Abraham Lincoln famously had less than one year of formal schooling, but you can find him now at both Harvard and Yale.
Needless to say, you can find him at every university in Illinois and colleges in other states. During his senate campaign against Stephen A. Douglas in 1858, the two men were required to walk in the door of the Old Main, still the oldest building on the Knox College campus. Once inside they climbed out a window onto the makeshift speaker’s platform, moved next to the building as protection against a rainy day. Lincoln quipped that this was his first time ever going into a college. After a laugh, the audience settled down to a rip-roaring 3-hour debate between the two long-time rivals.
During the Civil War, Lincoln’s son Robert attended Harvard, alma mater of quite a few American presidents, as well as abolitionists like Charles Sumner (whose statue sits just outside of Harvard Yard) and writers such as Ralph Waldo Emerson, T.S. Eliot, and perhaps more surprisingly, Henry David Thoreau. Lincoln was given honorary degrees from Knox College, Princeton, and Columbia, but never Harvard. And yet, there he is in Cambridge Commons, a full figure of Lincoln standing tall in the center of a monument to the city’s Civil War heroes.
Not to be outdone, the Massachusetts State House in downtown Boston has a bust of Lincoln and a painting in Doric Hall (apparently another bust is in the Senate chambers, but I missed that). I didn’t miss the women’s rights protest outside featuring Massachusetts Governor Maura Healey, Senator Elizabeth Warren, Congresswoman Ayanna Pressley, and Mayor Michelle Wu (who I had also seen a half hour earlier at Boston City Hall for a ceremony honoring a late state congressman).
Several days before my visit to Harvard I was on the Yale campus. Lincoln had given a speech in 1860 in Union Hall. The hall no longer stands (the High School in a Community is now in its place) but there is a memory of Lincoln on the green at Yale. There, at least up until recently, stood a majestic Oak deemed the “Lincoln Memorial Oak” that had stood for ages. In late 2012 the stately old tree was toppled by Superstorm Sandy, revealing old bones from the 17th and 18th centuries from the original graveyard it had been growing over. With the massive old tree gone, a new tree was planted along with a granite stone explaining its history.
I’ll have more photos and stories from my road trip as I get the chance.
[All photos by David J. Kent]
Lincoln: The Fire of Genius: How Abraham Lincoln’s Commitment to Science and Technology Helped Modernize America is available at booksellers nationwide.
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David J. Kent is President of the Lincoln Group of DC and the author of Lincoln: The Fire of Genius: How Abraham Lincoln’s Commitment to Science and Technology Helped Modernize America and Lincoln: The Man Who Saved America.
His previous books include Tesla: The Wizard of Electricity and Edison: The Inventor of the Modern World and two specialty e-books: Nikola Tesla: Renewable Energy Ahead of Its Time and Abraham Lincoln and Nikola Tesla: Connected by Fate.
