University still honors Lincoln 140 years after his death
People in this part of Appalachia have a long history of support for Lincoln and the Union. The statue stands at the entrance to Lincoln Memorial University, which also has a Lincoln museum visited by 17,000 people a year.
School officials placed a wreath in front of the statue this past week during a small ceremony to mark the 140th anniversary of Lincoln’s death.
“His ideas and vision led to the planting of a flower called Lincoln Memorial University and for that we honor his memory and remain thankful,” Michael Clyburn, the university’s vice president for academic affairs and provost, said during the ceremony.
During the Civil War, Lincoln talked about sending the Union army into east Tennessee through the Cumberland Gap, an actual split in the Cumberland Mountains at Harrogate that was an early gateway to the Western frontier.
The university’s museum has a letter Lincoln wrote in 1862 suggesting the strategy, and in 1863, he told Gen. O. O. Howard he wanted to help people in the area.
“They are loyal there. They are loyal! General, if you come out of this horror and misery alive, and I pray to God that you may, I want you to do something for those mountain people who have been shut out of the world all these years. I know them. If I live, I will do all that I can to aid, and between us, perhaps we can do them justice they deserve,” Lincoln was reported as saying as he pointed to the area on a map.
A group of Unionists who became known as the Bridge Burners were among those who hoped the army would invade east Tennessee and laid the groundwork by burning railroad bridges in 1861 to cut off supplies to the Confederates. The Union army didn’t follow.
“They got rounded up, and five of them were actually executed by the Confederates,” said Michael Toomey, staff historian at the East Tennessee Historical Society in Knoxville.
“It was a nasty time in east Tennessee, and Lincoln felt bad that these Bridge Burners and others had done their part and continued to support the Union and yet nothing was being done to relieve their problems.”
There were small skirmishes but no large battles fought at Cumberland Gap, and the area changed hands four times before the Union eventually took control of the region.
Lincoln was assassinated in 1865, but Howard remembered the president’s wish. Along with the Rev. A. A. Myers, he founded the university in 1897 in Lincoln’s honor. They located the campus on the site of a former hotel, hospital and sanitarium.
People in Harrogate were happy to have the university — unlike the reaction in Richmond, Va., where a Lincoln statue was dedicated in 2003, 138 years after he visited the former capital of the Confederacy.
The region has remained a Republican stronghold since Lincoln’s day, producing such politicians as former U.S. Senator Howard Baker of nearby Scott County.
They even call the Lincoln Memorial sports teams the Railsplitters, a nickname used during Lincoln’s campaign recalling his younger days splitting logs with an ax to make fences.
Nevertheless, the shop in the Abraham Lincoln Library and Museum on campus sells both Confederate and American flags.
“There are both sides to the war,” said the museum’s director, Charles Hubbard.
Col. Harland Sanders gave the university $500,000 several years after starting Kentucky Fried Chicken to help build the library and museum to store all the Lincoln documents and artifacts accumulating at the university.
Completed in 1977, the museum is much smaller than the 40,000-square-foot, $145 million Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum opened recently in Springfield, Ill., where Lincoln lived before he became president.
But there are plenty of artifacts for interested students and history buffs willing to go out of their way to visit the small town about 45 miles north of Knoxville.
The university’s museum has the largest oil painting ever made of Lincoln, Civil War uniforms, a bed from Cincinnati where Lincoln slept on the way to his inauguration, and the plaster mold of Lincoln’s face and hands used for a sculpture.
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On the Net:
Lincoln Memorial University: http://www.lmunet.edu