‘Scholars differ,’ author finds, in Lincoln portrayals
A review by ISBA member Bradley S. Le Boeuf, an attorney in Akron, Ohio, of “Land of Lincoln,” by Andrew Ferguson. (New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 2007)
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It is difficult to spend a day in Illinois, let alone travel anywhere in the United States, without somehow encountering a reminder of Abraham Lincoln. Pennies, quarters, five-dollar bills and license plates each bear the familiar image of the 16th president.
During springtime when, as poet Walt Whitman recalled the season, “lilacs last in the dooryard bloom’d,” we are subtly reminded of Lincoln’s assassination. Ironically, the anniversary of the president’s death on April 15 is also the date that federal income tax returns are due.
Andrew Ferguson’s “Land of Lincoln” is a searing, humorous and engrossing commentary on the lingering impact of Lincoln in our everyday lives.
The author, born in 1956, is an Illinois native and a senior editor at The Weekly Standard. He is the son of a Chicago attorney who worked in the same law firm as Robert Todd Lincoln. And he grew up on Lincoln Street.
Ferguson sorts through many of the contemporary perceptions of Lincoln and the myriad scholarly and other literary efforts that seek to define the “true Lincoln,” but he is left with the perplexing dilemma: “A biographer could pick and choose according to his own principles of selection and piece together any number of different Lincolns.”
Reluctantly, Ferguson concedes that attempts to identify the real Lincoln are met with the ambiguous and confounding academic refrain: “Scholars differ.” Historians are conflicted about portraying an accurate semblance of Lincoln.
Regarding Lincoln’s rustic, frontier-era progeny, Ferguson notes, “Scholars differ … about the character of his father, Thomas, and next to nothing is known of his mother, Nancy Thomas Hanks.”
The origins of Lincoln’s renowned political oratory skills are also uncertain: “Some accounts say he made his first political speech within days of arriving in Illinois; scholars differ.”
The intended destination of the 21-year old Lincoln’s migration from Indiana to Illinois is also in dispute: “Scholars differ on how precisely, Lincoln, the ‘piece of floating driftwood,’ happened to lodge up at New Salem.”
Recollections of the youthful Lincoln’s obligations to repay an onerous debt are equally vague: “Lincoln found himself owing creditors more than $1,000, at a time when the average yearly wage was about half that amount. He called the burden his ‘very own national debt.’ It took him years to pay off. (How many years? Scholars differ.)”
The circumstances of the circuit-riding days of Lincoln around the dirt paths and corduroy roads of Illinois are also open to dispute. “Whether these absences suggest a tireless ambition or an unhappy home life – scholars differ.”
Ferguson details numerous personal visits to various Lincoln shrines and interviews several people who claim an unabashed interest, fascination and even hatred of the 16th president. One strange category of Lincoln aficionados is the esoteric group of memorabilia collectors who invest in forged Lincoln signatures.
“Bogus Lincoln letters can sell for thousands of dollars apiece, if they can be traced to one or another of a half dozen legendary forgers who flourished in the early 20th century. Entire collections now rest on the flimflam produce by Eugene Field II, Charles Weisberg, Joseph Cosey, and other departed con artists.”
Lincoln detractors are grouped into the bizarre category of “Abephobes,” the sort of people who “are almost always well spoken and well read, and in percentage terms, not much crazier than the general population that tends to accept Lincoln’s presence as a fact of life.”
A cottage industry has also formed to rival the corps of Elvis Presley impersonators - actors who appear in “parades, pig roasts and ribbon cuttings,” dressed in “a black frock coat, black trousers, black boots and a top hat” reenacting Lincoln.
An entire book, let alone a single chapter, could have been have been devoted to Ferguson’s funny account of attending an annual convention of the Association of Lincoln Presenters in Santa Claus, Ind.
In a moving postscript, Ferguson recounts a Holocaust survivor’s pilgrimage to Springfield. The elderly Czechoslovakian often thought of Lincoln during the time of his imprisonment, remembering, from his schoolboy days the concept that “all men are created equal.”
Ferguson, in an interview with the guest services manager of the Springfield Hilton hotel, said the Czech tourist had “vowed if he ever got out of that concentration camp, he would come to Springfield, to thank Mr. Lincoln, he was so grateful.”
Aside of the details of a chance encounter with a hotel employee, Ferguson’s opinion of the state’s capital is not favorable.
He describes Springfield as an “exhausted city of liquor stores and parking lots but to me a place of wonders.” His blunt assessment of the state’s reliance on political appointees to fill local historian positions is scathing:
“One reason that Lincoln scholarship remained for so long the work of amateurs and lobbyists is the state government’s iron grip on much of his physical legacy.
“The state’s Lincoln holdings have included, at one time or another, his house and furniture, his carriage, many of his clothes and personal effects, and a vast quantity of his papers. All were controlled by patronage workers with immaculate political credentials, but no scholarly training or curiosity.
“The tradition continues. If anything, Illinois’s famously corrupt politics – two of the last four governors have been indicted for abusing public office – are more dismal than ever.
“A professor who specializes in Lincoln once complained to me about the impossibility of placing his graduate students in historians’ jobs at the state library or the Illinois Historic Preservation Agency, the two bureaucracies that hold sway in Lincoln affairs. ‘These are good scholars who would kill for those positions,’ he said. ‘But the jobs always went to party hacks.’”
Ferguson knows Lincoln inside and out. But in his otherwise entertaining, cultural-modern biography, he inexplicably omits details of some obvious Lincoln sites. Lincoln’s visit to the Antietam battlefield (still recalled as the bloodiest day in American wartime history) in western Maryland is an obvious omission.
Though Ferguson visits the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C., he doesn’t offer many details about a cross-town trip to Ford’s Theatre or to the neighboring Peterson House, the scene of Lincoln’s deathbed, nor offer any commentary on one of the greatest transcontinental road trips in North America, the coast-to-coast drive along the Lincoln Highway.
In Ferguson’s estimation, “Lincoln hasn’t been forgotten, but he’s shrunk. From the enormous figure of the past he’s been reduced to a hobbyist’s eccentricity, a charming obsession shared by a self-selected subculture, like quilting or Irish step dancing.”
But is enough yet known about Lincoln to fulfill our expectations of a great president? Scholars differ.