Forget the Politics - Visit Places Closest to President Lincoln's Heart

Signs along Illinois highways mark places where Abraham Lincoln ate, slept, debated and visited. No signs mark where he sought love, found love and lost love.

That takes a little homework, but the places in Lincoln's heart are just as visible as the statues that mark his debates with Stephen Douglas and the building that housed his law offices.

One can argue that this trail of the heart is more important than the markers of politics and law. It has been said that Lincoln may not have entered politics were it not for a broken heart.

Lincoln was not a native son of Illinois, but was born in a rough log cabin in Kentucky and then moved to Indiana. Eventually his family moved to the wilderness prairie of Illinois.

A good place to start on Lincoln's Love Trail is to visit the restored village of New Salem. It is here that Lincoln first found love, and it is here where it was lost.

Any visitor to New Salem today will be surprised at how tiny this little log cabin village is. It clings to the bluff over the Sandman River like a clump of tress on bare rock, and well it should. New Salem at the time of Lincoln represented a bit of reprise from the harsh and hard surroundings of the Illinois prairie. Today you can take a self guided tour of the approximately 700 acres and literally walk in Lincoln's footsteps.

The most important place to pause in this tour is the Rutledge Tavern. It was here that Lincoln first encountered Ann Rutledge. She was by accounts a blond haired woman of just under five and a half feet tall, compared to Lincoln's six foot four towering height. A bit of an odd couple, maybe, consider Lincoln's height was well above the norm for men at the time, and this is way before the famous stove pipe hat.

Lincoln and Ann Rutledge struck up a friendship that was described by some to be a simple one of companionship and by others as a deep romance. There is no question they shared time together, as evidenced by an English grammar book that survives today with both their names written on the cover for ownership.

Like many romances things were complicated. Ann was engaged to another man, John McNamar, who had left to go back East and was gone for several years.

Ann, however, might be forgotten to time if she had been able to marry McNamar. Because she didn't, and because she didn't marry Lincoln as well, she is immortalized.

Most American Literature students have read the famous words by Edgar Lee Masters about Lincoln's love. He is writing about Ann Rutledge, and can be found on the second stop on the trail.

Not far from the New Salem Historical site and State Park is the small town of Petersburg, just off of Illinois 97. In 1890 Ann Rutledge's grave was moved to the town cemetery. Here she lies today, and these words from Master's Spoon River Anthology are on the large grave stone:

Out of me unworthy and unknown
The vibrations of deathless music;
'With malice toward none, with charity for all.'
Out of me the forgiveness of millions toward millions,
And the beneficient face of a nation
Shining with justice and truth.
I am Anne Rutledge who sleep beneath these weeds,
Beloved in life of Abraham Lincoln,
Wedded to him, not through union,
But through separation.
Bloom forever, O Republic,
From the dust of my bosom!

It's a favorite spot for tourists to take pictures, but this is not where Lincoln grieved for Ann.

That's a little further north, in the old Concord Burial Ground. Here was Ann's first resting spot, and today the stones in the cemetery give silent testimony to the depth of the love between the two. To get to the little grave yard you can park at the side of the road and take a short trail between two fields.

Lincoln was said to have gone crazy with Ann's death. No picture exists of her today, so we can not gaze into her eyes as Lincoln no doubt did. Though there is controversy as to how involved the two were --some say just friends and some say engaged to be married -- there is eye witness testimony that before Ann died (mostly likely of typhoid fever), Lincoln and Ann spent some time together as she lay on her death bed. Upon her dying is said to have wandered about New Salem and the country muttering to himself.

A year later or so and the trail of Lincoln's love travels to Springfield, Illinois, about twenty miles from New Salem. Lincoln left the little settlement behind for good to practice law in the new state capitol. He was alone for a bit, then took up acquaintance with Mary Owen.

Mary Owen was said to suffer from caparison with Ann. The two didn't resemble each other at all, Mary being much taller and stouter, though she was educated and good company. It is said that both had contemplated marriage, but it was Lincoln that eventually brushed her away.

Springfield was also the location of Lincoln's courting of Mary Todd. Mary Todd and Lincoln eventually married, and had children. The only house Lincoln ever owned is in Springfield, and though Mary Todd, too, was said to suffer at comparisons with Ann --and to be jealous of the dead woman-- it is believed that Lincoln did find some degree of love in this house.

There is one more stop along Lincoln's Love Trail, and it is a sad one. Mary Todd Lincoln suffered a lot in her life. There was the nagging doubt, perhaps, of Lincoln's love for her, the death of her children, and, of course, the trauma of being seated next to Lincoln when he was murdered at Ford's Theater in Washington DC.

Mary Todd Lincoln, ten years after the death of her husband, was institutionalized by her only surviving son, in a facility in Batavia, Illinois. Bellevue Place was a private sanitarium and Mary Todd Lincoln spent four months here, before a court in Chicago declared that she was, indeed, sane. The building still stands but is private and not open for tours.

Batavia is a western suburb of Chicago, and is miles from the the region downstate where Lincoln found and lost love. It is still an important stop, because the events that took place here were said to be the direct result of a young man's falling in love with a young woman and his never quite recovering from her death.

Because he never recovered from her loss he threw his energies into public office, executed and suffered through a terrible war that set slaves free, and preserved the union of the states.

The country lived though Lincoln's heart, a part of it anyway, died.