Community Corner

Lincoln Scholar Shares New View of 16th President

Illinois University Professor Michael Burlingame Gives Witty, Absorbing Presentation on Honest Abe for Middlesex County Historical Society

Before a crowd of some 160 gathered at the Inn at Middletown Friday, the country’s foremost Lincoln scholar, Professor Michael Burlingame, said that in his youth he bore a passing resemblance to his subject, the 16th President of the United States.  The tall, lanky professor certainly possesses Lincoln’s sharp wit.

“I am 69,” he said to the audience gathered for the Middlesex County Historical Society talk. “But I prefer to think of it as 20 Celsius.”

The evening lecture, a fundraiser for the society’s annual Capital and Endowment Campaign, concluded with a dessert reception and book signing, allowing guests to meet the author.

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The Illinois University professor, author of what is considered the definitive work on Lincoln, is the Chancellor Naomi B. Lynn Distinguished Chair in Lincoln Studies at the University of Illinois at Springfield.

“Being a Lincoln scholar has many benefits and one of them is that Lincoln had a tremendous sense of humor and told wonderful jokes and was an excellent punster and funny stories were told by him and about him,” Burlingame says.

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He went on to relate an incident which took place while he was researching at the New York Public Library. Three times he came upon particularly funny Lincoln stories and each time laughed out loud, eliciting curt requests for silence from nearby patrons.

The final time, he laughed uncontrollably, Burlingame says, an earnest grey-haired woman across the table from him said, “‘just what is your field, anyhow? I think I’m going to switch to it.’”

“It calls to mind the delicatessen scene from the movie, ‘When Harry Met Sally,’” Burlingame ended, to much audience laughter.

Referencing his 2009 double volume, “Abraham Lincoln: A Life,” Burlingame says, “a question doubtless on your mind is, ‘what in the world justifies a new, 2,000-page biography of Lincoln?’”

It turns out that while conducting “original research from unpublished sources,” Burlingame says he discovered numerous primary material hadn’t been tapped in prior Lincoln biographies. So he began to look for information that had been discarded by writers condensing their work upon the request of publishers, which he found on the proverbial “cutting-room floor.”

Burlingame says he found interview notes that hadn’t been published in their books — never-before-seen information.

He spoke about the five years in which Lincoln dropped out of sight politically, and during what Burlingame terms as a midlife crisis, went through tremendous spiritual growth — transforming himself from a young, hack Whig politician to the fine statesman he eventually matured into — and arguably the most significant president in U.S. history.

Mid-April, Central Connecticut State University is hosting a series of events to kick off the 150th anniversary of the beginning of the Civil War. The Middlesex County Historical Society, which presently has a Civil War exhibit on view, will take part in the ceremony.

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