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to the University of Illinois Abraham Lincoln Bicentennial Web site. We kicked off our celebration in March 2008 with Pulitzer Prize-winning Civil War historian James M. McPherson's Lincoln Bicentennial Lecture, "Tried by War: Lincoln as Commander-in-Chief," to a standing-room-only audience at the Alice Campbell Alumni Center in Urbana.
We're continuing the celebration with events, performances, projects, speakers, exhibits, classes and other learning activities on all three of our campuses — Urbana-Champaign, Chicago and Springfield — through April 2010. Lincoln, our 16th president, of course, was born in Kentucky in 1809 and spent part of his youth in Indiana, and those states are rightfully proud of the association.
But Illinois is officially and unarguably the Land of Lincoln. It was here in Illinois that Lincoln honed his rhetorical skills as an attorney, learned the ABCs of politics in his youthful legislative career and started his family. During the 1858 senatorial campaign he engaged in the legendary series of debates with Stephen A. Douglas that plumbed the deepest and most controversial issues in the young nation's history. And although Lincoln lost that election, he was by then the mature, fully formed philosophical and moral statesman prepared to play the leading role on the nation's center stage.
So it was from Illinois that Lincoln embarked on the path that would save the Union and take a giant step toward fulfilling the Declaration of Independence and U.S. Constitution's promises of a new kind of nation "conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal."
At the 2005 grand opening of the fabulous new Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum in Springfield, my wife Mary and I attended a "state dinner" modeled after one from the 1860s, and we were transported back 150 years. I had recently joined the University of Illinois and was finishing up writing a book on leadership and great leaders.
In the book I used Lincoln as the introduction to a discussion of the qualities of great leaders. Lincoln, I wrote, was a great leader, "arguably the best in America's presidential history, and certainly the right person for the time." Lincoln had both the requisite analytical intelligence and empathetic and communication skills required for leadership. Beyond this, what really marked him as the model of a great leader was, I asserted, "the ability to make change, consequential change in the area of results for which the leader is responsible. And Lincoln delivered."
O. Vernon Burton, a U of I historian and author of The Age of Lincoln, describes Illinois and the Midwest in Lincoln's time as "a thriving and rapidly expanding region. ... America's western edge was younger, wilder, and more dangerous than the East." In other words, Illinois in mid-19th century was just the kind of environment where an ambitious young attorney — with high political aspirations but few if any family or institutional connections — could thrive.
Lincoln's political career began when he was elected to the Illinois legislature in 1834 and moved from New Salem to the state capital in Springfield when he passed the bar and began to practice law in 1837. Abraham and Mary Todd Lincoln's four sons were born in Springfield, and one (Edward) died there as a child. Lincoln was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives in 1846 but served only one difficult term and returned to Springfield to practice law, which he did successfully in a 23-year career in the state. Lincoln's tomb is at Oak Ridge Cemetery in Springfield. Mary Todd Lincoln and three of the couple's sons also are interred there.
Lincoln came to my new hometown of Urbana-Champaign frequently, riding "Old Tom" around the 14-county Eighth Judicial District in central Illinois in the years 1847-59. This predated the University of Illinois' Urbana-Champaign campus, which was founded in 1867. While the Civil War still raged, Lincoln signed the Morrill Act in 1862 granting federal land to states, the proceeds from the sale of which were to be used to establish a new kind of college that came to be known as the land-grant university.
The land-grant university mission was to "teach such learning as are related to agriculture and the mechanic arts ... in order to promote the liberal and practical education of the industrial classes in the several pursuits and professions in life." We've updated the language of our original land-grant university charge, but we've been taking our original mission of public education, research, service and economic development as our guiding principles for more than 140 years now.
Lincoln in the 1850s regularly visited Chicago — already the state's biggest city with a population of about 85,000 — on legal business with some politics on the side. Indeed, the dark horse Lincoln parlayed his good Illinois reputation, his native and self-taught eloquence and his considerable political skills into the presidential nomination at the 1860 Republican National Convention in frontier Chicago. It is difficult to imagine this nomination taking place in patrician Boston or cosmopolitan New York.
So we at the University of Illinois on all three of our campuses — Urbana-Champaign, Chicago and Springfield — feel a special kinship to Abraham Lincoln and his formative years in the state. We cordially invite the public — and especially those of you from Illinois — to our Lincoln Bicentennial Celebration exhibits, performances, speakers, events and educational programs. There's much to learn, discuss and ponder about our Abe Lincoln and our shared history as Illinoisans and Americans.
I'll conclude my welcome with Lincoln's own words: "There are no accidents in my philosophy. Every effect must have its cause. The past is the cause of the present, and the present will be the cause of the future. All these are links in the endless chain stretching from the finite to the infinite." (Herndon's Life of Lincoln by William H. Herndon and Jesse W. Weik)
B. Joseph White has been president of the University of Illinois since 2005 and is the author of The Nature of Leadership: Reptiles, Mammals and the Challenge of Becoming a Great Leader (Amacom).