ANDREW FERGUSON, AUTHOR, ”LAND OF LINCOLN”: Boy, I don’t know. I remember going down to see him – back in those days, people worked on Saturday still and he would take me down, sometimes, in the morning and – on a Saturday morning and there were old pictures of these old guys with walrus moustaches and he showed me one of Robert Todd Lincoln and a little light bell went off because I was already a Lincoln buff by the time I was six or seven, I’d say and it was a great, you know, it was sort of an elevating thing to think that our family had this kind of connection.

LAMB: Why were you a Lincoln buff at six or seven? Where’d you live?

FERGUSON: I don’t know. I think it’s something in the water in (INAUDIBLE) Illinois, which is the town I grew up in and I was – I grew up in an old house on Lincoln Street and of course, Illinois’s the Land of Lincoln and about a mile away there was an old house that people said, according to the legend, Lincoln had stayed in, in the 1850’s, as a traveling lawyer and politician and so there was this just, sort of this almost mystical presence hovering about of Lincoln consciousness. We also had a family relation to him. One of my ancestors is mentioned in the collected works of Abraham Lincoln, as having just died and Lincoln mentions it in a letter and so these were just things. There was – he was never far away.

LAMB: How important is that spot right behind you here at Ford’s Theater where Abraham Lincoln was shot and all the folklore that you went through writing your book?

FERGUSON: Well, I hate to start on such a mystical note but this is a place of mystical significance for us. This is the place where one story ended, Lincoln died obviously in the – actually in the boardinghouse across the street but it’s also the place where the story that I sort of try and tell, in this book, began; the martyrdom. You know, it was Good Friday. By Saturday morning, Holy Saturday, 7:00 a.m. he was dead. The country knew about it almost instantaneously thanks to the telegraph and everyone who had reviled him or at least, in the North, suddenly loved him. There were pictures of him being escorted into Heaven. There was even talk by preachers, the following Sunday, the next day, he’d been dead 48 hours or less, of you know, resurrection. Somehow, the country itself would be resurrected through the martyrdom of Father Abraham and although, the Lincoln cult’s never quite ever reached that pitch again, as I found when I traveled around the country, the intensity and the devotion, still is very strong among a lot of people.

LAMB: I don’t know if they still do but on the license plates of Illinois people, it says the Land of Lincoln.

FERGUSON: Absolutely, yes.

LAMB: Does it still say that?

FERGUSON: Yes.

LAMB: I think now you can get – I shouldn’t – I’m not sure. I think you can opt out now and you can get something about the Fighting Illini or something as opposed to just the Land of Lincoln but he was – this started in the 1950’s in Illinois. They needed a state slogan and a state legislator from central Illinois came up with the idea of Land of Lincoln. He liked the alliteration and everybody took to it and of course, at the time, we had a Senator Everett Dirksen who fancied himself as sort of a reincarnation of Lincoln almost and he (INAUDIBLE) a big stentorian voice and a florid style and he traveled the state talking up Lincoln. Then, 1961 comes along and it’s the bicentennial – it’s the centennial of the Civil War and that recreated even more interest in Lincoln and by 1965, you had the 100th anniversary of his death and once again, this sort of fever pitch began of intense Lincoln interest and devotion.

LAMB: Whose idea was it to call the book the ”Land of Lincoln?”

FERGUSON: It was mine. It’s always been, you know, I like alliteration as much as the next writer, so it was just in my head.

LAMB: What was your objective and when did you start this trail?

FERGUSON: Well, as I mentioned, I was a buff, growing up and then, you know, about high school or so, I wasn’t a buff any more and something was going on and this is in the early 70’s, the fever pitch from the centennial of the Civil War had kind of died away. There was – fewer history classes were being taught in the public schools. My own interests, sort of, wandered back towards the Beatles and then to Susan Day (ph) and I just remember Princess Caroline of Monaco was an object of special veneration of mine at the time but anyway, history just wasn’t as interesting either to me or to, I think, the country at large and he started to fade away and he just was in the background, still hovering but in the background and I thought that – I think Jan Morris (ph) who wrote a book about – a wonderful travel writer, British travel writer, wrote a book about Lincoln, in which he compared him to great jelly, like the great jelly you get when you go to a restaurant.

He’s just this sort of tepid, uninteresting substance that is just ubiquitous. You can’t get away from him but he’s just there and uninteresting and that was sort of the way I felt until one day, 2003 I think it was, my wife brought me the newspaper and it said, Lincoln statue stirs outrage in Richmond and it seemed like such a non sequitur Lincoln outrage. I mean how can you get outraged about Lincoln? It’s like objecting to the moon. He’s too big. He’s, you know, just sort of there and it turned out that some city fathers in Richmond, Virginia were trying to put in a statue to Abraham Lincoln of him and his son Todd to commemorate a visit they had taken there shortly after the capital of the confederacy fell in 1865.

Seemed like a wonderful idea to them but little did they know, a very large portion of their constituents didn’t like the idea at all and I read this story and I went down to Richmond and I decided to poke around and talk to them and I saw that you know what, there still is a passion about Lincoln. This happens to be a passionate hatred of Lincoln but he still is capable of arousing all kinds of deep inner stirrings in Americans and so, then, I thought, well you know – I wrote a long magazine article about the Richmond statue and I thought when I was done, you know, I’m not at the end of this. This is actually a much bigger story and that’s – from then, I just took off, got in my car and went around the country looking for Lincoln.

LAMB: You do have a chapter on, I think, his name was Tom DiLorenzo, is that right?

FERGUSON: Yes.

LAMB: Are they called the Lincoln haters?

FERGUSON: Yes. I mean I call – they don’t like to be called Lincoln haters because it sort of dismisses them. It sounds – and they’re not, although, they’re often caricatured as this way, they’re not just a bunch of racist vagabonds; some of them are quite sophisticated. DiLorenzo wrote a book called, ”The Real Lincoln,” which had just come out when the Lincoln statue went into Richmond and he was treated as sort of a hero by these Lincoln haters, as I call them or Abeaphobes (ph) was another coinage I had – the thing, when I was down in Richmond, the thing that struck me wasn’t just the intensity of the hatred for him among these sort of sons of confederate veterans and the sort of southern nostalgics and things, who thought that the wrong side lost the Civil War, I was also struck by the tepidness of the people who wanted to defend Lincoln.

There was a conference put on at the Virginia Historical Society, right before the statue was unveiled and it was a number of Lincoln scholars and people who were prominent in the field and the Lincoln that they presented, in opposition to this terrible Lincoln that the Lincoln haters had presented, was so touchy-feely (ph) and almost new age-y (ph). One of the guys said what we love about Lincoln is that he was comfortable with ambiguity and he was a figure who could always see the other side of an issue. Well that much is true but you know there’s nothing ambiguous about the way he prosecuted the Civil War. There’s nothing ambiguous about the Gettysburg Address. These are ringing declarations of something very important and so I thought, well that can’t be Lincoln and these are the guys friends and so, I thought – once again that’s where I thought, I’m not at the end of this story. I want to find out what do we know about Lincoln; how do we know what we know about Lincoln or what we think we know about him. Is he even knowable at all, 140 years after his death?

LAMB: Give us just quick highlights of all the different places you went in order to try to discover the real Lincoln.

FERGUSON: Well, let’s see from Richmond I went back to – well, the first thing I want to do, I went to bunch of books because I also realized hanging around with these Lincoln Haters, they knew a lot more than I did and here I was, the guy who had kind of grown up as a buff and they were much more conversant in the ins and outs of the Lincoln story than I was, so I discovered this character who wrote the first great Lincoln biography, a man named William Herndon (ph) who had been Lincoln’s law partner, who was a fascinating character. He called himself an infidel and a freethinker and was a big boozer, part-time politician; a fairly good lawyer apparently but basically, a very feckless guy who worshipped his law partner and ended up writing the great – the sort of the fountain of Lincoln lore. It comes from a book we now call Herndon’s (ph) Lincoln and the story of how he came to write that and how he learned about his law partner and the things he found out that he hadn’t expected to find out, is a fascinating story that hasn’t been told, I don’t think in this popular sort of way the scholars know about it and so, I delved into Herndon (ph) and saw that you could pull out of Herndon (ph) all the strands that led to Lincoln all around the country.

So from there I went to the place where I had learned to be a buff back in Chicago, Illinois, the Chicago Historical Society, which had once sort of been a shrine to Lincoln. It had wonderful stuff. It had his old carriage that he drove around Washington. It had his – the bed that he died in; just amazingly moving artifacts. They had also dioramas when I was a kid that were just beautiful little scenes from Lincoln’s life and you could stare into them for half-an-hour at a time, they were so evocative and so, I went back to Chicago, I wanted to see this and they were all gone. The bed was still there; some of the artifacts were still there but the historical society was no longer a shrine to Lincoln. There was, in fact, very little Lincoln left and I thought, well, this is – this tells us something about what’s happened to Lincoln.

I also found some amazing people in Chicago that we could talk about later and then, from there, I decided to go see Lincoln collectors; people who think that they can find Lincoln by holding this – buying and holding this stuff that he held himself or that he wrote on and I found that the greatest of all Lincoln collectors, in fact, one of the great collectors, in the United States, is a very wealthy woman who lives in, in all places, Beverly Hills, California and has a vault, which is a treasure trove of Lincoln and she was kind enough to take me into to show me this.

LAMB: You’re talking about Louise Taper (ph).

FERGUSON: Louise Taper (ph) is her name.

LAMB: How did she get into it and what did it look like up close, the – all the, you know, all the Lincoln paraphernalia?

FERGUSON: Well, it’s – I mean, for a buff, I mean it was – it’s – we were sitting in her vast living room and she popped up out of her chair and said, do you want to see the really good stuff because she’d shown me – she actually owns Abraham Lincoln’s chamber pot and I said, this is Lincoln’s chamber pot and I said, you own Abraham Lincoln’s chamber pot and she kind of looked at it, for a minute and she said, as though it had never occurred to her and said yes. Yes, I do and so, it was a moment of revelation for both of us, I think but she took me into her vault and showed me this – she’s a woman of superb taste and she always knew what she wanted in collecting Lincoln. She married a very wealthy philanthropist in Beverly Hills and she’d always – she’d been a buff for many years herself and her husband was a very generous man and said, I’ll back you in whatever you want to do and so, as she said herself, we really went to town and for the next 10 years she transformed the market in Lincoln collectables by buying one thing after another.

Prices in Lincoln memorabilia went up partly as a result and there are a lot of people, I think, in the Lincoln world, who resent the inflation of the market that Louise (ph), among others – Ross Perot was a big Lincoln collector and drove up a lot of the prices; Malcolm Forbes. So anyway, she was – there was something about her that showed me something about Lincoln that I hadn’t seen before. As I try and say, in the book, she – there was an aspect of Lincoln disclosed by her own devotion to him and particular to Lincoln’s wife. She’s a great collector of Mary Lincoln’s stuff.

LAMB: What’s she going to do with all this?

FERGUSON: She didn’t say. I mean we talked a little bit about it. You don’t really like to ask somebody what’s going to happen when they croak, you know, it’s – can I have that when you’re done. I think …

LAMB: But don’t you suspect somebody else has been asking her that?

FERGUSON: Oh, I’m sure. There was one moment when we were talking in her house and the Lincoln world, among the very – the scholars and so on, can be very fractious and there’s a lot of backbiting and resentments and bitterness and unresolved tensions and things and Louise (ph) said, you know, a lot of people don’t get along in it but I get along with everybody. And I said, well, why is that Louise (ph)? Why do you think that is and she said, because I’ve got the stuff and of course that’s true, so I think the poor woman is surrounded by guys who are just sort of – and she’s, you know, she’s very careful about it, as she should be. She loves the stuff. She doesn’t want it – she truly – that’s why I say, she’s a great collector. She – this stuff is important to her. This is not a hobby. This isn’t stuff she just likes to hang on the wall, so I think when she finally disposes of it, it will be done with great care.

LAMB: How valuable do you think that chamber pot is? How much …

FERGUSON: Oh, I don’t know. I couldn’t even imagine. I would ask around every once in a while about, you know, can you put a price on it? She has one of Lincoln’s – there are three top hats, Lincoln stovepipe top hats, she has one of them. Hers is considered the most evocative and moving because if you look very closely on the brim, there’s two fingerprints where Lincoln would it against the wind or doff his hat to people. Those are Abraham Lincoln’s fingerprints that you can see on the hat and – so, it’s beyond price. There’s really, I suppose, you know, given how eccentric people could be, it could be multiples of tens of millions of dollars.

LAMB: You paint a picture in your book about three states and a heritage trail, a Lincoln Heritage Trail with 960 miles divided evenly between the three states, is there still a heritage trail?

FERGUSON: It’s fallen into disuse. It started in the early 1960’s and I got this idea. My family took and to me, memory is a blissful trip seeing sights on the trail, the Lincoln Heritage Trail and I wanted to kind of piece it back together again for my own family. As I say, in the book, you know, either Lincoln mysticism is something that’s past from generation to generation and failing that I was going to cram it down their throats and see if they were going to take it, my own kids and it turned out, I had to cram it down their throats but anyway, the idea that I had of reconstructing the Lincoln Heritage Trail, which has now fallen into disuse, when you drive around the Midwest, you’ll see the old signs, where, if they’re quite handsome old silver signs and you know, they’ve been vandalized and torn down and gone to rest, so I thought, well, I’ll try and do it myself and I couldn’t find anybody who knew anything about the old heritage trail from the early 1960’s.

So I got on the phone and I called around and finally, a tourism official in Illinois said I know the guy you’ve got to talk to; he’s 87 years old, he lives in Champaign and he was the guy who actually put together the Lincoln Heritage Trail, so I called him up in Champaign and he was a wonderful, wonderful man and very talkative and I kind of just gushed at him. I said, you know, it is such an honor to speak to the man who created the Lincoln Heritage Trail because you know that’s the world I grew up in when people venerated Lincoln, they understood how important the past was; they would go to the trouble of making a trail like this and there was a pause and he said, well thanks but you know, this was all cooked up by the American Petroleum Institute. And I said it was and yes, you know, they wanted to get people in their cars buying gasoline, so they came up with this idea of a Lincoln Heritage Trail and there was one back East, a Washington Heritage Trail and we had a Hiawatha Heritage Trail, so you know, you scratch anything, in America and pretty soon you find a commercial motive.

LAMB: How much commercial motive is there around Lincoln?

FERGUSON: Oh, it’s astonishing. I mean you – especially, now in the Midwest, there’s – because I think there’s sort of a revival of interest in Lincoln, leading up to the bicentennial of his birth, which will be in 2009, so a lot of the communities in Illinois and a little bit less in Kentucky and Indiana where he also lived, as a child, are now sort of rousing themselves and realizing that there’s a dollar potential there. In the collectors market, for example, which is still very robust, you have – the demand for Lincoln stuff has so far outstripped the supply that – in the way that markets work, the supply has just sort of expanded into stuff you that you wouldn’t think was worth collecting at all. I mean there are matchbook covers from the Lincoln Life Insurance Company, in Ft. Wayne. My favorite example of it was there’s now a very hot market in forgeries of Lincoln’s signature. There was, apparently, in the 20’s and 30’s, a group of very successful forgers of guys who studied Lincoln’s signature and wrote a number of documents that they then sold. These are now, themselves, collector’s items, so you know, you can get farther and farther away from Lincoln but there’s still this, somehow, this mojo that people want to get hold of.

LAMB: We’re sitting in the Ford Playhouse, Ford’s Theater, in Washington, D.C. and there are 688 seats in here and right over your shoulder is the box where President and his wife and Major Rathbone and others were sitting the night that he was shot. This place is – was reconstructed in 1968; it opened up and they had shows here for the first time, I think, since the assassination but they’re going to do it again. They’re going to – in another 18 months they’re going to close it down – I mean they’re going to close it down for 18 months. The reason I bring this is up, is that I noticed in your book that almost no matter where you went and you would say, is this the real log cabin? Is this the actual spot where Lincoln did this or did that you’d find that well, not quite, give us an example of the Kentucky story?

FERGUSON: Yes. Well, the – sort of the climax of my dragging my poor family along the Heritage Trail …

LAMB: By the way, how old are those kids?

FERGUSON: Well now, they’re getting older and older, so 16 and 14 now; at the time, I think, they were 14 and 12.

LAMB: And you say they went – did they go reluctantly or …

FERGUSON: Very reluctant; you know this was a very hot summer. All their friends were, like, going to the beach or some of them went to Disneyland and they go up to the mountains or something and dad was going to take them, driving through borough Midwest to see Lincoln sites, so they were – you can imagine how ecstatic they were. Now, my wife, is herself, a history buff and so, she was all gung-ho, which I think made it even harder on the kids. I think if they had had an ally in their other it would’ve been easier on them but the climax of the trip, I concocted these various stratagems to, you know, to get – entice their interest and one was we would go backwards through Lincoln’s life. Why I thought this was a good idea I’m not sure but we would start at Springfield, which was the last place he lived in the Midwest and then we would travel back to the earlier places he’d lived in Illinois and then across the river into Indiana where he’d been a teenager and then end up in the holy of holies, the temple, on a little hill, in Hodgenville, Kentucky and in the temple, is the cabin in which Lincoln was born.

LAMB: A real temple.

FERGUSON: It is a temple. I mean it is a Greek temple built by John Russell Pope (ph) who designed the National Gallery of (INAUDIBLE) and neoclassical architect, a great architect, if you like that sort of thing but anyway, so this was – I said, you know, we’re getting down to Lincoln’s essence. We’re going to finally see where the loam that he sprung from, this is the real elemental Lincoln and I had been reading book by Ida Tarbell, who was a great Lincoln scholar and wonderful journalist from the early part of the century and she, herself, had gone to the cabin right after it had been put in and said how moving it was that this was the essence of Lincoln, so you walk up 57 marble stairs; you open these big brass doors and there, in this, as I say, sanctum cantorum, this holy of holies, is this little tiny cabin and it’s extremely moving if you’re an American who values our own roots as sort of a rural people and it’s people who come from nothing and made this fabulous country; deeply moving place and I was sitting there and I was thinking about all the things that Ida Tarbell had said and my kids were, I think, quite struck by it and the guard said, well – I was jotting in my notebook and he said, you know, this is what we call a symbolic cabin and I said well, actually, I read a lot about it and I said, you know, there was a whole team of forensic scientists who came in the 1920’s and determined that this was the Lincoln cabin and he said well, no actually, the History Channel was just here about a year ago and they were filming a show.

The park service let them take a core sample and they discovered that the cabin, in the middle of this holy of holies, in this beautiful sylvan setting, dated from the 1850’s, which is 40 years after Lincoln was born. So it’s not the cabin and there was something about that that was sort of summary to me. It’s kind of – the more you look for him, he splits away from you. It’s like mercury. There’s – you can never pin him down and I think that that’s probably because, as I say, he’s been dead for 140 years but there is something elusive and mysterious about Lincoln to the people who knew him best and as he comes down to us, in history, he’s always just out of reach, I think. That doesn’t mean that he isn’t important but that cabin symbolized that for me.

LAMB: What did you find behind the scenes in Springfield, Illinois kind of the headquarters of Lincoln land?

FERGUSON: Well, Springfield – you mentioned about the commercial possibilities that are being exploited. Springfield, of course, is the town where he lived as a man; practiced law. The only home he ever owned is there and Springfield has tried, from the very beginning, to exploit it’s Lincoln connections. That’s a pejorative term. I guess I should – exploit’s the right word. This dates back from the very beginning. Lincoln died on a Friday. Saturday morning word reached Springfield and that afternoon the city fathers were trying to buy up a parcel of land that they could use as his burial place and the place they chose was right at the intersection of two railroad lines, so that as people went through Springfield, they would see this big tomb that they were going to build for Lincoln and then, maybe, stop and spend the night; spend some money; buy some meals, souvenirs, whatever, so they always had this on their mind. This is – same impulse is now finally culminated in the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum, which cost over $150 million and which just opened last year and – two years ago now – yes, 2005 in Springfield and it’s a fabulously expensive and elaborate place.

LAMB: You write about Bob Rogers (ph).

FERGUSON: Right.

LAMB: Who is he?

FERGUSON: The people in Springfield decided they wanted to have a state of the art museum. They didn’t want something old and fuddy-duddy and the kind of thing that would appeal to people like me. They wanted something that would appeal to kids and be loud and noisy and so they sought out what they thought was the best kind of historical museums and sites like that. There’s a point now where historical sites, museums and theme parks are all sort of merging together and one of the guys whose behind that whole movement is this guy Bob Rogers (ph) who is a former Disney employee; lives out in Burbank, California; has a huge studio there; several hundred employees. Has worked for NASA and a number of places in developing these sort of theme parks/educational/museum, so they hired him; a very colorful and indeed, brilliant man; full of energy with – who brought a kind of Hollywood ethos to Lincoln that had never been there before. A lot of Lincoln scholars were appalled that this, sort of vulgarian that’s my term not theirs, would be taking their sainted figure and turning him into a rubber dummy, as they have done, in the museum.

In various tableaus, you see Lincoln in his log cabin; Lincoln in a store in New Salem; Lincoln about to get shot right here and this is one of the tableaus they have in the – life-sized tableaus they have in the museum, so there was certain quarters where there was terrible outrage, among Lincoln traditionalists. More often, though, what I saw was, especially, when people in Springfield, it was, we finally figured out a way to make Lincoln pay. You know, this is actually going to be a moneymaker for us and it has been wildly successful.

LAMB: Let me read from your own book because it has a lot of – when you talk about Bob Rogers (ph), you’re quoting him. You say he says it all emotional, Bob (ph) had said, as though giving me a hint and there’s no mistaking when you walk through the museum, you’re meant to feel sympathy for Lincoln, even feel sorry for him. Pulled from room-to-room, you’re asked to be touched by his humble beginnings; you have a parenthetical expression that many of our presence were born for. You feel terrible Mr. Rogers (ph) says because his son dies an agonizing death but many presence you say here watched helpless as their children died. We ache Bob Rogers (ph) said because he was reviled and you say most presence were reviled by somebody and because he had an explicable marriage and then you say, hello Mr. and Mrs. Clinton. Bob Rogers (ph) says it’s not a Lincoln and a Jane Adams (ph). Now, I may have – this may be your words.

FERGUSON: No that – yes, this is me.

LAMB: Yes, this is you. It’s not a Lincoln and Jane Adams (ph) would walk five miles to see or a Lincoln that would inspire Mr. Esch (ph), if he ever returns to Springfield. In the end, what you come up with is that he’s interesting because a lot of people, over the past 150 years, have been interested in him. He’s been hated and loved; pondered and studied; honored and mourned, so intensely for so long that it doesn’t seem to matter why. He’s reached the zenith of American celebrity. He’s famous for being famous.

FERGUSON: Yes.

LAMB: I mentioned a name in there that you wrote about Mr. Esch (ph).

FERGUSON: Yes.

LAMB: Can you tell that story? Who is Mr. Esch (ph)?

FERGUSON: He was one of the – as I said, there were many fascinating people in Chicago. He was one of the ones I met. I heard about him in another book. He was briefly mentioned. He runs a tie – he’s a Thai immigrant. He and his wife came here in the early 70’s and as he said opened the second Thai restaurant in Chicago.

LAMB: And with the name Esch (ph)?

FERGUSON: Esche (ph), yes.

LAMB: Esche (ph).

FERGUSON: Oscar Esche (ph), I think is how he pronounced it.

LAMB: And he’s Thai?

FERGUSON: And he’s Thai, yes and is just a wonderful gentle man and they were kind enough to show me their restaurant, in which, there is a shrine to Abraham Lincoln and he raised his family to venerate Lincoln and that’s why I mention him there. He – Lincoln, for him, was a way to become an American. This is also true of Jane Adams (ph), the founder of Hull House who I mention there. They saw in Lincoln a gateway into the country; into the things you believe and the way you behave as an American, Lincoln symbolized to them and so, Mr. Esche (ph) would always bring his children to Springfield every year, as he raised them and my point in that and there’s actually a very funny anecdote that I guess I won’t go into here, right now but my point about the Lincoln Museum, was all of that kind of content had been drained away from Lincoln and in it’s place was this sort of Hollywood ethos, as I said, a sort of Disney razzmatazz. That what you end up with is a question mark, in the middle; why again, do we love him and revere him? Why have people been obsessed with him for 150 years and as I say, it’s a question that kept coming up as I – wherever I would go and I hope I answered it in the end.

LAMB: Back to Springfield because you paint a picture about a woman Julie Cellini (ph) and her husband and then you add Richard Norton-Smith (ph) to it and then you have Bob Rogers (ph) over here and then you have the Lincoln world, the Springfield crowd versus the northeast crow.

FERGUSON: Right.

LAMB: Explain all that and …

FERGUSON: Well, this is …

LAMB: … do they get along?

FERGUSON: No and this is sort of what Louise Taper (ph), Mrs. Taper (ph) had mentioned to me that you know, people – there’s a lot of factions involved here. When you move around really committed Lincoln buffs, scholars, authors, hobbyists, collectors, enthusiasts of all kinds you start to hear them darkly whisper the word Springfield and what Springfield represents is the kind of failure in the preservation of Lincoln. Springfield is extremely possessive of Lincoln. They have wonderful artifacts. Obviously, his – the home is there and so on and people outside of Springfield think that they’re too possessive; that they cling to him; that they don’t understand him well enough and I talked about several people in there who, as I say, kind of view Springfield as a dirty word.

I really don’t have that strong a feeling about what’s – I think the people in Springfield have more or less done as best as they can and there’s something in the hatred of Springfield, among non-Springfield Lincoln buffs that is very much like what Lincoln himself experienced. He was from nowhere by – Easterners thought of you know, this hick from nowhere; he must be a nobody. He can’t have any great talent and as I say in the book, it’s almost though, when you talk to the – especially, in New York or elsewhere, Lincoln buffs that say, you know, how could somebody so great come from nowheresville (ph), you know, he should’ve come from the Upper East Side, you know or at least Yonkers or you know, Nyack but instead, he came out of this, you know, this two-horse town in the middle of nowhere, which is still kind of is actually but to me that is key to Lincoln’s greatness, too.

LAMB: You went to Santa Claus, Indiana among other places.

FERGUSON: Right, yes.

LAMB: You went to a convention there, what was the …

FERGUSON: I hit a gold mine on that one. I had heard about an association called the ALP, Abraham Lincoln Presenters and it is a group of now, I think, almost 300 people, most of whom, make their living impersonating Abraham Lincoln and I wanted to go to one of these conventions and it just happened to be my great, good fortune that they were having their convention in Santa Claus, Indiana, so it’s sort of the kind of thing you thank the journalism gods for so the convention was actually held of 150 Abraham Lincoln Presenters in Santa’s Lodge, in Santa Claus, Indiana, so you had kind of a collision of icons. You had Santa, on the one hand and Lincoln on the other and it was surreal but also, wonderfully elevated. I mean these guys are eccentric, as you would think. A lot of them know a great deal about Abraham Lincoln. A very large number of them have no resemblance to Abraham Lincoln whatsoever. I mean I – my grandmother looked more like Abraham Lincoln than some of these guys.

The first one I saw, in fact, was standing out in front of Santa’s Lodge and he was five foot six and maybe, the same around. You know, he was basically – I couldn’t tell if he was the Santa or if the statue of the Santa was the Santa but anyway – and then I went in and met them all and there were an awful lot like that and I said to one of them once, you know, he was bald; he was, as I say, about five seven; rotund. I said, you know, did it ever really bother you that you really don’t look very much like Lincoln? Did that ever stop you and he goes, well Lincoln was not a good looking man and so, I realized that if he had justified in himself now because Lincoln was not quite as good looking as he was that he still could go off and – because for them, Lincoln was – is a spiritual matter. You know, it’s not even a physical resemblance. There’s some essence to him that they’re trying to conjure up and some of them are quite good at it.

LAMB: Were your kids with you for this?

FERGUSON: No, unfortunately, they – we went through Santa Claus later when did the trail, when I was dragging them along the heritage trail.

LAMB: What are their names, by the way?

FERGUSON: Gillum, G-I-L-L-U-M, which is an old family name and Emily (ph), Emily Ann Ferguson (ph).

LAMB: Your son sounds like he has the same sense of humor that you have.

FERGUSON: Sarcastic, cynical and …

LAMB: Yes.

FERGUSON: No, he’s not a cynic at all. He’s – well, they both have great senses of humor, which is why I knew that I could spring this on them and it wouldn’t be too bad. I think that they saw this kind of absurdity inherent and there were moments when I think I really pushed them too far. I had – one morning, in Springfield, when I was taking them along. As I say, my wife was totally onboard that she …

LAMB: What’s her name?

FERGUSON: Denise (ph); she really – she’s a Lincoln buff herself and a history buff and – but I took them around Springfield and of course, Springfield now is kind of slightly down at the heels and most of the places that Lincoln knew have been torn down and I took them to a parking lot and I said, this is where the Globe Tavern stood and I could see my son wince, he’s going to tell us all about the Globe Tavern and he said, what’s the Globe Tavern and I told him what the Globe Tavern was, which is Abraham Lincoln and Mary Lincoln spent their wedding night and where Robert Todd Lincoln had been born, nine months later and I stopped suddenly and I realized I had been taking them around Springfield all morning and had yet to show them one building that was still standing. I’d shown them empty blocks; I’d show them the site of this and where this had been and I thought this is too cruel to these kids. I should – I’ve got to let up. I didn’t though; I kept at it.

LAMB: Go back to Santa Claus, Indiana and impersonators, you say they don’t like to be called impersonators.

FERGUSON: Absolutely not. I think for them, rightly so, impersonator conjures up ideas of Las Vegas acts of you know, guys in feather boas pretending to be Carol Channing or something and they have a much more serious mission and – I mean they’re not lugubrious people but they’re – but as I say, it’s a spiritual thing for a lot of them. They want people to know about Lincoln. They’re worried that we’re forgetting Lincoln and …

LAMB: But you point out, in the book, some of these guys had tennis shoes on and were sleeping in their cars.

FERGUSON: Well, it’s a lonely life and it’s not a very lucrative life and lot of the guys at Santa’s Lodge were out in their cars sleeping there at night and I’d come in, in the morning, you know and I’d find them in the restroom off the lobby, you know, doing a towel bath and then putting on the stovepipe hat and brushing off the lapels and give a little tug and you could just see them transform themselves in the mirror to – into Lincoln.

LAMB: What do they charge for their services?

FERGUSON: There was a big debate about that actually, which I record in the book. At that time, which was a few years ago, a couple years ago, they were hoping to get $250 for a good school appearance. That means an hour to 1.5 hour school assembly and I suppose that the antitrust division of the Justice Department would swoop in and get them for collusion if they found out that there was actually this kind of negotiating going on among them but then later, privately, several of them told me $250 is way out, you know, you’re lucky to get 50 sometimes, you know. You’re doing ribbon cutting; you lead a Memorial Day parade; you can’t ask for more than $50.

LAMB: You found a Lincoln collector, also, on the East Coast.

FERGUSON: Right, Frank Williams (ph) who is the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of the State of Rhode Island; a very impressive man who is, I believe or at least he said so, the owner of the largest Lincoln – privately owned Lincoln collection in America. Louise has the best; Frank (ph) has the biggest and Frank (ph) is also, by acclamation, partly his own, the leading figure in the Lincoln world. He’s ubiquitous. You cannot turn around without bumping into Chief Williams (ph). He’s extremely energetic and I think the man must sleep three hours a night, I don’t know because he runs the judicial system of the entire state even if it Rhode Island and does a magnificent job from everything I can tell. He’s a very – a man of great integrity.

LAMB: But I gathered from your chapter, you were tweaking him a little bit.

FERGUSON: He’s tweakable (ph) and you know, I want to convey my respect for him, which is formidable. His energies and his ambition and so on, I think, are all very laudable and he’s done a lot to try and bring Lincoln to life for people. On the other hand, he has – his e-mail, for example, is alincoln@ and the address. There are moments in talking to him, where Lincoln and Frank Williams (ph) get kind of mixed up. I mean they’re sort – you’re not sure whose – which is one and which is the other. I think the intensity of his personal relationship to Lincoln is such that – and he draws such sustenance from learning about Lincoln’s intellectual battles, his political battles and so on that there’s almost a symbiosis in Chief Justice Williams (ph) mind that is taking place. This is not unusual I should say. I mean I have Frank (ph) in there because he’s a perfect example of a phenomenon that’s quite widespread among Lincoln lovers.

LAMB: What did you see when you went to visit him?

FERGUSON: Well, he has the most amazing office. They’re his judge’s chambers, as we call them, which is filled with Lincoln statuary and Lincoln memorabilia, some really wonderful pieces. A copy of the Emancipation Proclamation that was bound by the Freed Men of I believe Shreveport, Louisiana and presented to Lincoln, various Lincoln papers and signatures and quite – really quite beautiful things but you can’t turn around without seeing some image of Lincoln everywhere and he said, Lincoln is always here with me and I said that’s absolutely true in the physical sense, too, because you know, I mean he can’t reach out without touching some representation of Lincoln; some of them humorous and some of them quite moving. He has in his basement of his home that he was kind enough to show me, a very, very depressing depiction on his knees in the White House bedroom, almost at the end of his rope. It was painted by James Montgomery Flagg (ph) whose the guy who did the I Want You posters from World War I; did Uncle Sam and all that and anyway, these are things of intense meaning to him, to Williams (ph) as a collector, so it’s not just him as a collector that I wanted to show but also the way that people get their whole lives mixed up in Lincoln and it’s hard disentangle.

LAMB: As you know, about 15 years ago, there was a split that occurred between Abraham Lincoln Association and Springfield and now, what Chief Justice Williams (ph) runs, which is – and holds as the Vice Chairman something called the Lincoln Forum.

FERGUSON: Right.

LAMB: What happened there?

FERGUSON: It depends on who you talk to. That’s the way these things go. Again, the people outside of Springfield will whisper darkly that it’s this blob called Springfield, sort of, ejected Williams (ph) and Holter (ph) as reformers because they had come in from outside Springfield. This is an old, sleepy organization called the Abraham Lincoln Association, which was founded in the first centennial. It’s been sort of a keeper of the Lincoln flame nationally. To people outside it is thought of as very provincial and not scholarly and kind of more of a social club for Springfield’s first families. According to Williams’ (ph) account, he came in and he wanted to shake things up. He wanted outreach. He wanted more publicity for the group. He wanted to inspire more scholarly research and the people in Springfield simply weren’t having it and so, after – again, the particulars are up for debate but after a couple of terms as head of the Abraham Lincoln Association, one group of Springfielders (ph) got together and ejected Frank (ph) and several – many, many Lincoln people went with him and are no longer members of the association or if they are, they have no real other connection to it and Frank (ph) went and started the Lincoln Forum, so now you have these two large Lincoln organizations dedicated to advancing the memory and legacy of Abraham Lincoln and a very large number of the members don’t talk to each other.

LAMB: Another sacred spot in Lincoln lore is Gettysburg; you had a most unusual trip to Gettysburg.

FERGUSON: Right. Well, you know, it’s a funny thing about Lincoln because – you know, you had said about the commercial possibilities. Lincoln very early on was used by – well, the foremost example was Dale Carnegie, the man who wrote How Win Friends and Influence People and he saw in Lincoln, the exemplar of the secret of success. Lincoln, of course, didn’t get rich, not really rich; he was well off but because Lincoln was saving the Union and freeing the slaves and these other things but in Lincoln’s personality and his habits and his thought processes and his behavior towards other people, these were things that were transferable to the average American and if you, as he said, ask yourself what would Lincoln do?

In any given situation you would be better off and you’d end up making money and you’d become a success and you’d climb the corporate ladder and he wrote an entire biography of Lincoln and then used Lincoln heavily in how to wind friends and influence people. This is all back in the 20’s and 30’s. Well, this tradition is still alive I discovered. I wasn’t quite prepared to discover but Lincoln is now used in several places as a management guru and again, that’s a pejorative term that I don’t think those people would want to use but he is considered as a guy who can give you the secret to capitalistic success and how to climb the corporate ladder and make a buck.

Now, of all – as I went around the country, I thought, you know, what is the most farfetched thing that people have done with Lincoln? I mean there’s, you know, there are people who say there was a gay Lincoln. Lincoln’s been used as a poster boy for manic depression. You know, for – he’s a racist; he’s a liberal; he’s a conservative (INAUDIBLE) Marxist said he was a Marxist and what is the most farfetched and I thought the one – it’s got to be that Lincoln was a great businessman. Lincoln was – has a key to business success because as I go into great depth in the book, Lincoln was a terrible businessman. He was completely disorganized. He was a terrible boss, in the sense that we think of as a boss. He was, you know, he would be a micro-manager on one minute and then be in total indifferent to a subordinate and another minute he kept all of his notes in his hat. You know, he forgot to cash his paychecks and so on, so that this is really the most farfetched Lincoln I’ve come across so far but then I went to a leadership seminar held by Tigrett Corp in Gettysburg.

LAMB: Tigrett?

FERGUSON: Tigrett, T-I-G-R-E-T-T Corp and it’s a husband and wife team and they now have several employees who teach – bring in CEOs, government bureaucrats, vice presidents of corporations and those sorts of things and try and teach them how Lincoln led his – the country and his people and it turned out, not to be farfetched at all. I mean it is sort of in a way, I suppose but what they really do is they teach you a lot of history and you learn a great deal about Lincoln and …

LAMB: And you were right at the table with their clients.

FERGUSON: Oh yes, I sat through the seminar and did all the exercises and so on with them and met a couple of very colorful people, one of whom was a terrible Lincoln skeptic who had run Tom DiLorenzo’s (ph), The Real Lincoln that we spoke about before and he had all the statistics about, you know, what a monster Lincoln was and how many people he threw in jail and how many newspapers he shut down and blah, blah, blah and – I shouldn’t say blah, blah, blah those are serious points but anyway and then there were people who loved Lincoln at the table who were shocked to hear these things, so we had a nice debate going back and forth but in the end, I realized that was the Tigrett people were doing and what Dale Carnegie had done earlier; what a man named Don Phillips (ph) and his hugely successful book, Lincoln on Leadership had done, was something quite valuable and I go into it in the book but again, it was a very uplifting, wonderful experience. I mean – and of course, I went into it, what a bunch of nonsense but it wasn’t nonsense at all.

LAMB: What did you see in Gettysburg itself?

FERGUSON: Gettysburg is a very odd place, you know and I figured that it’s got a kind of – sort of a wasted feel to it. It doesn’t, you know, you’d think that they would have done all kinds of things to capitalize – they have two million visitors a year or more and – but there are no sort of like yuppie restaurants, no high-end gift shops …

LAMB: Put that into perspective that’s twice as many as visitors as the Supreme Court has a year.

FERGUSON: Yes, sure. Yes. Of course, they don’t have any yuppie restaurants at the Supreme Court either but that’s – they’ll get it sooner or later. But you know and I – it comes from the odd nature of the place. This is a place where several hundred thousand men got together for three days trying to kill each other and 11,000 of them succeeded and to try and turn a place like this into a vacation spot, you’re going to get a kind of a cognitive dissonance there.

LAMB: What’s the Perry Como statue?

FERGUSON: Right underneath the window of the house where Lincoln wrote the Gettysburg address or touched up the Gettysburg address, the night before he delivered it, on the Gettysburg Square, is a statue of Lincoln with Perry Como or so it said. Actually, what it is, is it’s Lincoln life-size next to sort of every man tourist.

LAMB: By the way, for those who might not remember who it was.

FERGUSON: People have forgotten Perry Como, this is awful to say the least. He was a crooner, a sort of a Frank Sinatra without the overtones of danger and sexuality but anyway, so he just looks like every man, which was Perry Como’s appeal and he’s in a cable neck sweater and Lincoln is talking to him. One of the things I do, in the book and I’ve tried to, as a theme to weave in, is everywhere I went I found a new Lincoln statue. Lincoln statuary is a fascinating subject in and of itself. It reflects this – our own changing view of Lincoln. The opening chapter’s about the statue that was put in at Richmond, which is a very small, life-size statue. The last chapter is about Lincoln Memorial, which of course, is a huge Lincoln statue and there’s a lot to learn about how we’ve seen Lincoln and what we think of him now by the kind of statues we put up and the one in Gettysburg is incredibly banal and sort of cartoonish and silly and it’s considered by most Lincoln buffs to be the low point of Lincoln iconography.

LAMB: On the galley proofs of your book, it says that they plan a first printing of 100,000.

FERGUSON: Right.

LAMB: That’s a lot of books in today’s world.

FERGUSON: Yes.

LAMB: Why do you think so many?

FERGUSON: They’re either …

LAMB: And does that make you nervous?

FERGUSON: They’re either nuts or – no, I don’t really get nervous about – I think that it reflects the continuing interest in Lincoln. The publisher likes the book I’m happy to say and they think they it’d make a great Father’s Day book. For example, it comes right before Father’s Day and so, I think they think that there’s a market for it and there is a market for Lincoln, as we’ve just seen in the last year, with the success of James Swanson’s (ph) book, Manhunt and of course, Doris (INAUDIBLE) magisterial (ph) book. We can’t shake him. We’re never going to get rid of him and the point of my book is, we can’t. We shouldn’t and we shouldn’t even try.

LAMB: But there – I mean, one of the things that I’m not sure we got across in this hour, is you stick a little pin in folks along the way, more than once with your humor.

FERGUSON: Right. Well, I want it to be entertaining and I, you know, this is really – it’s sort of a slightly cockeyed look at a lot of what’s going on and it’s very hard for me to look on something straight beam and I found it amusing but not just amusing. It is funny and it’s wonderful and – but it’s also – there’s a lot of wisdom in these people. There’s a lot of deeply poignant things about them, so it’s all mixed in together.

LAMB: Where did you get the cover?

FERGUSON: The cover was this – designed by the publisher and a Lincoln presenter whose name escapes me right now – I wish – I should know was brought in to do it and in typical Lincoln presenter fashion, he said he would agree to do it and I think they even have is Web site there.

LAMB: It’s Pete Raymond (ph).

FERGUSON: Right. I think he has a Web site.

LAMB: peteraymond.com.

FERGUSON: Right and – you know, he’s a perfect Lincoln guy but he didn’t want to do it for money unless he read the book first because much more important to him than the job, was to know whether or not this was a Lincoln enterprise with supporting. What’s his tie and was it going to be good for (A) but was it going to be bad and that’s very typical.

LAMB: Now, on the back, I mean people often pick these books up and look whose endorsing it and you got some real Lincoln scholar there, Doris Kearns Goodwin; Jay Winnick (ph), did 1865; Christopher Buckley; P.J. O’Rourke, those are people I think you worked with in the magazine.

FERGUSON: … old friends of mine.

LAMB: And Walter Isaacson, who did Benjamin Franklin and Richard Brookhiser.

FERGUSON: Of the Einstein book and yes, Richard Brookhiser.

LAMB: Is it hard – just got a couple of seconds, is it hard to find people to endorse a book like this and does it make a difference?

FERGUSON: I have no idea whether it makes a difference. I think it makes a difference at a certain level of – in the book business that people think, OK, this book has passed under the gaze of Walter Isaacson and therefore, it might be worth taking seriously. I don’t know if somebody picks up the – I mean, if I pick a book and I see that P.J. O’Rourke (ph) has endorsed it, I’m going to take it seriously, you know, it means it’s going to be a good book and I hope that’s what people take away from this. These are old – a couple of them are old friends of mine and the others I bribed.

LAMB: Andrew Ferguson, author of ”Land of Lincoln.” Thanks for joining us here at Ford’s Theater.

FERGUSON: It’s wonderful to be here really, thank you.