Assassination Vacation (13 page)

Townsend directs me to look at a photograph of a political rally held here during the 1860 presidential campaign. Throngs of people are crowded in front of the two-story house. One man towers over them — Abraham Lincoln, in a white suit.

So I’m just one of the countless pilgrims who made their way to this house paying homage to that man.

“Even during the Civil War,” Townsend says, “when the Lincolns were in Washington, Civil War soldiers were training at a camp here in Springfield and some of them would write home, ‘Drove past the president’s house today,’ ‘Rode past, visited the president’s house.’ The family that was renting were very accommodating to people knocking and just letting them in. So really the visitation even started as early as that. And after Mr. Lincoln’s assassination, that’s when the house first became kind of an icon. People wanted to connect with the president, so they came here.

“The oldest Lincoln son, Robert, ultimately ended up with sole ownership of the home. He maintained it as rental property. He complained about it, having to deal with this house. In fact there’s a quote in a letter that he’d owned that house until it ‘ruined him,’ just having to deal with landlord stuff. But he couldn’t quite part with the house. Finally, in 1887, he did decide to donate the Lincoln home to the state of Illinois on the condition that it be well maintained and free of access, meaning free of charge. So that makes it one of the earliest publicly held historic sites in the nation. As of 1887 on, it was opened as a historic site.”

“And did Robert ever come and stay in it occasionally?” I ask. “You know how sometimes” — I learned this from a cabdriver I had once in Memphis — “Lisa-Marie Presley still stays at Graceland?”

“As far as we know he did not. He did end up visiting in Springfield a time or two. There’s one episode where we know he went in and identified the rooms and things like that, but nothing more than that. The National Park Service began operation of the Lincoln home in 1972, when the state of Illinois donated it.”

Townsend opens the door to Lincoln’s house, taking off his Stetson hat. I have been looking forward to this moment for years. I must have only seen black-and-white photos, however, because I am unprepared for the way it looks. And it looks Christmasy.

“I don’t know why I keep thinking about Graceland,” I tell Townsend, “but it’s so red and green and garish. This isn’t how I pictured it.”

“Yes,” he says. “That does surprise a lot of people. In 1860, it’s the start of the Victorian in terms of decorative elements. If you were able to get the latest stuff in 1860 and you were stylish, there was the fairly recent technology to produce these bright colors.”

“Is that Lincoln’s original couch?” I ask.

“I believe that it is, yes.”

I can’t quite put my finger on why I’m not really feeling anything. I came here to get closer to Lincoln. So why is it that I feel closer to him sitting on my couch reading my paperback copy of his
Selected Speeches and Writings
than I do here in actual Springfield staring at the actual couch where he read his beloved newspapers and Shakespeare?

Townsend must be reading my mind. He says, “This home really reflects Mrs. Lincoln more than Mr. Lincoln. Mrs. Lincoln came from a very wealthy background down in Lexington, Kentucky, and the home reflects her taste and what she was used to. This is her sphere, this is the stuff she really cared about and was good at, and he was more often downtown working. But this home played a pivotal role during the campaign. Folks came to visit, there were open houses, things like that. Because Lincoln did not go out and campaign — it was considered improper at that time.”

Upstairs, he says, “The wallpaper in the bedroom suite area is an exact copy of what Mary had here, and this is the only area in the home where we know exactly what the color and pattern was, and this is a reproduction of that. And there again, that bright blue surprises a lot of people.”

“Yeah, it’s hideous,” I say.

“This is the space Mary would use for some quiet time. She suffered from migraine headaches quite often and this would be a place perhaps she could get away.”

After Lincoln died, Mary and her two remaining sons Robert and Tad moved to Chicago. Mary returned to Springfield a couple of times, but she never lived in this house again.

“I think it was just too painful for her,” Townsend says. “By that time, before she died, she had seen her husband assassinated and three of her four sons die. And her fourth son — they kind of grew apart.”

“That’s a nice way of putting it,” I agree. He is referring to Mary Todd Lincoln’s falling-out with Robert Todd Lincoln.

At the time of her husband’s assassination, Mary had already buried two young sons. And so her husband, nothing if not empathetic, indulged her eccentricities, including allowing the séances she hosted in the White House in an effort to contact her dead little boys. Then, not only was her husband murdered, she was sitting next to him when it happened. Six years later, her son Tad died too. It would be insane if a mother and wife had endured that much grief without going mad.

In 1875, concluding that Mary was mentally unstable, Robert had her followed by Pinkerton detectives. He hired the private eyes to protect his mother, but he also assigned them to report back with any suspicious behavior. Such as summoning a waiter to her hotel room and demanding to see “the tallest man in the dining room,” for example. So Robert attempted to have his mother committed to an institution. When she refused, he instigated a nasty public insanity trial. His mother was institutionalized not far from Chicago. Though she eventually got herself released, she never forgave her son.

I ask Townsend, “When you’re telling the story here to just the regular tourists, do you go into any of that stuff, like the insanity trial, or Robert not being buried here because his wife couldn’t stand his mom?”

“It’s not really our primary story here,” he says. “But people do ask and we’ll talk about, at least our opinions. What the staff generally tends to do is say that Mary’s mental health is a complicated issue. Should Robert have done what he did or shouldn’t he have? Quite often, I guess kind of like a biographer would, you start to become attached to the people you’re talking about, and we end up, I think, becoming Mary defenders here, so to speak. Not blatantly, but we do cut the lady some slack.”

He continues, “I mentioned how important the home was, and there were a lot of newspaper articles at the time of Lincoln’s nomination and election where they’re very complimentary — what a pleasant home Abe Lincoln has and complimenting Mary. And she did spend a lot of time polishing his rough edges and getting him sophisticated enough to go to the next level. She was very politically astute, and they enjoyed discussing politics together. They had this partnership almost, politically.”

In Lincoln’s bedroom, Townsend points out, “The desk in the corner is an original, as well as the shaving mirror. That mirror surprises a lot of people, too. Attorney Lincoln who lived here in Springfield always shaved, and didn’t start growing a beard until the time of his election.”

The little mirror is hung on the wall at the perfect height to frame Lincoln’s face. I have a six-foot-four-inch friend — Lincoln’s exact height — who told me that when he came here he could see his face framed perfectly in the mirror. I want to see mine in it too, but I’m Secretary of State Seward’s height — five foot four — so I have to jump up a foot to see my face in the mirror, which sets off an alarm.

T
he Lincoln depot is a short walk from the Lincoln home. Except for the forlorn fact that this is where the president-elect would depart for the city of his death, it’s an otherwise nice old brick train station. A plaque erected in 1914 by the Springfield Chapter of the Illinois Daughters of the American Revolution lists his Farewell Address of February 11, 1861. “My friends,” it begins,

no one, not in my situation, can appreciate my feeling of sadness at this parting. To this place, and the kindness of these people, I owe every thing. Here I have lived a quarter of a century, and have passed from a young to an old man. Here my children have been born, and one is buried. I now leave, not knowing when, or whether ever, I may return, with a task before me greater than that which rested upon Washington.

That phrase “whether ever, I may return” is pretty poignant considering he would return, but in a long black casket decked with silver stars and fringe.

“I bid you an affectionate farewell,” he told his friends and neighbors. Then he waved good-bye.

The hands Lincoln waved good-bye with are there wherever I go, waiting for me. Sculptor Leonard Volk came to Springfield in 1860, two days after Abraham Lincoln received the Republican Party’s presidential nomination. At Lincoln’s house, Volk made casts of the hands. The reason the right hand is larger than the left is that Lincoln’s right hand was swollen from all the congratulatory shaking.

After Lincoln’s assassination everyone wanted a piece of him. And I do mean right after. A member of the audience that night at Ford’s later recalled, “As [Lincoln] was carried out of the Theatre, the blood from the wound in his head dropped along the floor, and many of the people dipped their handkerchiefs therein to preserve as a sacred souvenir of the beloved President.”

When sculptor Augustus Saint-Gaudens learned of Volk’s casts of the president’s hands, he immediately set out to raise money to purchase them to donate to the Smithsonian, where the originals are on display today. Saint-Gaudens established a subscription service where patrons could purchase plaster or bronze casts of the originals. Ever since, Lincoln’s hands have been scattered to the winds. Besides the Smithsonian, I have seen them at least nine times, in Washington, Chicago, Springfield, Quebec, at Robert Todd Lincoln’s Vermont house Hildene, and at Daniel Chester French’s house in the Berkshires (where French consulted them for his statue for the Lincoln Memorial, though, ultimately, he modeled the hands of the marble colossus after his own).

William Dean Howells once described seeing the hands at a party in a New York home. One partygoer in particular seemed drawn to them. He picked them up, held the hands in his own, and asked the host to whom they belonged. And when he heard that they were the hands of Abraham Lincoln, the man, Edwin Booth, silently placed them back upon the shelf.

U
ntil the Lincoln Memorial was dedicated on the Mall in 1922, the main shrine for Lincoln pilgrims in Washington, D.C., was east of the Capitol, the Freedmen’s Memorial in Lincoln Park, dedicated on April 14, 1876, the eleventh anniversary of the assassination.

At the dedication, Frederick Douglass gave a speech. About Thomas Ball’s problematic sculpture of a standing Abraham Lincoln with a shirtless slave kneeling at his feet, the most specific thing Douglass says is that it is a “highly interesting object.” Douglass never says he likes it, probably because he doesn’t. Meant to commemorate the signing of the Emancipation Proclamation on January 1, 1863, the intent was to portray the Great Emancipator freeing a slave from his shackles. Nevertheless, it’s still a little icky the way the black man looks like he’s bowing down to the white man. Frederick Douglass, no dope, would have noticed.

The stories behind the sculpture are more interesting than the thing itself. When Charlotte Scott, a freed slave, heard of Lincoln’s assassination, she had the idea that all her fellow freedmen should build a monument in his memory. Scott, the story goes, donated the first five dollars she ever earned. Archer Alexander, the model for the slave, was the last runaway slave to be returned to his master under the Fugitive Slave Act.

“This is no day for malice,” Frederick Douglass said to those assembled, including President Grant. He marvels that such a gathering would have been unthinkable before Lincoln’s time. The rest of Douglass’s speech is remarkable, one of the most unflinching, truthful, well-argued celebrations of Abraham Lincoln I’ve ever read. In front of Grant and everybody, Douglass calls Lincoln “pre-eminently the white man’s president,” pointing out that Lincoln’s position before the war, and at the beginning of the war, was simply to prevent the extension of slavery. He cared more about saving the Union than he did about freeing the slaves. “We are at best only his stepchildren,” Douglass complains. He enumerates Lincoln’s slowness to take up the cause of slaves, dwelling on the disappointment, Douglass’s frustration welling up inside him and squirting out his mouth. Everything he’s just said is true, but so is the next thing: