Land of Lincoln

October 18, 2007
Thursday
We entered the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Museum shortly after 9:00 and went to the Grant Theater and saw a presentation, The Ghosts of Lincoln. This was an exploration of the place that history has in our lives and why historians have preserved Lincoln memorabilia.
In the Union Theater we saw Lincoln’s Eyes, a study of how the events in his life shaped his face and his eyes. A mask imprint of his face in 1865 looked more like a death mask than a life mask, a marked difference from the laugh lines that marked his face in 1861.
The Museum provides Mrs. Lincoln’s Attic as a playhouse for children, but lacks a means for locking them inside.
We watched a Tim Russert coverage of the candidates and issues of the 1860 Presidential campaign, concluding that the campaign issues were inconclusive. I was reminded of Doris Kearns Goodwin’s assertion that Lincoln positioned himself at the 1860 Republican convention to be, not anyone’s first choice, but everyone’s second choice. When the delegates deadlocked on the initial votes for the Republican Presidential candidate, Lincoln became the obvious choice.
The cafeteria listed on its menu food items named after characters in Lincoln’s lifetime. My favorite was the George McClellan Chicken Sandwich.
We watched a map of the United States that represented the Civil War in four minutes, one week equals one second. Week by week, battle by battle, the casualties mounted up to more than 1.3 million American men killed, wounded or imprisoned.
Major Henry Abbott wrote a letter to his mother in April 1864 and he quoted from a conversation that he had with General Meade–"among other things, Uncle Abe is tender-hearted about shooting a deserter but that he was perfectly willing to sacrifice a thousand brave men in a useless fight." Politicians want to be generals and generals want to be politicians.
At the time Lincoln took office, one in seven Americans were slaves. Lincoln always went back to the Declaration of Independence for inspiration as to what constituted a democracy, that "all men are created equal..." and to him that meant that slavery could not stand in a democracy. He was opposed to slavery from childhood, to the point of exclaiming that when he heard a man support the institution, his reaction was that that man should be the first enslaved. This is an ignoble sentiment out of character for Mr Lincoln and I take that as an indication of his deep feeling for the matter.
Slavery, though, was not the casus belli. It was union, whether any State had the right to break away from the country, and it was this issue that ignited men’s passions to fight a war. Lincoln recognized that, even though the war began over dissolution, slavery was the root cause and the great evil that prevented the two sides from living together. He knew that eventually the country would come to see that as he did. He was willing to lead the country away from slavery but he had to wait until the people were ready to be led. And that epiphany, like any change, was dramatically difficult for people to accept.
So difficult was the subject that Lincoln had to walk a fine line between the Abolitionists who demanded an end to slavery and the great majority of people who did not see the need. At the beginning, he used the Constitution for political cover, justifying the war on the basis of the compact agreed upon by all the States and dodging the morality of the slavery question by referring to its Constitutional roots and his obligation as Chief Executive to uphold the Constitution. He had faith that, eventually, as the war deepened, public opinion would come around to match his own, and he was right.
The President labored for more than a year over the words and timing of his Emancipation Proclamation. He received good advice from his cabinet and followed it. Surprising as it may seem, public reaction was mixed–some said it went too far, others not far enough. Frederick Douglass said that Lincoln didn’t free any slaves, that he had no power to free slaves in the Southern states; that the Northern states had no slaves; and that he exempted the border states of Missouri, Kentucky, Delaware and Maryland for fear of alienating those citizens to the Union cause.
In the end, Mr Lincoln got his way. Congress passed the 13th Amendment outlawing slavery in 1865, just before the end of the war.
Lincoln’s funeral train carried him from Washington back to Springfield starting April 21st and finishing May 3rd, 1865. The route covered over 1,700 miles and stopped for twelve major funeral processions in different cities. The trip took fifteen days. By the time it was over Lincoln was seen by more people as a dead president than he had been as a live candidate.
We walked through an exhibit exploring the question, "Was Mary Todd Lincoln Insane?" Mary Todd’s mother died when she was six and her father immediately married a stepmother who favored her own children over Mr. Todd’s.
Her second son, Eddie, died when he was three. Her third son, Willie, died when he was twelve. Her husband was assassinated as he sat beside her at Ford’s Theater on the happiest day of their lives. Her fourth son, Tad, died as they returned from Europe after being forced out of Germany by the 1870 Franco-Prussian War.
She was vilified by the American press during her tenure as First Lady for faults that they found with her behavior, never paying attention to the improvements she made to the White House or to Washington society.
When she exhibited inappropriate and dangerous behavior to herself, her first son Robert took her to court to protect her by having her declared insane so that he could place her into a private institution. After four months, she made her way out of the institution and tried to regain her physical and mental health in Europe. She became physically incapacitated and returned to the United States to live with her sister until she died.
Ryan picked us up after lunch to drive us back to Toyota where we had the Sienna serviced. Ryan was excited that we were from California because it is his dream to move to California. It is also his dream to have a house in Colorado where he can look out the back window at trees.
Ryan asked if we had ever been to Orange County because he heard that all the roofs in Orange County are the same color. I told him I believed that is true in Irvine but I did not know about the rest of Orange County.
Ryan asked if it is legal to run neon car lights in California. He said that you can install different colored neon lights underneath your car frame, red, green, yellow, any color you want, but if you light them up while driving in Illinois, you get a ticket. He heard that in exotic states like California and Texas you can drive with your neon lights on. I confessed ignorance about this issue.
Ryan told us that he had a car wreck recently when he was driving his car at 140 mph and a truck pulled out in front of him and he hit the back and flew off the road and totaled his car. He thinks he won’t do that again, and especially when he is driving customers to the Toyota dealership. I surmised that he must have been wearing his seat belt when he flew his car into the bayou since he had no bandages or casts, or none that we could see.
After retrieving our van, we went to Lincoln’s house on Jackson. The National Park Service operates the house and still honors Robert Todd Lincoln’s stipulation that the public should never be charged a fee to visit the house. NPS has purchased and refurbished neighborhood houses to represent the view that Lincoln would have had of his neighbors in 1860.
Springfield is full of Lincoln ghosts. His presence is everywhere. A few blocks from the residence is the Lincoln-Herndon Law Office, across the street from the Capitol building. Lincoln spent a lot of time in the building, as an elected representative of the people, as a paid employee of the State and as a barrister practicing before the State Supreme Court. He ran his campaign for the Republican Presidential nomination from the Governor’s reception room on the second floor. He debated Stephen Douglas in the house chamber and there gave the speech that made him a national figure in 1858, that a house divided against itself cannot stand.
And, in the end, he returned to Springfield and to the Capitol building. During the 24-hour period when Lincoln lay in state at the Springfield Capitol building, the guards counted 75,000 visitors and they estimated that another 25,000 waiting in line at the end of the viewing period. This was at a time when the population of Springfield was 16,000.
Who is buried in Lincoln’s Tomb? We drove to the Oak Ridge Cemetery to find out. It was closed for the day, but we already knew the answer–Abraham, Mary, Eddie, Willie and Tad. Their eldest son, Robert Todd Lincoln, is buried in Chicago, where he made his career and his fortune.
Robert Todd Lincoln Beckwith, born in 1904, died without issue on December 25, 1985, the last living Lincoln descendant, thus ending the Lincoln line.