
If you liked Abbott and Costello Meet the Mummy or Archie Meets the Punisher, you’ll love “Anne meets the Lincoln family”! This fall on C-SPAN 3!
How do you do, fellow olds! Here on Election Day Eve 2024, do you feel the despairing urge to retreat from the present-day reality’s endless shenanigans into not-too-distant days of yore, when Presidential candidates with far more character endured and even persevered through much worse times in American history? Have we got the escape hatch for you!
Previously on Midlife Crisis Crossover:
In addition to our annual road trips, my wife Anne and I have a twice-yearly tradition of spending our birthdays together on some new experience. On past trips we’d visited the graves, tombs, mausoleums and virtual posthumous palaces of 24 American Presidents in varying accommodations and budgets. One of the biggest names ever to grace the White House kept eluding us: Abraham Lincoln, planted a mere three hours away in Springfield, Illinois. In May 2023 I figured: let’s make his tomb a trip headliner of its very own, not a warm-up act on the road to Branson or whatever. History is technically more Anne’s fervent interest than mine, but we found plenty to do beyond reading wordy educational placards…
…which are even cooler when they’re paired with statues in action! We got all that and more when we departed the Illinois State Museum for our next stop, the much larger Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library & Museum. This huge edifice was opened in 2005 and contains the Lincoln Presidential Library and other research collections, in addition to a series of statues reenacting various moments in the sixteenth President’s life. The statues were sadly not animatronic, but that didn’t seem to bother the few dozen field-tripping students we had to wade through on our way in. A selection of relics were found here and there around the life-sized exhibits.

Between the parking garage and the museum is a plaza whose features include A Greater Task, a 2004 sculpture by John W. McClarey,marking Lincoln’s February 1861 farewell address to Springfield before leaving for DC.

Acts of Intolerance, a 2009 two-piece work by Preston Jackson, commemorates the Springfield Race Riot of 1908.

…big enough to contain its own White House. The Lincoln family waits outside for the movers to finish breaking stuff.

Our Hero’s secret origin begins more or less with Kid Lincoln contemplating the deeper meanings of a fable he’d just read.

Slightly older Lincoln reads indoors during the chillier season. At his feet, one of the many family dogs he’d know throughout his life.

Abe lays a “well actually” diatribe on his soon-to-be-ex-girlfriend. (The display names more than one of his old beaus.)

Of the Lincolns’ four sons in all, this was the original 1850 tombstone for 3-year-old Eddy, the first to die. He was reinterred at the Lincoln Tomb after it was built in 1865.

Your 1860 Presidential candidates, Honest Abe and Stephen A. Douglas, who previously beat him in the 1858 Illinois race for the U.S. Senate and Mr. Blackwell’s annual Best Vest list.

The Springfield 1860 directory has two listings for Lincoln, down at the right: one for his home and one for his law practice, the Lincoln/Herndon Office.

Not long after, the attack at Fort Sumter kicks off the Civil War. The museum represents it with a painting rather than a full-scale model exploding like a science-class volcano.

Of all the terrible things to deal with throughout the war, demeaning caricatures were the smallest of his worries.

Other politicians offered varying levels of support, uselessness, and/or antagonism — much like today’s careerists.

Lincoln ponders signing the Emancipation Proclamation. On each side of the hallway leading to him are ghost-like angry faces.

At no point does the Great Emancipator think to himself, “Which choice will get me the most Likes and the sweetest billionaire endorsements?”

An actual letter written by Lincoln in June 1863 to General Joseph Hooker, drafted for telegraphing, discussing Robert E. Lee’s imminent second invasion of the North.

November 19, 1863: the Gettysburg Address.

Fast-forward to 1865, and the war’s over and the North won! Now everyone can relax and enjoy some entertainment, like a nice play at Ford’s Theatre.

Failed actor John Wilkes Booth ends the night with tragedy, despite the efforts of millions of time travelers to stop him.

Yes, of course they have a Lincoln bust — a prep piece for the 1908 version now in the U.S. Capitol. Its sculptor Gutzon Borglum is best known for such works as the dueling polar opposites Mount Rushmore and Stone Mountain.
…but wait! There’s more! To be continued!
Other chapters in this special MCC miniseries:
Part 1: The Tomb of Honest Abe
Part 2: More Wars, More Memorials
Part 3: The Illinois State Capitol
Part 4: Around the Capitol Complex
Part 5: Generation X Belongs in a Museum
Part 6: Misc. Museum
Part 8: The Lincoln Museum Minus Lincoln
Part 9: ‘Round Springfield
Part 10: Lincoln Home & Law & Gifts
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