on his thriving law practice. The Lincoln’s were at the center of the social scene in Springfield as both it and the rest of Illinois and the other prairie states began to exert a greater and greater influence on events nationwide leading up to the culminating situation that devolved into the American civil war. What Lincoln stood for and what he strove for and accomplished are very well known. What is less well known is the tragic situation that his White House years became as the Lincoln’s would lose three of their four children to various diseases during their tenure there. While her husband had a nation to run and to save, Mary Todd Lincoln would have to spend her years flirting with what losing that many children can do to a high spirited but also somewhat unstable personality. Mary coped with what fate had handed her by involving the president in séances where those who took advantage of her would make her believe that she was still communicating with those that only a mother loves best. Lincoln’s opinions of religion were muddled at best but he did make the statement that at the darkest points of the civil war he simply fell to his knees in prayer because he had no where else to go.
On the night of April fourteenth, 1865, he and his beloved Mary went to the theater where they arrived late which was not unusual for them. They interrupted the play Our American Cousin, a comedy, when they took their seats in the presidential box beside a young army officer who was substituting for General Grant and his wife who had begged off on them earlier in the day. The president, dealing with the end of a conflict that had aged him, so loved to go to the theater especially when there was a comedy at hand.
Today, in the rotunda of the Lincoln Museum in Springfield, you can pose with a life sized set of mannequins that portray the Lincoln family when all were alive. Just behind them over against a rail is another very realistic form staring at them with brooding hate in his eyes. It is John Wilkes Booth!
In Washington D.C. Lincoln is one among a large cast of characters in history’s ever changing parade. Out here in Illinois he is something very special to a people from which he sprung to go to heights and achieve things that only dreamers think about. But, even we Illinoisans are often too quick to forget the nightmares that came along with those dreams. There is a reality to Abraham Lincoln and it all too often gets lost among the myths and legends that have sprung up along the way. However, in the final analysis, if there will ever be one, Abraham Lincoln was indeed a very great man and they just don’t come along all that often and it is always a miracle when they do!
IOVHO,
Regards,
Joe
To say that "God exists" is the greatest understatement ever made across space and time.
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