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By Root 772 0

so the place must have been in uproar. He was often seen pulling his kids along the street in a cart, something that was considered very unmanly and feminine in those days. I liked the sound of that because I remembered pushing my own son around in a pushchair in Glasgow. It was the delight of my life at the time, but even then people responded to me strangely and often looked at me as if I was a bit of an odd hippy. They’d say, ‘Aren’t you embarrassed? That’s a woman’s thing to do.’ So I could only imagine how the residents of Springfield must have reacted to Lincoln in the nineteenth century.

Another thing I like about him is that he lived in a sort of suburbia, a modest neighbourhood. He was born in a log cabin, so the Springfield house must have been a huge move up for him, and it was the only house he ever owned. He moved straight from Springfield to the White House in February 1861. Four years later, it was boom, goodnight Vienna, when John Wilkes Booth, a Confederate sympathiser, shot him in the back of the head.

Lincoln was a giant and I came away from his old home in great admiration of the man. And I’ll retain that admiration, I think.

Clearly, I’m not the only one to hold Lincoln in such high regard. For evidence, you only need to look at his tomb, built in Springfield after that stumer shot him. (‘Stumer’ is a Scottish word that really appeals to me. I don’t know where it comes from, but I like to think of it as a cross between ‘stupid’ and ‘tumour’. It means you’re no good for anything.) The centrepiece of Oak Ridge Cemetery, Lincoln’s final resting place is surrounded by towering oak trees in a gently rolling landscape. His 117-foot-tall granite tomb also contains the bodies of Mary and three of their four sons – Edward, William and Thomas.

Although relatively modest by the standards of presidential tombs, this is one of the most revered places in America – and rightly so. It’s worth a visit just to see the sculptures of Lincoln, both inside and outside the tomb, the most impressive of which is a large bronze bust of the President at the entrance. A facsimile of a marble bust that stands in the US Capitol in Washington, DC, the bronze was created by Gutzon Borglum, who also sculpted the vast Lincoln figurehead at Mount Rushmore. Many visitors rub the nose of the Springfield bust for good luck. It’s not encouraged, but I’ve never done what’s encouraged, so I gave it a rub.

Inside the building, other bronze statues portray Lincoln in various stages of his life. Some include excerpts from his most famous speeches. Walking down a circular hallway to a marble burial chamber, I was confronted by the sombre words that Edwin Stanton, Lincoln’s Secretary of War, uttered at his death: ‘Now he belongs to the ages.’ Stanton’s next words after the assassination – ‘There lies the most perfect ruler of men the world has ever seen’ – aren’t displayed in the tomb, but I think they would have been quite appropriate. Standing in the chamber, there’s a very real sense of the terrible human cost of the American Civil War, almost as if Lincoln died yesterday.

A red marble marker stands above the underground vault where Lincoln’s coffin lies. People have twice tried to steal the body, so the vault has now been reinforced with concrete and steel to foil grave robbers. God only knows why anyone might want to steal it. What would they do with it? Put it on eBay?

One of the things that sums up Lincoln for me is that he spoke for less than three minutes at the dedication of the Soldiers’ National Cemetery in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, where four and a half months earlier, the Union armies had decisively defeated those of the Confederacy. Before the President’s concise, powerful and deeply moving speech, Edward Everett, a former Secretary of State, had talked for two solid hours. Everett’s seldom-read, 13,607-word oration was slated to be the main event of the day, but Lincoln’s ‘few appropriate remarks’, which summarised the war in just ten sentences, is now recognised by everyone in America as the Gettysburg Address.

He began