If you live in Illinois, you probably think that Springfield has a lockdown on Abraham Lincoln’s history. After all, his house, law office, tomb and presidential library and museum are there. And if you went to public school in this state, you probably took the mandatory field trip to Springfield or New Salem. If Lincoln’s presence is anywhere, it’s downstate, right?
Not entirely. It exists in Chicago — and should, even more than it does now.
If you want to see the bed where Lincoln died, view some of the best Lincoln art anywhere in the world or visit a church where he worshipped, you have to be in the Windy City. If you want to see a magnificent dress designed by wife Mary Todd Lincoln’s Black dressmaker, Elizabeth Keckley, see it at the Chicago History Museum. If you’d like to peruse a bookshop devoted exclusively to him, stop by the venerable Abraham Lincoln Book Shop in River North.
Lincoln visited Chicago more than two dozen times in the years leading up to his presidency, with several trips lasting more than a week. That’s about five months altogether. He attended events here, gave political speeches and argued nationally important law cases. (One helped define the northern part of the Loop, and another helped enable railroads to transform the country.) The new Republican Party — with lots of help from Chicago friends and newspapers — secured Lincoln the presidential nomination here in a giant convention hall on Wacker Drive. Truly, this city was instrumental in making him president, and at the historical moment when he was needed most. Chicago was a jet engine for Lincoln’s professional and political career.
And there’s so much more. Chicago was where Lincoln’s new presidential whiskers were first photographed and where a sculptor covered the lanky lawyer’s face with plaster to make a life mask. It’s where Lincoln loved visiting theater performances, and where his wife loved to shop. They thought so highly of the city that they envisioned retiring here.
After Lincoln was assassinated, Mary lived on the Near West Side near Ashland Avenue, and their youngest son, Tad, attended school near where the United Center now stands. Robert Todd Lincoln, their oldest son, practiced law in the Loop and later had a magnificent residence on what is now DuSable Lake Shore Drive. Even the plotters who tried to steal Lincoln’s body from his Springfield tomb were Chicago gangsters!
Much of the Chicago that Abraham visited was destroyed by the Great Fire of 1871. But enough remains — sites and spaces, relics and artworks, archives and information — to recover the very real presence of Lincoln and his family.
This city used to memorialize Lincoln in grand fashion. His 1865 Chicago funeral was, after Washington, D.C.’s, the most lavish of any city. The 1930s Century of Progress Exposition had an entire lakefront village of re-created Lincoln buildings. Legend even has it that Edwin Booth, the oldest brother of John Wilkes Booth, who assassinated Lincoln, would leave a flower at the base of Augustus Saint-Gaudens’ magnificent Lincoln statue (behind the Chicago History Museum) every time he was in town. And no city celebrated the 1909 centennial of his birth as lavishly as this city did.
But the feting dropped off precipitously from there.
Do you remember what Chicago did for the bicentennial of Lincoln’s birth in 2009? You probably don’t, because there was precious little. Instead, the city’s civic organizations celebrated architect Daniel Burnham’s 1909 Plan of Chicago
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(important, too, admittedly). To top it off, in 2009, then-Gov. Rod Blagojevich closed all the state’s historical Lincoln sites. Perfect timing.Chicagoans desperately need to know when, where and why Lincoln graced this city. But beyond more markers and artworks, there needs to be something more experiential and conspicuous. Like what the Chicago Architecture Center does for important buildings or the kinds of important exhibitions and programming that the Chicago Cultural Center and the Department of Cultural Affairs and Special Events mount. A coordinated effort between the city’s many vital civic organizations is in order. After all, Chicagoans excel at thinking big!
In the meantime, there are problems that need addressing. For instance, a sculpture of Stephen A. Douglas, Lincoln’s nemesis and an advocate for slavery-permitting states’ rights, towers over the predominantly Black Bronzeville neighborhood. But nearly invisible is a superb statue of Lincoln as a lawyer — the way he looked when he was visiting the Loop — in Lincoln Square, hidden behind wires and poles. Nor are there any sculptures of Mary or Robert Todd Lincoln, or tributes to any of the brilliant artists who depicted the prairie-lawyer-turned-president. Shouldn’t an award be given to the Hotel Lincoln for its massive, dignified mural of Lincoln’s comforting face?
These days you can have an immersive experience with the art of Vincent van Gogh, but no one offers a walking tour to see Lincoln sites or artworks. Surely a hero of his magnitude deserves greater visibility in our city.
This year, Lincoln’s Feb. 12 birthday should make us reflect on the time he and his family spent here. In our crisis-ravaged moment, it might help bring out, as he said, “the better angels of our nature.” The Lincolns loved this city, and it shaped their destiny and America’s as well. The least we can do is what we’re already doing, which is shamefully not much.
Wouldn’t it be nice if, when you say you’re from Chicago while traveling, someone mentioned Lincoln along with, inevitably, Michael Jordan or Al Capone?
Mark B. Pohlad is an associate professor of history of art and architecture at DePaul University and a Public Voices Fellow with the OpEd Project.
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