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TAKING LEAVE OF LINCOLN AT LONG LAST
(THIS TIME I MEAN IT).
Since I was a kid in 1955 I’ve moved thumpity-thump in that ox cart with the Lincolns from Kentucky to Indiana to Illinois so many times that I know the route by heart.
I sat in that little log cabin through many winter nights watching him read by the firelight or do his cipherin’ on the back of a wooden shovel.
I remember the day his mother died, how he cried and cried.
I’ll never forget when he started working in that store in New Salem up there in Sangamon County. In those days he barely owned the shirt on his back. So determined to make something of himself he was.
What fun on that raft floating down the Mississippi to New Orleans!
Returning on the steamboat, we both heard the clanking and turned to see the coffle of slaves chained together. Our eyes met…no words…only the churning of the paddle wheel.
Remember when he went off to the Blackhawk War? I sure do.
Many times I stayed up all night with him after Ann Rutledge died. I still keep hoping she’ll recover. She never does.
Oh, how many hours I wiled away in his law office, him telling me stories , his feet up on the desk, me laughing!
I canvassed for him in his first campaign, and later on when he ran for Congress.
A century too late, I tried to warn him not to marry Mary Todd, having read so much about their marriage. She was such a drag, but he marries her every time.
I was in the statehouse when he gave the House Divided speech, in the telegraph office when he got the returns making him president, at the Capitol for the First Inaugural, at his desk when he signed the Emancipation Proclamation (actually, I handed him the pen), with him in Gettysburg when he dedicated the cemetery there, in the crowd for the Second after he was re-elected…still feel my skin tingling when I hear the words “With malice toward none; with charity for all,” though I have heard them a dozen times since.
I walked with him down many a sleepless midnight hallway in the White House after the latest Union defeat. (I told him McClellan was no good).
I saw him age, and I aged with him. The old man he became during the war I became while reading about his life, a half-century of books about his trials, his words, his refusal compromise that simple credo that all men should be free. No surprise there. Didn’t he once tell me he might be a “slow walker but he never walked back”?
Ford’s Theater…Oh yes, I was there too on a hundred April 12ths…heard the shot ring out (and keep hearing it)…helped carry his body across the street to the Petersen house….laid him diagonally across the bed…saw him draw his last breath at 7:22 am. I know because I always took care to glance at the clock to record that moment for posterity.
Thinking back to the early years in New Salem, I recall him telling his closest friends that he hoped to do something great for humanity one day, something he’d be remembered for. You can’t make stuff like that up. It happened.
Now the funeral train is wending its way back to Springfield. Through the rain-splattered windows, I see the somber crowds waiting with bowed heads along the tracks. This will be my final ride. I want to pay my respects one last time. I am present for the burial in Oak Ridge as usual.
The books will remain standing like silent witnesses on my crowded shelf. Even the fire in my Kindle has burned down to faintly glowing embers.
What’s more to read? to know?
Only that the story has become part of me, this intertwining of two lives, proud to have come to know him, my luminous companion from history. Time to move on, the way friends move on, into the past, into the future.
After finishing one last biography marking
the end of my lifetime with Lincoln.
December 30, 2014