Before the pandemic, Laura’s father got us tickets to a literary series that took place at the Hermitage. The shows consisted of author talks. Each of the three presenters came dressed as the author and wove biographical information in with excerpts of works. The first one we saw was Gerald Dickens, who is a great-great grandson of Charles Dickens. The next was a man presenting Poe, and the third Washington Irving. The talks lasted about an hour, and you could get wine or hot chocolate beforehand and/or buy some souvenirs. I got a little Poe finger puppet for one of my teacher friends.
As we were wrapping up the series, I mentioned to Laura that I would like to present an author myself. The only problem was that the sole authors I could really comment on were Shakespeare and Poe. I didn’t look like either one of them.
“You should do Abraham Lincoln,” Laura suggested.
“I don’t even like Abraham Lincoln,” I scoffed. “Besides, he’s not really even an author.”
And that, so they say, was that. I dismissed the idea entirely and two or three years passed by without giving the matter much thought.
Why didn’t I like Lincoln? As a child, I had.
I think my first exposure to him was in visiting the Hall of Presidents at Disney World. I distinctly remember Lincoln delivering some sort of speech and my being in awe. “I want to do something like those guys did,” I told my dad.
On the way out, there was a display of Lincoln on his deathbed, steadily breathing. “Will he make it?” I asked.
Then, later, I saw a joke somewhere: “How do you send a letter to Abraham Lincoln?” I didn’t understand the punchline. “Mom, what does this mean?” I asked.
“Oh, that’s cute,” she said, “You use his Gettysburg Address.” She looked at me, the explanation going over my little head. “The Gettysburg Address? It’s a famous speech that Lincoln gave.”
The years went by, I fell out of love with the things that I’d naively loved as a child. I grew jaded. Historical figures no longer held their appeal to me. They were flawed. Jefferson preached about freedom, yet owned slaves. Columbus stumbled upon the Americas and subjugated the natives through violence. Someone invented, whole cloth, the Washington/cherry tree anecdote. History was full of jerks. What did I care about Abraham Lincoln?
But then, I thought, what do I even know about Abraham Lincoln? The answer was ‘not much.’ Not much at all. As a person who prided himself on memorizing famous poems and soliloquies, I didn’t know anything from Lincoln’s oeuvre past the opening few words of the Gettysburg Address.
So, one day last fall I made a decision. I would become an expert on Abraham Lincoln. If I liked it, I would become him. If not, at least I would have read a few things. I went to the library app and downloaded a few audiobooks. Thus, I began my journey.
I took a very lazy approach, listening to books, taking not a single note, just absorbing and digesting. The names, places, and events at first were a jumble of facts hard to parse and harder to separate. I think things started to click, somewhat, when I listened to a collection of Lincoln’s works. The letter written to Mrs. Orville Browning, detailing Lincoln’s courtship of Mary Owens really struck a chord, and then I was shocked by the excerpts from the Lincoln/Douglas debates that are so often used to knock the man off of his high civil rights pedestal.
The more I listened, the more I came to understand and admire the 16th president. I began to yearn for a politician like him, one who really could reach across party lines and respect the other side without compromising his own morality. I even convinced my friends to take a trip with me to Springfield, Illinois to visit his home and from there we went to New Salem, to see the town he’d been a part of.
Through the process, I discovered friends and friends of friends who were also Lincoln experts. Several people pointed me in the direction of Hal Holbrook’s Mark Twain Tonight, which one of my mentors in this journey, Judge Cotton of Oneida, TN said was the bar for a one-man show.
I came to discover that in his time, Lincoln was known as a storyteller and a jokester. One of the arguments against inviting him to speak at the Gettysburg Cemetery was the fact that he might go off the rails and tell a off-color joke unworthy of the decorum of the occasion. The press highly criticized him for similar missteps in the past.
In watching Mark Twain Tonight, in thinking about those stories and of the writer’s nights, my very own show began to coalesce. I took P.M. Zall’s book of Lincoln’s anecdotes, culled out my favorites, and wove them together thematically. Into this I added the most famous speeches—the Second Inaugural Address, the Gettysburg Address, the letter he wrote at Albert Hodge’s request (“I am naturally anti-slavery”), and others. I tried to keep the show as much Lincoln’s actual words as I could. I believe the text is around ninety percent Lincoln’s writing, or what primary sources have said about Lincoln’s stories. Lincoln actually didn’t write down many of the stories and jokes, so they are mostly relayed second-hand by those who knew him best, William Herndon, his primary contemporary biographer in particular.
One of my trusted mentors suggested that I make the show like a Ted Talk: Who is Abraham Lincoln, and why does he matter today? In my process, however, the one thing I do not do a very good job in is explicitly relating Lincoln’s relevance. I believe that one of the causes of this neglect is that Lincoln himself did not say why he was important. So, instead, I present the man as he was as a collection of stories and jokes, a bit of an autobiography, some of his first-person thoughts on slavery and morality, and the two greatest speeches of his presidency. As Lincoln said in that letter to Orville Browning’s wife: “I was most confoundedly well-pleased with the project.” I hope the audience will be, too.
Upcoming Performances:
October 4 at 6:00 p.m.: Harbor Beach Community Theater; Harbor Beach, MI
November 12 at 6:00 p.m., reception to follow: Oakland’s Mansion, Murfreesboro, TN. Produced by Murfreesboro Little Theater
Tentative: November 18 at 6:00 p.m., reception to follow: Rugby Theater, Historic Rugby, TN.
Freethought Farm 