Posted on Mon, Feb. 04, 2008

Does Ky. boyhood count for much?

BICENTENNIAL BRAGGING RIGHTS: 3 STATES CLAIM PRESIDENT AS THEIR OWN

By Greg Kocher

GKOCHER1@HERALD-LEADER.COM

His birth and earliest schooling were in Kentucky. His adolescence and young-adult years were in Indiana. And his legal career and political aspirations were realized in Illinois.

So which of the three states has the strongest claim to Abraham Lincoln, the beloved U.S. president whose 1809 birth will be marked with two years of bicentennial events starting Feb. 11 and 12 in Louisville and Hodgenville?

"Every one of these three places has a different and equally valid claim in terms of where he hailed from," said James M. McPherson, author of 1988's Battle Cry of Freedom, a Pulitzer Prize-winning book about the Civil War.

"Kentucky can claim his birthplace, and so that gives them certain bragging rights," McPherson said. "And I suppose Indiana would make the point that his formative years were spent there and that's where he got most of what little education he got. But then Illinois would say, 'Well, this is where he spent most of his adult life and this is where he achieved prominence.'"

The question was one of many that trailed students from Centre College in Danville who spent three days on a kind of cross-state Lincoln quest last month. The group visited the Abraham Lincoln Birthplace National Historic Site near Hodgenville, and then traveled to various Lincoln-related sites in Springfield, Ill.

In Kentucky, they climbed the 56 steps (one for each year of Lincoln's life) leading up to the birthplace memorial that shelters an 1800s cabin symbolic of the one-door, dirt-floor house where Lincoln was born on Feb. 12, 1809. They stopped at Knob Creek Farm, about 6 miles northeast of Hodgenville, where Lincoln lived between ages 2 and 7.

In Springfield, Ill., the Centre students walked the creaking floorboards of Lincoln's law office, saw the desk where he wrote his first inaugural address, toured his 10-room house, went through the $115 million presidential library and museum complex, and visited the tomb where he is buried. At the law office, they listened as interpreter Clara Wright talked about fellow Kentuckian and Centre graduate John Todd Stuart, who encouraged Lincoln to study law, lent him law books to read, and became Lincoln's first law partner.

The 15 students also saw how crazy a town goes over a favorite son. A now-defunct downtown Springfield business called El Presidente Burritos featured a window logo with the penny-like profile of Lincoln wearing a tilted sombrero. Visitors who plunk down $5.25 at the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Museum's cafe can snack on an "Honest Abe Turkey Bacon Wrap." (Not to be outdone, Ruthie's Lincoln Freeze in Hodgenville serves a quarter-pound Lincoln Burger for $2.79.)

Lincoln expressed fondness for Springfield when he left there in 1861 for his inauguration in Washington, D.C.

"To this place, and the kindness of these people, I owe everything," Lincoln told Springfield residents at the train depot before departing. And in 1863, Lincoln wrote: "Springfield is my home; there, more than elsewhere, are my life-long friends."

After immersing themselves in all things Lincoln, many in the Centre contingent said Illinois has good reason to proclaim itself the "Land of Lincoln" -- the state slogan since 1955 -- because he spent most of his adult life there.

"Even though I am a native-born Kentuckian, I think I would have to say he was a son of Illinois," said freshman Maria Kennedy. "Illinois was his home and where he has his law practice and where he meets his wife. All the important things about Lincoln -- the reasons why he is famous -- can be traced back to Springfield, not Kentucky."

But fellow Centre freshman Grant Sharp of Russell Springs said he thinks Indiana, where Lincoln lived from ages 7 to 21, contributed more to the man.

"Because that is where his work ethic was really established," Sharp said. "And that work ethic and that moral character that he developed in Indiana made him the man that he became in Illinois, that ultimately made him the national celebrity that he became. He became a self-made man in Indiana."

Pierce Lively of Danville, who didn't go on the trip but who co-taught "Lincoln: A Political Study" with professor Dan Stroup, said Lincoln's presidential qualities were learned in Illinois, where he delved into politics. But Lively, a retired judge of the 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, said Lincoln's drive to be something other than a backwoods laborer came in Kentucky.

"He didn't want the kind of work that his father did, clearing forest and planting corn," Lively said. "He said many times that his goal was to earn the esteem of his fellow man, and I think a lot of that started in his childhood in Kentucky when he saw how hard farming was."

Kentucky roots

How one counts a president's origin is "always a question," said Kentucky's state historian, James Klotter of Georgetown College.

"In the listing of the presidents, do you put them by birthplace, or do you put them by residence?"

Klotter said Lincoln's Kentucky roots "are sometimes not stressed enough."

"For example," Klotter said, "Lincoln married a Kentucky woman (Mary Todd of Lexington) and that had an important influence on his career. Her views influenced him. ... But more than that, her family was upper class and gave Lincoln entry into the hallways of power that he may never have been able to tread."

Specifically, Mary Todd's sister, Elizabeth, was daughter-in-law to Ninian Edwards, a former Illinois governor and U.S. senator.

"So when she was in her sister's home, they were meeting all the leading political figures" in Illinois, Klotter said. Lincoln eventually served four terms in the Illinois state legislature and was elected to one term in Congress.

"Plus, Mary Todd's family was very close to (Kentucky U.S. senator and Lexington resident) Henry Clay, who was a leading politician ... in the nation. So to have that kind of family connection to important elements to the political world gave Lincoln a step up he might never have had," Klotter said.

All three of Lincoln's Illinois law partners -- John Todd Stuart, Stephen Logan and William Herndon -- were Kentucky-born. His close friend Joshua Speed of Louisville was a Kentuckian.

Bluegrass State historians also note that Lincoln, who emancipated slaves in 1863, might have begun formulating his ideas about slavery in Kentucky. It's possible that he might have seen slaves traveling along the Louisville-to-Nashville road as they passed his boyhood home in what is now LaRue County. Lincoln also wrote in 1841 about seeing a group of Kentucky slaves on their way south. The chained slaves "were strung together precisely like so many fish on a trot-line," Lincoln wrote.

'Catching up to do'

Such references to Kentucky are relatively absent from the presidential museum in Springfield, Ill. The log cabin reproduction in the museum's rotunda is of the Indiana home, not the Kentucky birthplace at Sinking Spring or the boyhood home at Knob Creek, both in LaRue County. One small display includes a fragment of wood that "allegedly came from the birthplace property in Kentucky."

The museum's most prominent reference to Kentucky is its recreation of Lincoln's presentation of the Emancipation Proclamation to his Cabinet. Mannequins of the Cabinet members are seated or stand around a table as Postmaster General Montgomery Blair, who was born near Frankfort, points to Kentucky on a map.

Visitors find out that "A conservative Republican, Blair didn't like the proclamation because it was too radical. He thought the American people would not accept the proclamation and that issuing the proclamation would cause Republicans to lose the fall elections. It might well drive border states such as Kentucky into the Confederacy."

James Cornelius, curator of the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library in Springfield, said Lincoln referred to himself and his wife as Kentucky-born "in the interest of demonstrating to the country that we are all one, that he was not a Northerner or a Southerner. He was American.

"He did this," Cornelius said, "sometimes in part to defend her against accusations that she was more Southern than anything else and that she had sympathies with the South and family members fighting with the South. He never considered the South anything but part of the United States."

Over its history, Kentucky itself has had split views about its native son. Lincoln didn't carry Kentucky in the 1860 or 1864 presidential elections. Fayette County, which did not favor Lincoln's anti-slavery views in 1860, cast only five votes for him that year.

Many Kentuckians "became very angry at Lincoln following the Emancipation Proclamation," said Alicestyne Adams, director of the Underground Railroad Research Institute at Georgetown College.

"Before, we really didn't want to claim Lincoln, but now we are, and we've got catching up to do."

On the other hand, Kentucky might be said to have led the nation's appreciation of Lincoln, Klotter said. In the late 1800s and early 1900s, Henry Watterson, editor of The Courier-Journal, gave public lectures emphasizing Lincoln's strengths, and that gradually led people to see them as Kentucky's strengths. Eventually Congress established the birthplace in Hodgenville as a national park site in 1916.

"In that sense," Klotter said, "I would see Kentucky not playing catch-up so much, but being a leader in how Lincoln should be viewed and accepted."