INTRODUCTION

It was during the Second World War, when I was just a boy, that I first came into contact with Abraham Lincoln. In Crawford School, now Corkery Elementary, in the office, there stood a bronze statue of President Lincoln, half life-size. It was a school that my entire family had attended. My grandmother, mother, aunts, uncles and I all went to that school at one time or another. During that war, the young teachers had been called away to serve their country, and my great-aunts came out of retirement to help fill the empty positions. You had to watch yourself in my aunt Mrs. Henpenius’s classroom; she was very strict. Since a number of the teachers in the school were my relatives and friends, I spent a good deal of time in the office before and after school, with my aunt and the bronze Lincoln.

It was a striking statue, about my size at the time: his protruding nose and pointed chin, the wizened eyes and a humble smile on his lips. Here was a troubled man with an enormous burden to bear. Through all my years of schooling, through classes on American history, the statue in my grade school stands out as my most vivid memory of Lincoln.

When I was a boy, my aunts would often take me to museums to satisfy my interest in history and antiques, or else to the fantastically elegant Marshall Fields, where I spent hours looking at the marvelous colonial antiques and beautiful silver. I often went with my grandmother and her sisters to the Lawndale-Crawford Historical Society, of which I would later be president, to attend the meetings and lectures. I listened to it all eagerly. Occasionally, if I was lucky, I could sit in on meetings of the Ninety-Three’ers. This was originally just a social club for those who had worked at the magnificent Columbian Exhibition of 1893, but as membership dwindled with time, it began to include people who had attended the fair. My grandmother had gone to the fair as a child and was a member. They used to meet just off of Prairie Avenue, on Twenty-First Street.

I went with my grandmother when the Ninety-Three’ers were celebrating the anniversary of the World’s Fair in Chicago. There was a reception and a picnic in Jackson Park where the fair had been held. I met Little Egypt, a dancer at the fair who had enthralled audiences from around the world with her hootchie-kootchie dance (a risqué belly dance); by the time I met her, she was a sweet little old lady. Later, I met a 107-year-old man who had been a guard at the fair. This man asked me if I wanted to shake the hand of a man who shook the hand of Abraham Lincoln. I took him up on his offer. I was now one handshake away from the man behind that statue.

My interest in Lincoln was kindled, but it took time for that to grow. In junior high school, I was chosen by my teachers (for being an outstanding student) to go down to Springfield for a mock gubernatorial election, an annual event called Boys State. When we weren’t at the fairgrounds participating in the event, we were taken to see all the Lincoln spots in and around the city. The old capitol building where he worked, his home and neighborhood—we even went to New Salem where he lived and worked after moving away from his parents. We also visited the elegant new capitol building. All of this combined with my previous experience with Lincoln into a powerful portrait of the man.

Years later, I acquired a scrapbook of memorabilia, filled with telegrams and printed material from before the Great Chicago Fire; it was rare to have so much paper from before that calamity. In it, I discovered a number of newspaper clippings of life in Chicago, with some mention of the Lincoln family. One of the pieces was a telegram sent as the fire raged, inquiring whether the lumberyards were in danger. They were. This piece I gave to the Chicago Historical Society.

All my life, I have worked as a florist, and through that work I came twice to meet the last of the Lincoln line, Robert Lincoln Beckwith, grandson of Robert Lincoln and great-grandson of Abraham Lincoln. The first time was in the seventies, while working for a Michigan Avenue flower shop. I was decorating the Playboy Mansion in Chicago for Christmas. In the ballroom, we set up a twenty-two-foot Christmas tree, and as I was decorating it, Hugh Hefner and an elderly gentleman came in. This gentleman was short, stocky, shy—but when he started talking, a congenial man. This was Robert Lincoln Beckwith, and he told Hefner and me how the house had belonged to Dr. George Snow Isham, a friend of Robert’s, and how each Christmas they would come to that house and a sleigh would be set in the ballroom beside the tree, overflowing with presents. Christmas was a fun time for the Lincolns in Chicago.

The second time came nearly a decade later. I was hired to do the flowers for a party at a home in Lake Forest, Illinois. It sat right along the shores of Lake Michigan. As I brought in flowers, I saw Robert Beckwith again and greeted him. After a brief conversation, I went to help decorate the garden. At this point, I had been fascinated with the Lincolns for some time and had begun to acquire Lincoln paraphernalia, including a chair from his law practice in Springfield and one from the home of the Gourleys, his neighbors.

The chairs came to me in a strange way. A patron of my flower shop, who would stop by to talk from time to time, had her family home in Springfield. She moved some of the furniture to Chicago after her place was burglarized, old furniture piled up in her Cadillac for the drive. She knew my interest in history and invited me to come see her collection, telling me all about each piece. When she passed, her children offered me anything I wanted from her home. She had told me the history of the chairs, which she inherited from her mother. I took them without hesitation.

John Toman’s chair, which he was told came from the Lincoln office. Collection of John Toman.

A late piece of the puzzle came in the early 2000s, when I was sitting outside my cardiac rehab clinic. I was waiting for the valet to bring my car around and got to talking to the man sitting next to me. It turned out that he was Leonard Sauer, owner of one of my favorite restaurants. He told me the story of his place, how it was built to be a ballroom for Prairie Avenue debutants and a dance studio. After the neighborhood declined, it had the top floors removed and was converted to a warehouse. He acquired it and turned the open space into a German restaurant. After closing, the entire kitchen would be cleaned and leftover food given to the needy. I told him I used to go to that restaurant regularly with friends; the food was delicious, and the service was perfect. Sauer told me that of course his waiters were the best: they were all former Pullman staff, trained to be perfect gentlemen. The first men Pullman hired were former house slaves. When the Pullman Palace Car Company was made to shut down, Sauer had hired them; after all, they were world famous for their service. By this time, I had learned that Robert Todd Lincoln had been president of Pullman, another connection.

The drawing is from Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper vol. 11, showing the Lincoln office. John Toman’s chair is second from the right. Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum.

I am also a junker; going about antique shops, if there was a book on Lincoln or Chicago, I bought it. I had begun gathering many stories about the Lincolns and the people around them, some that were squirreled away and overlooked. One particular aspect of Lincoln that puzzled me was his speech. It seemed older than the time he lived in, epic in size, vivid and commanding in style. Through all my research, I could not find an answer to this curiosity of mine until I read Joe Wheeler’s Abraham Lincoln, a Man of Faith and Courage. In this excellent book, I learned that a young Abraham read from the King James Bible (one of the few books available to people on the frontier) when he was finished with his chores or at Sunday school. The reason, then, that Abraham’s speech is so biblical is because he copied the style deliberately, influenced by the Bible from a very early age.

As a dyslexic, I have to read material a couple of times in order to understand it. By the time I do, I have it memorized. As I read, looking for the story I wanted to tell, I kept finding new aspects of history that brought the stories to life. All this material was stuck in my mind, waiting to get out, the story growing and growing until a little pamphlet became a full book. As the collection of Lincoln artifacts and stories grew, my mind was resolved to put it together.

But so much has been written about Lincoln, a vast number of books analyzing his every presidential moment from all sides—or else the story of the humble prairie lawyer, going the circuit from county to county to earn his family bread. Yet I had all this material and knowledge about Lincoln in between these periods of his life, about his time in my hometown, and so little was written about it.

The Lincolns were tied inextricably to the city of Chicago, before and after the presidency of their patriarch. In all the years of Abraham’s life, he came to the city numerous times. His work for railroad companies and industrial moguls brought him to the city quite often. Chicago is where he would give many of his famous speeches. It is where he met the owners of the Chicago Tribune, the newspaper that would ceaselessly work to make him president, using every trick in the book to secure his nomination. Chicago saw the first Lincoln-Douglas debate, and it is where Lincoln would plan his elections with Norman B. Judd, the Chicagoan who offered the city for the Republican Convention of 1860 specifically so that Lincoln would have a home field advantage. Chicago loved Abraham so much, he had to hide himself in order to get work done or else be mobbed by demands to make speeches.

Chicago was a miracle city in Lincoln’s time. Incorporated in 1837, Chicago began as a fur-trading town huddled close to Fort Dearborn. On the edge of the expanding nation, the city was well situated beside the lake and the river. By 1850, it was full of railroads, a transportation hub connecting the interior to the coastal ports. All railroads led to Chicago. It had grown with immigrants and entrepreneurs, full of factories that spewed forth the machines of the Second Industrial Revolution. Twenty years from hovels to industrial powerhouse, transportation hub and the crown jewel of the West. By the time of the Civil War, Chicago was a model Northern city, with booming docks and busy train stations. Its people read major metropolitan newspapers, watched fine theater and opera, debated the future of slavery and hosted elegant parties.

My grandmother told me that when she was young, there was one Democrat in the entire Crawford community. The Republican Party was founded in 1854 by former Whigs in Ripon, Wisconsin, as a party aimed at stopping the further expansion of slavery. They were a diverse lot, with abolitionists and big business interests, Free-Soil Party members and capitalists. Chicago, by the time of the founding of the party, was a booming city, quickly becoming a Republican bastion. Republican Chicago had a strong pull on Abraham. The Chicago Tribune was a major Republican paper, a vocal voice on the Kansas-Nebraska Act and the growing divide between North and South.

A divide between the mercantile North and cash-crop South can be seen clearly from the very foundation of the United States, only growing in the following years. The two different systems relied on one another but were diametrically opposed to each other. It was the North that fed the United States. The cash crops of tobacco, indigo and, more than any other, cotton are thirsty crops that destroy the fertility of the soil. Cash crops, and therefore slavery, had need for expansion, and there was plenty of money and power backing these interests. When the war started, the South discovered that they had created vast systems for cash crops but not food.

Immigrants from all over Europe poured across the Atlantic in the years after 1848, the great year of revolution. They had fought for the right to a constitution and lost; fleeing retribution, they came to the New World. Upon their arrival, they found good land to farm, whereas Europe had too little to feed all its people. German, Irish, French, Italian, Polish and Jewish, they all came for the individual liberty they were denied in Europe. These people soon found themselves embroiled in a war for their adopted home, one they fought with zeal.

Immigrant populations came to the northwestern states and fueled their activity. There was no work in the South that a laborer would be hired for. Slaves were the engine of the South, and immigrant labor was neither needed nor wanted, but the North had room to spare for them and welcomed them with open arms. Factories and farms ran on their labor. The northwestern states at the time—Illinois, Michigan, Indiana, Wisconsin, Iowa and Minnesota—were where the United States got its food. Lumber and wheat, lead and steel: all the things a growing nation needed were right there in that one corner. The food, machines and all kinds of manufactured goods spewed out of the Midwest to consumers. The region was full of waterways for transport, huge swamps stretching throughout the Chicagoland area and into Indiana (the swamps were so full of birds that they became known as the Butcher Shop of Chicago). It was easy to get from place to place by water, and when the railroads came in, it became that much easier to move all the bountiful resources to where they were needed. The Midwest fed and still feeds the United States and the world. It was the right place at the right time, and Chicago was at the heart of it all. The city was vital to the Union effort, not least because it had molded the man in the White House.

Why is it that the place where Lincoln met his richest, most influential backers is left out of the story? Why are the tricks they pulled to get Lincoln nominated not included in biographies? There are so many fantastic small pieces to the story of Abraham and his family, and as I was compiling my notes, there always seemed to be something more to add, something new to tell. The history of all the people who banded together to make Abraham Lincoln the president, at times against his will, has faded in the shadow of the war he was forced to fight.

All the characters from the Lincolns’ age are gone now, most traces of their lifestyle have disappeared and all that is left is hidden between the pages of books. It can be found, but only if one takes the time to look. I have been looking, for decades, at the small details from 150 years