Here are to be found articles about Abraham Lincoln in all his aspects, living and posthumous—the man himself, Lincoln tourism, the restoration of his Springfield house and neighborhood, Lincoln scholarship, Lincoln museums, scholarly controversies about his life, his life in work in central Illinois, considerations of him as a prose artist, and reviews of books, all as they were published mainly in Illinois Issues, Illinois Times, and Chicago's Reader.

 

Anyone living in Springfield finds it impossible not to stumble across Lincoln, literally. My parents, recently transplanted Beardstonians, rented an apartment about a block from Lincoln home in Springfield. Years later, my morning work routines took from my office downtown past the house at the way to the founding offices of Illinois Times, which were located within the Lincoln Home National Historic Site. The Lincolns' neighborhood became as familiar to me as my own. Family history researches later took me often to the restored Old State Capitol complex, site of the "House Divided" speech. 

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Lincoln was a constant presence among the people of my native central Illinois for more than a quarter-century, thanks to his travels on the old 8th Judicial Circuit. He stayed at their houses–hotels were scarce, at least in the early days of the circuit–argued their cases, addressed them in court with summations and entertained them in the taverns afterward with stories. As a politician he favored even the smallest burgs with speeches delivered on his behalf or that of his party and its candidates.

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He left a trail, in short, and the diligent visitor can follow much of it. A stone in Beardstown marks where Lincoln was mustered into military service during the Black Hawk War. A decorated stone on the lawn of the Decatur Art Institute faces the probable route on West Main Street down which Lincoln traveled on his way through town. In the Logan County town of Atlanta is the Carriage Shed, where Abraham Lincoln stayed with the Hoblit family; in Danville is the old Ithian house where Lincoln stayed on visits to that town, featuring a balcony from which he made speech in 1858; a stone tablet on the courthouse lawn in Winchester marks the site of the Aiken Tavern in which Lincoln lodged in 1854. There are others.

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“Lincoln slept here” is a sure draw but the tourist’s attention also is directed toward places Lincoln ate. At the restored Phelps House in Oquawka, both Lincoln and Douglas were entertained. In Athens a marker notes the store in which locals banqueted the Long Nine, of which Lincoln was a member, and where he toasted his colleagues. The Harmon mansion in Danville is identified as a place where the great man once ate Thanksgiving dinner. (No mention is made of the menu.) Even the content of the outhouse behind his house in Springfield has been explored and its contents carefully cataloged during a recent rehab of the house.

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Any connection to the great emancipator is bragged on. Towns boast that they were laid out by Lincoln when he was surveyor. In Decatur a marker identifies the site where stood the tent in delegates of the new Republican Party of Illinois in 1860 gave Lincoln his initial endorsement for the presidential nomination. Springhill Cemetery in Decatur is the burial place of several of Lincoln’s friends. The Bloomington-Normal Area Visitors Guide notes that the legal paperwork needed to set up Illinois State University was largely done by Lincoln, and the University of Illinois brags that the Morrill Act of 1862 that set up land grant colleges like it was signed into law by Lincoln. Not only are the sites of the Lincoln-Douglas debates marked, but the sites where he debated about debating too; in the Moultrie County town of Bement is a cottage in which the two candidates met in July, 1858, to arrange their debates, preserved as a state memorial. The Petersburg Merchants Association in 2003 changed its name to "Lincoln's New Salem Area Merchants."

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The very energetic tourist may also visit the burial places of Lincoln’s teacher, of his store partner, the lawn where he and pals played games, the spot where he merely began his survey of one town, and a building lot that he owned (but apparently never visited). In the town of Lincoln, a plaque locates an inn where, in 1876, a gang of counterfeiters plotted to steal Lincoln’s body from its Springfield tomb. Lincoln spoke in the Methodist church in LaHarpe in 1858; a church pew and a large slab of marble still in the church were there when he spoke, and presumably absorbed some vital essence of the man.

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The wise traveler will read the fine print of the tourism brochures before investing too much time and energy on such errands. At the Executive Mansion in Springfield the Lincoln Bedroom is furnished in part by a bed and dresser given to president-elect Lincoln by Springfield friends before he left for Washington; placed in storage awaiting his return, it was never used by him. The Postville courthouse is a reproduction; the building thus is as bereft of Lincoln’s essence as is, say, the Sears Tower. Lincoln Log Cabin State Park outside Charleston is a memorial to Lincoln’s father rather than to his son, it being the last farm that father Thomas Lincoln lived on; son Lincoln had by then struck out on his own, to New Salem and so never lived there, although he did buy the land to provide safe haven for father and stepmother. (The son later sold it.) Lincoln Memorial Garden and Nature Center on Lake Springfield was designed to be a “living memorial” to Abraham Lincoln in the form of natural plantings composed of plants native to his home states of Illinois, Indiana, and Kentucky; it is one of the few places on which Lincoln never visited, ate, slept there, spoke, rassled, or plead a case.

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It is not merely the tourism promoters who exploit the least relevance to Lincoln. Historians calibrate the importance of their subjects according to how well they knew him. Richard Oglesby was a man of considerable accomplishment as a politician, a soldier, and a governor, but it is only because of his many a links to Lincoln that Oglesby is remembered at all but even the literate public. Oglesby was in Washington on the day Lincoln was shot, and sat at his deathbed before accompanying the funeral train home to Springfield. Oglesby served as the only president of the association that built the Lincoln tomb, and he delivered the major oration when it was dedicated. He also was the man who contrived the rail-splitter image for Lincoln's successful presidential campaign of 1860—thus was a biography of him published by the University of Illinois Press in 2001 titled Lincoln’s Rail-Splitter.

I made no special effort to learn about the man until I was offered a job as a tour guide at a local Lincoln site. When I was an apprentice journalist, Lincoln and the house was much debated officially. History per se had little to do with these public conversations, much less scholarship. The topic was how to better capitalize on Lincoln to boost tourism, usually with side conversations about how to get someone else to pay for it. 

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As a mature journalist I wrote about him many times because there are so many Lincolns to write about. There is the official Lincoln, the popular Lincoln, the "real" Lincoln, the undiscovered Lincoln. Springfield has always thought better of itself than it deserved because he had lived there. (In fact, it was Springfield the state capital, not Springfield the town, in which Lincoln lived.) He made it a more interesting place, certainly, and I became grateful for that too. 

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Lincoln never brought the North and South of the U.S. together, and the same is true to some extent of his own state. Illinois has long called itself the Land of Lincoln, which seems accurate enough; Lincoln was an Illinois politician, after all. Lincoln’s Whig politics were all about commerce, and Chicago would be made great by government-paid infrastructure such as canals and railroads that Lincoln championed. It was in Chicago, in 1860, in a frame building thrown together for the purpose known as the Wigwam, that the Republican National Convention on the third ballot nominated Lincoln for the presidency. He carried Illinois in 1860 largely with votes from northern Illinois, including Chicago. And the Civil War that, in very different ways, made both the city and the man.

 

That Lincoln was admired in Chicago is plain. Many a Chicagoan started life on the bottom rung of the social ladder, as Lincoln did, and worked his way to the top, and see in his life enough of their own to create a bond. Judge Abraham Lincoln Marowitz, the West Side boy who worked his way through law school and grew up to give the oath of office six times to Mayor Richard J. Daley, loved to tell audiences that he was named after Lincoln because his immigrant mother, who admired the President as a champion of freedom, assumed he had been Jewish “because he was shot in the temple.” For years, one Thai restaurateur in Albany Park each day laid a plate of food before a small statue of Lincoln in the rear of the restaurant as an offering, because Lincoln reminded the proprietor of the Thai King Chulalongkorn, the great reformer who abolished slavery in that country in the 19th century. No pork, however—a man named Abraham must be Jewish.

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The City Council was quick to rename an old fort road Lincoln Avenue after his death—one of the first public roads to be named for the president—and later named its most beautiful park for him. Some of the better historians of Lincoln and his period—long-time Chicago Historical Society Paul Angle comes to mind—have been Chicagoans and in 1938, the famous Abraham Lincoln Book Shop on West Chicago Avenue was founded (sayeth the shop’s own history) in part to serve the passionate collecting needs of local Lincoln buffs. The foundation of what became the Illinois historical library collection was the Lincoln works donated by Gov. Henry Horner, a Chicago man. William E. Barton, the most prominent and prolific author and lecturer on Lincoln of his era, lived acrossthe street from Chicago in Oak Park.

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Many Lincoln papers and artifacts reside in Chicago. It has been said that “no other historical figure has played such a dominant role in the life of the [Chicago] Historical Society” as Lincoln. (Lincoln had accepted the society’s first honorary membership.) Among the CHS’s Lincolniana are his death bed, the table upon which he wrote the Emancipation Proclamation, and the silk and beaver top hat he borrowed from a Springfield pal to wear during his inauguration ceremonies in 1861. On the other end of town the important William E. Barton collection of Lincolniana is housed in the University of Chicago’s Regenstein Library.

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But while Lincoln was Chicago’s kinda guy, Chicago was not his kinda city. He is thought to have visited the city only fourteen times between 1848 and 1860. So identified is he with the bucolic—log cabins and circuit-riding and rail-splitting—that many of its downstate residents cannot imagine him in a city like Chicago and resent the claims that Chicago makes on Lincoln. The big city has its own heroes and plenty of them; why do they need to take ours?

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Like everybody says, an inexhaustible topic.

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NOTE: A few pieces about Lincoln tourism can be found on the "Springfield" page.

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“Someone from Outside”

Lincoln scholars

"Dyspepsiana"  Illinois Times  February 4, 2010

Holy Inkwells

Turning Lincoln stuff into sacred relics

"Dyspepsiana"  Illinois Times  February 11, 2010

No Mere Bump on a Log

Logan Hay, once Springfield’s best-known citizen, is forgotten

"Dyspepsiana"  Illinois Times  December 21, 2017

Of the People and for the People—But Never Like Them

Lincoln and the Springfield democracy

"Dyspepsiana"  Illinois Times February 12, 2015

The State of Lincoln Scholarship

Lincoln belongs to Illinois, not the ages
 Illinois Issues  February 2000

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To leave an article and return to this page, click on your browser's back button or on "Abraham Lincoln" in the Topics menu