Impressionist channels Abe Lincoln at library program
Rick Miller prepares for his “An Evening With President Lincoln” presentation at Peters Township Public Library.
Rick Miller provides some levity during his program with a fanciful cellphone conversation between Abraham Lincoln and Gen. George Meade.
With no disrespect intended, seeing a clean-shaven Abraham Lincoln is an odd experience.
“If you look at pictures in books of Lincoln without a beard, he did have an extremely thin, gaunt-looking face,” Cranberry Township historian Rick Miller said. “So the beard helped it out.”
Miller’s own beard helps him bear an uncanny resemblance to our 16th president, as do the top hat and bowtie he sports as an Honest Abe impressionist.
During his “An Evening With President Lincoln” program Sept. 8 at Peters Township Public Library, Miller elucidated the capacity crowd about the origin of the whiskers, which sprouted prior to the 1860 election.
“A little girl, Grace Bedell, up in Westfield, N.Y., northeast of Erie, saw this poster that her father had brought back from a county fair. She writes me a letter,” Miller said, doing first-person Lincoln. “She’s 11 years old, and she says, ‘Dear Mr. Lincoln: Do you have any daughters? Your face is so thin. My father and brothers all have whiskers, and the girls love it. If you grew a beard, the women would tease their husbands, fathers and sons to vote for you.’
“Well, I wrote back to her. I said, ‘Dear Miss Bedell: I don’t have any daughters. I’d like to have one as smart as you.'”
Whether pre-suffragette wives, daughters and sisters really did have any bearing, the bearded Lincoln won the White House. And as Miller did throughout his 90-minute presentation, he had a good anecdote to tell about this election, this one involving Mary Todd Lincoln:
“I was the Northern Republican candidate. She was married to me. (Stephen) Douglas was the Northern Democratic candidate. He had courted her. And (John) Breckinridge, the Southern Democratic candidate, was her cousin. So three of the four candidates, she knew intimately.”
Much of Miller’s presentation was devoted to answering questions from the audience, including one about the religious stance of Lincoln, during whose administration “In God We Trust” started to be minted on American coins.
“What I believed,” he said, again invoking the right of first person, “was that it’s important for us to be on the side of the Creator, rather than make any assumptions about the Creator being on our side.”
Lincoln’s side, of course, prevailed in the Civil War that consumed his presidency, finally ending on April 9, 1865. Six days later, John Wilkes Booth put an end to any plans Lincoln had for the reunited nation’s future, leading to conjecture ever after.
“We might not be here, because, who knows?” Miller-as-Lincoln said. “I might have screwed up royally during Reconstruction, and I would have been on the dust pile of American presidents.”
Still, Miller gave his opinion that he would have done a better postwar job than his White House successor, Andrew Johnson, given Lincoln’s “ability to not feel superior to the South.”
“I said that if we were in the same situation, we would have acted the same way in the North,” Miller explained, again channeling. “I didn’t have that self-righteous attitude that the abolitionists possessed.”
Miller plans to return to Peters Township Public Library on Sept. 22, this time as himself, for the presentation “Abraham Lincoln: The Careworn, Gentle Face of Wartime Violence.” In the meantime, the library is hosting the exhibit “Looking at Lincoln: Political Cartoons from the Civil War Era” through Sept. 27.
For more information, visit www.ptlibrary.org.