LAND OF LINCOLN

LAND OF LINCOLN: Adventures in Abe’s America
By Andrew Ferguson. Illustrated. Atlantic Monthly Press. 279 pages. $24.

Reviewed by David Madden

Standing on the front porch of the three-room farm house that is my father’s home place on a high ridge next to a Civil War fort in South Knoxville, I gazed directly across the Tennessee River upon the ridge in Lincoln Park, North Knoxville, where I was born in a three-room railroad shack that is my mother’s home place.

Mindful of the Abraham Lincoln Bicentennial coming up in 2009, I recalled the United States Bicentennial of 1976 when I drove north to Springfield, Illinois to give the first of twenty readings from my fiction across the country and back to Baton Rouge in the month of May, sleeping in my car. Visiting Lincoln Land was an early inspiration for my Civil War novel
“Sharpshooter.”

What do those Lincoln moments among many I could recite have to do with “Land of Lincoln”? Andrew Ferguson, mindful of similar moments in his Chicago childhood, was inspired to retrace in 2005 his odyssey during the Civil War Centennial of the early 1960’s over much the same territory in Lincoln Land, searching for the man and the myth, listening to “what Lincoln means to me” testimonials by Lincoln “buffs” and even Lincoln “haters,” officials of Lincoln libraries and museums, and “innocent” bystanders.

“If you’re interested in politics, war, civil rights, literature, economic, the law, religion, romance, human psychology, celebrity, or the infinite application of the graphic arts,” says Ferguson, “then your interest will likely bring you into contact with Lincoln the politician, the commander in chief, the emancipator, the writer, the rhetorician, the free marketer, the lawyer, the martyr, the husband of Mary, the manic depressive, and the most celebrated and most graphically depicted man in American history.”

In describing his adventures and misadventures in Lincoln Land, Ferguson employs a truly witty style that seldom verges on sarcasm, a wit that becomes an ambience for a tough lyricism that never wallows in easy sentimentality. He leaves glib sarcasm and shallow irony to the large cast of characters (his wife, son, and daughter included) who provide contrast to those much fewer men and women encountered along the way who express trenchant insights and poignant feelings about their own personal Lincolns.

He controls and mutes his own criticism, scorn, outrage, sadness, and helplessness, letting historians, museum directors, relic collectors, Lincoln look-alikes, commercial exploiters, and other types gesticulate and expatiate.

Each of his 275 pages elicits a rush of cringing delight. I have seldom before so overwhelmed a captive audience of one (my wife) with quotations from a reading-in-progress—characters speaking and Ferguson commenting.

Ferguson moves from wisecracks to insights to lyrical moments. He delves into the mentality of collectors of Lincoln memorabilia. Famous actress Laura Keene’s dress, stained with Lincoln’s blood as she held his head in her lap, is one example. Imagine the effect on Laura’s life and on the life of the collector?

Ferguson is respectful of Louise Taper, a collector of collections, including Mary Todd Lincoln items. Louise is very real, striking a balance of tough talk and depth of feeling. “There’s mysticism at the heart of most Lincoln collecting… a connection between the collector and collected that crosses space and time and infuses bits of matter with its opposite…. The interest is inexhaustible, the radiance is inexhaustible as well.”

The Land of Lincoln is densely with symbols, paradoxes, ironies, and incongruities, such as Mary Todd’s house in Lexington, Kentucky, which became a whorehouse in the 1940’s. But it is now a fine example of how Ferguson wishes all Lincoln sites were.

Another example is the annual national convention of the Association of Lincoln presenters in Santa Claus, Indiana. As Ferguson walked through the door of Santa’s Lodge Motel, 175 Lincolns—both tall and short--were staring at him. This is a scary chapter, unless you revel in 175 types of surrealism.

An example of incongruity is Lincoln’s simple birth cabin, encased in a magnificent marble Greek Temple in Hodgenville—after a few feet were lopped off to make it fit. Even so, to early Lincoln biographer Ida Tarbell it was very patriotic, very apt, for Lincoln was both simple and magnificent. But 80 years later, the park ranger informed Ferguson that recent experts have proven the cabin to be a “fake”; nevertheless, it is offered as “symbolic.” Yes, says Ferguson, it is “a symbol of the fate of any search for Lincoln.”

Ferguson’s examples seem inexhaustible. “Against all odds, Lincoln has become a business guru” for Tigrett Corps, which conducts workshops in “Lessons from Lincoln.” Ferguson revisits Dale Carnegie’s worshipful promotion of Lincoln in his ‘Lincoln the Unknown,” the success of which inspired “How to Win Friends and Influence People.” Donald T. Phillips’ recent “Lincoln on Leadership” became “perhaps the best-selling Lincoln book ever.” Ferguson concludes that as they were teaching business strategies, Carnegie, Phillips, and the workshops were teaching history, and transcending that, moral instruction. “You can always try to become a better person.”

“Land Of Lincoln” may remind readers of Tony Horwitz’s “Confederates In The Attic.” But Ferguson’s is a much more personal book, with personal implications for anyone, worldwide, who is responsive to Lincoln as both fact and fiction.

As he moves across country from Richmond to Beverley Hills, Ferguson, like an ancient mariner who is both light-hearted and heavy-hearted, tells us more than one story, mostly about how others are killing the albatross (Lincoln) over and over. Lincoln haters convened in Richmond while Lincoln lovers were unveiling a new Lincoln statue, adding to hundreds of other statues worldwide. This latest one looked to Ferguson “puny and absurd.”

Lincoln revisited his Indiana home place only once but he was deeply moved. “Lincoln was the first Lincoln tourist.” As a boy, Ferguson read Lincoln in bed by flashlight; as a boy, Lincoln read Reverend Weems’ biography of Washington by firelight. For Ferguson’s grandfather, his father, and himself, Lincoln sites provided much more about Lincoln than for Ferguson’s own children. In a combative process, many changes had been made, and “Lincoln was the most prominent casualty.”

Ferguson describes those several unintentionally irreverent depictions of Lincoln with deliberate irreverence. For instance, everything that made him love and revere and want to revisit Lincoln at the Chicago Historical Society building was gone, stored underground “in an old bomb shelter on a farm forty miles northwest of Chicago.” From each disastrous return to Lincoln landmarks that had moved him deeply in his childhood, Ferguson drove full of memories and hope to the next site, where he encountered yet another sad spectacle.

As he drove on to Springfield, Illinois, where Lincoln lived almost half his life before moving into the White House, and to which he returned in his funeral train, Ferguson’s hopefulness and eagerness aroused my own--to see “the most important Lincoln tribute to be built in eighty years.”

What he saw was purpose-driven lives creating an “immersive visitor experience” for the ordinary person, on the “principle that says the surest way to get someone wet is to drown him.” The inspired goal is to present Lincoln as an ordinary man among ordinary people to appeal to ordinary people, raising the question, Do ordinary folks “want to come to museums to see themselves”? It is, for Ferguson, the disneyfication of Lincoln triumphant: “Cute and chilling and sad and chipper—and fun! —and never, not for a moment, more realistic than an animated movie.”

Some new-thinking historians have contributed new approaches to Lincoln museums. But to Ferguson, the new history perspective is boring. “Follow the footnotes in most Lincoln biographies and you’ll find yourself slogging through a … thicket” of “contradictions and inconsistencies—the murkiness of how we know what we know about Lincoln--” that “can lead a sensitive soul into a kind of despair of postmodernism….”

Every night in what seemed the same motel, Ferguson re-read “In the Footsteps of the Lincolns” by Ida Tarbell, leading muckraker at the turn of the twentieth century. She was Ferguson’s Virgil throughout his tour of the Lincoln Heritage Trail, over three states; he then became our Dante. You will, naturally, as will I, go see for yourself.

Ferguson closes with “In Defense of an Icon,” the Lincoln monument in Washington. He often heard the words “myth” and “icon” uttered in derisive tones. For him, icons resonate down the ages to us--shattered, they are simply there, soon discarded. What do we think we know and what do we really know about Lincoln? Fact and myth are not exclusive; they are two complementary ways of knowing.

Among the thousands of books on Lincoln, Ferguson provides a totally fresh way of meditating on his life and work. Over a hundred new books each year join the some 14,000 already published. Seldom has a story been so often rewritten. Ferguson calls himself “just a journalist, not a scholar.” He often wryly repeats the phrase, “scholars disagree.” A writer for The New Yorker and other major magazines, Ferguson offers neither footnotes nor an index, and few photographs, but out of the vast archive in his head, many lucid images flash before us.

The postscript embodies the essence of the preceding 267 pages. One of the most memorable testimonials is that of a Czech Jew who survived the concentration camp by holding onto his living vision of Lincoln as the emancipator who reminded him daily that all men are created equal. He saved his money for 60 years to come to the Land of Lincoln, to place flowers on the
Great Emancipator’s grave, arriving in Springfield a week before the opening of the new Lincoln Museum, and on the eve of what witnesses assumed might well be his own death.

Ferguson merely alludes to the Abraham Lincoln Bicentennial, which starts now and goes on through 2009, but his book implicitly pleads with us to make that a corrective occasion. Perhaps to deal with the questions he implicitly raises—among many that others are raising--would be a valuable mission for participants. Each reader might pose this question: In what ways may I revisit and rewrite Lincoln’s story in my own mind, make it in my own way my own story as well? In the course of his journey, Ferguson listens to and quotes a multitude of other Americans. I imagine his readers adding, as I did, their own voices.

From moment to moment “this is the saddest story I have ever heard,” the voices of representative citizens contributing, Ferguson’s own voice sounding as if coming across a table in a highway diner. Simultaneously, from moment to moment, something transcendent hovers, behooving us as listeners to turn to the resources of our own emotions, imagination, and intellect to resurrect, enhance, and transmit into the future a more profound and more complex record and vision of the Abraham Lincoln who lives in each of us and thus in the consciousness and the conscience of our nation.


Novelist-historian David Madden is a member of the advisory committee for the federal Lincoln commission in Washington and chair of the Louisiana Abraham Lincoln Bicentennial Commission, located in the office of the Secretary of State. He is LSU’s Robert Penn Warren Professor of Creative Writing.