Feb 12, 2009 1:20 pm US/Central
Lincoln Was No Stranger To Chicago
CHICAGO (CBS) ―
Abraham Lincoln never lived in Chicago, but particularly in the years before he was elected president, he was no stranger to the city.
Lincoln came to the city on legal and political business on a regular basis, and would sometimes stay for weeks at a time, according to
the Lincoln Institute.
A Chicagoan in the mid-19th century might have found Lincoln standing before a judge at the pre-Chicago Fire courthouse, at the site of what is now City Hall and the Cook County Building. Lincoln also made speeches at several conventions at the Sherman House hotel, on the present-day site of the Thompson Center, 100 W. Randolph St.
While Lincoln's political rival, Stephen A. Douglas, decided to move to Chicago in 1847, Lincoln turned down an opportunity to start a new law firm in the city and remained in Springfield instead, according to the Lincoln Institute.
But Lincoln and Douglas both kicked off their campaigns for the U.S. Senate at the Tremont House hotel, which stood at Lake and Dearborn streets. Lincoln lost the campaign to Douglas.
In 1860, Illinois Republican State Chairman Norman B. Judd arranged for the 1860 Republican National Convention to be held in Chicago. The convention was held at the Wigwam, a stadium that was located at what is now Lake Street and North Wacker Drive.
Lincoln had also been scheduled for an appearance in Chicago just before his assassination, at a sanitary fair in May 1865. But Lincoln was assassinated before the fair, and a throng of people who had been excited for his appearance were instead devastated as his funeral bier passed through the city, according to the Lincoln Institute.
The Chicago of Lincoln's time was a far cry from the hulking, cosmopolitan metropolis of the early 21st century.
Quoted by the Lincoln Institute, journalist and women's rights pioneer Mary Livermore wrote that when she moved to Chicago in 1857, it was a city "in which mud, dust, dirt, and smoke seem to predominate."
"Imagine its appearance in the (1850s), when I first beheld it!" Livermore wrote. "Michigan Avenue was the only paved street in the city, and the only one with decent sidewalks. Elsewhere the sidewalks were of very simple construction. Scantlings were laid on the prairie soil, to which plans were spiked, and as these soon sank into the ground, green and black slime oozed up between the cracks in wet weather, splashing the face of the pedestrian and befouling his clothes. The drinking water of the city was furnished by the lake...but then it was pumped from the basin inside the breakwater, and was sold by the barrel, and it was not safe to use it until was filtered and boiled. A small section of the South side was lighted by gas; elsewhere some kind of oil was the illuminant for streets and houses."
At the time, the city was far smaller, extending only as far north as Fullerton Avenue and as far south as Pershing Road – then known as Egan Avenue. The western boundary of the city reached Crawford Avenue, now Pulaski Road. And the present-day Magnificent Mile was not part of the Michigan Avenue to which Livermore refers. At that time, Michigan Avenue north of the Chicago River was called Pine Street.
Most of the buildings Lincoln visited or worked in were destroyed in the Great Chicago Fire of 1871.
Adam Harrington, cbs2chicago.com
(© MMIX, CBS Broadcasting Inc. All Rights Reserved.)
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