Assassination Vacation

  A platform, he says, was built under the painting of George Washington to hold Lincoln’s casket. It was here under the Washington portrait’s gaze that the future president delivered his “House divided” speech in 1858, famously prophesizing that “this government cannot endure, permanently half slave and half free,” unaware that he would be the man to fulfill this prophecy, that he would be the man who made the government “all one thing, or all the other,” and that for his trouble he would be murdered only to end up here, again beneath this portrait, a corpse. “In twenty-four hours, seventy-five thousand people came to pay their respects. The population of Springfield at that time was only sixteen thousand seven hundred.”

  The tour guide has an overly generous idea of the schoolgirls’ knowledge of history because he keeps quizzing them and patiently waiting out interminably awkward silences for answers that never come. In the Senate chamber, he shows them a painting of a dashing old man in a fur coat who looks like Oscar Wilde as played by Gerard Depardieu. The guide wants the girls to guess the gent’s identity, dropping loads of clues about how he’s French and he served in the Revolutionary War and HE’S FROM FRANCE. It’s a relief when the guide finally gives up, shouting, “Marquis de Lafayette!”

  I am invariably the odd man out on tours like this. The only people who take them are kids who are forced to endure them and elderly retirees. I am always either the oldest person on a tour, or the youngest. I prefer to be the youngest if only because usually that means I’m the prettiest by default. (Before coming here to the capitol I had already dropped in for the tour at Lincoln’s law office, a place overrun by nineteen very mature Ohioans, one of whom told me that they were having a reunion here in Springfield, a reunion commemorating a caravan they all took to Alaska sixteen years ago. That’s how very old they are — old enough to have been taking trips like this for sixteen years. They make no comments about the horsehair sofa with a copy of the New York Tribune strewn over it to suggest a lounging Lincoln lying there reading aloud or the kind of upside-down top hat the disorganized lawyer is said to have used as his only filing cabinet, but they have plenty to say about having to go up and down stairs, concluding that “it’s sure easier going down.”)

  In the Old State Capitol, one of the seventh graders points to a brassy object, asking the tour guide, “What’s that big bowl?” The guide, shocked, answers, “That’s a cuspidor, a spittoon.” I can understand how these kids might not have heard of Lafayette, but is it possible they have never seen a single episode of Gunsmoke?

  By the time we arrive at the statue of Lincoln’s old debating partner (and possible rival for the hand of Mary Todd), Senator Stephen Douglas, the guide demands the Chicago kids tell him Douglas’s nickname. Clearly, they don’t even know Douglas’s actual name so, a little impatient to get out of here, I can’t stop myself from blurting out, “Little Giant. They called him the Little Giant.” One of the kids looks at me, then at the diminutive statue of Douglas, who was five foot three. She raises her hand and wants to know why someone so short would be called a giant. To which the guide, exasperated, mumbles, “Well, he was a giant in politics.”

  Lincoln’s tomb in Springfield’s Oak Ridge Cemetery is a towering white obelisk plopped on top of a crypt of marble corridors decorated with bronze tablets of his best-loved speeches and reproductions of the greatest hits of Lincoln statuary, including the seated Lincoln sculpture by Daniel Chester French in Washington’s Lincoln Memorial, the August Saint-Gaudens in Chicago’s Lincoln Park. It’s all a little busy, overly chockablock.

  The remains of Mary Todd Lincoln, as well as those of their sons Tad, Willie, and Eddie, are buried in the tomb. There’s also an inscription for the oldest son, Robert Todd Lincoln, noting that he’s buried at Arlington National Cemetery. (There’s a story as to why — supposedly, his widow couldn’t stand the thought of her husband, and eventually herself, spending all of eternity next to her dreaded mother-in-law — but of course that’s not brought up here.)

  What looks like Lincoln’s tomb is surrounded by flags and inscribed in gold letters with Secretary of War Stanton’s deathbed proclamation, “Now he belongs to the ages.” Actually, the president is buried below, under ten feet of concrete. His son Robert, who became a lawyer for the Pullman Palace Car Company, witnessed the burial arrangements of his boss, George Pullman, a man so loathed by his formerly striking workers that he had himself buried under cement and steel so as to prevent the desecration of his grave. Robert was always worried about the security of his father’s tomb, especially after the Secret Service had thwarted a grave-robbing plot in 1876 when a counterfeiting gang cooked up a plan to steal Abraham Lincoln’s remains and hold them for ransom in exchange for the release of their imprisoned engraver. Robert liked Pullman’s approach and shelled out seven hundred dollars to pour concrete on top of his dad.

  The Museum of Funeral Customs is on the edge of Oak Ridge Cemetery, a five-minute walk from the tomb. Supposedly the fellow who swoops over to greet me is the museum director, but he speaks in the hushed low voice of a funeral director. He warns me about “the sensitive nature of our exhibits.”

  Please. I actually giggle when he tries to steel me for seeing the re-created 1920s embalming room, as if I’m not wearing Bela Lugosi hair clips; as if I didn’t just buy a book for my nephew called Frankenstein and Dracula Are Friends; as if I was never nicknamed Wednesday (as in Addams); as if in eighth-grade English class, assigned to act out a scene from a biography, when all the other girls had chosen Queen Elizabeth or Anne Frank, I hadn’t picked Al Capone and staged the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre with toy machine guns and wadded-up red construction paper thrown everywhere to signify blood; as if I’m not here to see the replica of Abraham Lincoln’s casket; as if I’m not the kind of person who would visit the freaking Museum of Funeral Customs in the first place.

  Lincoln’s walnut casket was “covered in broadcloth and adorned with silver studs.” Black, it has a white satin interior and white fringe. It’s also decorated with silver stars. The effect is startling. The only word I can think of to describe it is “snazzy.” It has a country-and-western showbiz quality, reminding me of the shiny rhinestone-studded suits Nashville singers used to wear to the Grand Ole Opry.

  I stand there and read a very interesting brochure entitled The Embalming of President Lincoln. It makes note of the fact that the Lincoln funeral train was the best advertising the nascent embalming industry could have hoped for. Around one million people saw the president lying in state as his funeral train came back to Springfield. Embalmed by the firm of Brown & Alexander, Lincoln’s body was attended throughout its long trip home by the firm’s staff, including the very bearded Henry P. Cattell. They were, according to the brochure,

  able to keep Lincoln in a presentable viewing condition with the help of local embalmers and undertakers along the way. Though often noting these discolorations, newspaper accounts generally reported favorably on the president’s appearance.

  Another brochure, this one devoted to the nearby tomb of Lincoln, concludes with the thought that since thousands of people come to Springfield every year to visit Lincoln’s tomb, then “the National Lincoln Monument Association completed its task of erecting a tribute that conveys the country’s estimate placed upon his life, virtues, and public services.”

  While I appreciate the local boosterism behind that sentiment, in a museum across town there is another object that is the best indication of the esteem for Lincoln I have ever seen — more than the marble tomb, more than even the marble Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C., more than any book, statue, lock of hair, bloodstained collar, top hat, or plaque.

  Any old forgettable rich guy might warrant a marble tomb, an obelisk, or elaborate sculptures after death, but you know you are regarded with a ridiculous, religious amount of awe when they put your dug-up drainpipe in a museum. It’s on display here in Springfield at the Lincoln Home National Historic Site, a complex including the home the Lincolns lived
in from 1844 until they left for Washington in 1861, as well as several neighboring houses, each a museum named for its occupants in 1860. Tim Townsend of the National Park Service, the site’s historian, was showing me around one of these museums, the Dean House, when I spotted the drainpipe of devotion.

  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.

  The 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 Da
ughters 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).