Friday, August 1, 2008 6:16 PM CDT
The story of Lincoln's last visit to Coles County
By Tim Zgonina, Staff Writer
tzgonina@jg-tc.com
In the predawn darkness of Friday, Feb. 1, 1861, aboard a westbound train, Abraham Lincoln left Coles County for the last time.
Elected to the presidency the previous November and not yet having departed his home in Springfield for Washington, D.C., to be inaugurated, he had come on Jan. 30 to visit his stepmother, Sarah Bush Lincoln, and to say farewell to friends and family in Charleston and the surrounding area.
He would never return. Having led the United States through the Civil War, he would die at the hand of assassin John Wilkes Booth in Washington’s Ford Theater on another Friday — April 14, 1865.
Lincoln had first set foot upon the soil of what would eventually come to be Coles County 31 years earlier, as he and his extended family traveled from their home in southern Indiana to stake out a new life along the Sangamon River west of Decatur in Macon County. Though he never did actually reside here in Coles County, in the interceding decades he had come back many times — to visit family, to litigate court cases and to campaign for public office — and departed again for home. But this time would be the last time.
Following his election as president, Lincoln had remained in Springfield, where he set about the work of planning his administration — and was set upon by office-seekers. No doubt the prospect of leaving the city and the supplicants behind for a few days’ respite in “Coles,” as he called it, was appealing to the president-elect.
On Jan. 28, Lincoln wrote a note to his cousin, John Hanks, that he would be passing through Decatur two days hence, asking him to accompany him. Also traveling with Lincoln on the 30th were several Republican politicians and jurists, including his good friend from Charleston, State Sen. Thomas Marshall.
On the morning of the 30th just before 10, Lincoln, wearing a faded hat and a short coat and carrying a worn carpet bag, boarded an eastbound Great Western train in Springfield with his fellow riders for the trip that would take about eight hours. Despite his status as the next president of the United States, he was not accompanied by any bodyguard or soldier (the Secret Service had not yet been formed).
They switched trains in Tolono in midafternoon and headed south on the Illinois Central toward Mattoon. There, Lincoln, now probably accompanied only by Marshall and possibly Hanks, waited about 20 minutes at the Essex House hotel until they could catch an eastbound freight to Charleston on the Alton, Terre Haute and St. Louis line.
Today, the arrival of a president-elect in a small town would elicit a storm of press coverage. The editor of the Mattoon Gazette reported the visit not on the front page, but inside, under the headline “Old Abe Loose”:
“Mr. Lincoln, who seems to have made a temporary escape from the office-seeking host at Springfield, passed through this place last Wednesday and went on the freight to Charleston, from which place we understand from Hon. T.A. Marshall, who accompanied him, he will soon return to Springfield.
“Thinking it none of our business what Mr. Lincoln’s business in Charleston was, we made no inquiries, and having seen him frequently, we concluded that as we wanted no office and could get none even if we did, we would not impose our presence upon him during his short stay at the Essex House.
“The large crowd, of all parties, which collected on the platform, were evidently delighted to see him, and he greeted his old friends as cordially as though he were simple friend Lincoln and not the most noted personage in the civilized world.”
Lincoln hopped the freight because waiting for a scheduled passenger train would have wasted several hours, and when the train arrived at the depot, on the north edge of town, he descended from the caboose.
Charleston attorney James Connolly later recounted witnessing the arrival:
“When the train finally drew in and stopped, the locomotive was about opposite the station and the caboose, or car which carried the passengers, was some distance down the track. Presently, looking in that direction, we saw a tall man wearing a coat or shawl descend from the steps of the car and patiently make his way through the long expanse of slush and ice beside the track as far as the station platform. I think he wore a plug hat.
“I remember I was surprised that a railroad company, with so distinguished a passenger aboard its train as the president-elect of the United States, did not manifest interest enough in his dignity and comfort to deliver him at the station instead of dropping him off in the mud several hundred feet down the track.
“In addition to myself, quite a crowd of natives were gathered on the platform to see him. There were no formalities.”
It was about 6 p.m. when Lincoln arrived in Charleston. He had been traveling all day and was undoubtedly tired, and so accompanied Marshall to Marshall’s home, a few blocks to the south. The house in which Lincoln slept that night was a large two-story structure with white columns in front, located on the site of what today is the west side of 10th Street on the north side of Harrison Avenue.
Charleston, in 1861, was much smaller than it is today, extending but a few blocks in any direction from the courthouse square, which held a much smaller structure than today’s edifice built in the 1890s. The university was more than three decades in the future, too, and the southern part of today’s town was still covered by forest. There was no Illinois Route 16, only the railroad and the State Road from Paris to Shelbyville, and some connecting trails.
Lincoln ate supper with the Marshalls, then withdrew to sit before the fire in the front room. Soon thereafter, callers and well-wishers began to arrive in throngs. A band was even dispatched to serenade the president-elect.
A Marshall family legend had it that, that night, when Lincoln placed his boots outside his bedroom door to be blacked by a servant, one of the Marshall daughters and a friend took turns putting them on their feet and treading up and down the hallway outside the president’s room — this, in order to say they had once walked in the great Lincoln’s shoes.
The next morning, Thursday, Lincoln rose early and made his way to the home of Dennis Hanks, on the west side of the present-day courthouse square, to have breakfast. Hanks, Lincoln’s stepbrother-in-law, had migrated with the Lincolns across the future Coles County in the winter of 1830 and ended up living in Charleston most of his life. (Earlier he had resided in a house on what is now Jackson Street west of Fourth Street.) He is buried in the old city cemetery on the northwest side of Charleston.
At Hanks’ home, Lincoln was greeted by another crowd, and after breakfast, he departed for the tiny village of Farmington (also called Campbell, south of Charleston) to see his 72-year-old stepmother, who was staying at the home of her daughter, Mrs. Matilda Moore, because the chimney of Sarah Lincoln’s own cabin on Goosenest Prairie had fallen down and the place was in disrepair. Before he left town, Lincoln would leave for his stepmother a generous allowance of money to help see her through her final years.
He rode in a two-horse buggy driven by a family member, Augustus Chapman, the husband of Dennis Hanks’ daughter, Harriet. Along the way, they talked of family and days gone by. They had difficulty crossing Kickapoo Creek, which was filled with ice.
Lincoln reached the Moore home a couple of hours before dinnertime, and after warmly greeting his stepmother, decided to use the available time before the meal to drive out the mile distance to his father’s burial place by way of the cabin at Goosenest Prairie, where the elder Lincolns had lived.
In the interim, tradition has it, Sarah Lincoln and Matilda Moore, their larder mostly bare, scurried to round up victuals suitable for so notable but unexpected a guest as Abraham Lincoln. Neighbors from the village and nearby farms brought their best meats and baked goods, and a fine table was laid.
When the president-elect returned, he was greeted by another crowd of well-wishers. Even the local elementary school was dismissed so the children could meet Lincoln.
By midafternoon, it was time for Lincoln and Chapman to return to Charleston. On the return trip, they were accompanied by Mrs. Lincoln, who took advantage of the opportunity to spend one more night with her stepson.
Arriving back in Charleston, the Lincolns and Chapman returned to Chapman’s house, located on the north side of present-day Jackson Street between Fourth and Fifth streets. There, Lincoln was greeted by another crowd.
Wishing to spend some time alone with his family, he told the throng that he would meet with them that night at the Mount and Hill Hall, which stood at the corner of present-day Fifth and Monroe. That he did, speaking not of politics but the past, telling stories and shaking the hands of the men and accepting pecks on the cheek from the ladies.
After the reception, Lincoln returned with Chapman (who also is buried in the old city cemetery) to Chapman’s home. He had had another full day, having ridden out to the old homestead and his father’s grave and dealt again with the press of the public. He was tired, both physically and emotionally, and planned to rise early the next morning to return to Springfield.
The following day, Friday, Lincoln awakened at 4 a.m. and packed his carpetbag as he prepared to catch the early train back toward Mattoon, Springfield and destiny. Sarah Lincoln arose, too, to bid him goodbye.
This was the famed parting of mother and son, as recounted by Chapman and later Lincoln himself.
The old woman, frail and in the seventh decade of her life, embraced Lincoln, not as the president to be, but as the son she dearly loved, and with whom, 31 years earlier, she had trekked across this very land to make a new home.
Perhaps she thought of the bittersweet years gone by, and more ominously, of those that lay ahead. Tenderly, she embraced the tall, lanky man who stood before her, bundled against the cold for the morning’s journey, and pulled him close.
And as she released him, she told him that they would never see one another again, that he would, indeed, never come back to her alive.
Lincoln protested. “No, mama,” he said, calling her by the name he always called her. The Lord would provide for his safety, he assured her. They would meet again, some day.
And then he walked out the door.
Records show that a train, westbound from Mattoon, was scheduled to leave that city at 5:30 that morning, so Lincoln must have risen at such an early hour in order to catch it as it passed through Charleston. As he boarded it and it began to pick up speed, he left the city behind for the last time, in the darkness.
And so, probably sometime around 6 a.m., before the winter sun had risen above the horizon behind him, Abraham Lincoln crossed over the western boundary of Coles County. He would never set foot on its soil again.
Lincoln probably changed trains in Pana, and again in Decatur, before arriving back home in Springfield late in the afternoon.
It is impossible to say how many times, in the difficulties of the years ahead, Lincoln would reminisce about his last visit to Coles County and find some comfort in the memories. But we do know that he was already thinking about those difficulties. The very day that he departed Charleston, he wrote to Sen. Charles Seward, his future secretary of state, about the slavery issue, emphasizing his determination not to see the institution extended into the territories.
Less than two weeks later, Lincoln boarded a Great Western train at the station in Springfield bound for Washington. “My friends,” he said as he stood on the platform, “no one, not in my situation, can appreciate my feeling of sadness at this parting.” Might he have spoken similar words, unrecorded, in Charleston?
Later that day, as the train steamed eastward past Tolono toward the Indiana state line that he first crossed with his family 31 years earlier, perhaps he looked out the window toward the south, and Coles County across the prairie.
Author Charles Coleman’s 1955 book, “Abraham Lincoln and Coles County,” along with other sources, provided information for this story.
Contact Zgonina at tzgonina@jg-tc.com.
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Matt Toon wrote on Aug 7, 2008 5:59 AM: