Green Mountain Outlook

Rutland — President’s Day is Feb. 20, and having just oberved President Abraham Lincoln’s birthday Feb. 12, modern Vermonters rarely pause to consider the interesting connections between the sixteenth president and the Green Mountain State.

Here's a rundown of Honest Abe's Top Ten Connections to Vermont:

1. No other state gave Lincoln, the first Republican president, a larger victory margin in 1860 than Vermont: over 75 percent of Vermont's votes. He did even better in 1864, getting over 76 percent.

2. Mary Todd Lincoln, Robert Todd Lincoln and Tad Lincoln visited Manchester, Vermont in 1864 and stayed at the Equinox Hotel. The First Lady was smitten with the area, and enjoyed her summer stay . . . and made reservations to return the following summer with the President. The Equinox even built a special suite in anticipation of the President's stay. Fate intervened, however, and Lincoln was assassinated in April 1865.
   

3. The highest point in Addison County is named after President Lincoln: Mount Abraham.

4. Robert Todd Lincoln, like his mother, fell in love with Vermont. Decades later, after enormous success as a public servant and as a businessman, he returned and purchased 500 acres in Manchester on which to build his summer home. The Hildene mansion has been painstakingly restored by the Friends of Hildene and is a popular tourist attraction.

5. Vermont Senator Justin Morrill, who like Lincoln came from humble beginnings, was a key legislative ally of Lincoln's. Morrill sponsored key revenue measures to raise early funds for the Union Army, and also sponsored the legendary Morrill Land Grant College Act, which was signed into law by President Lincoln in 1862.
   

6. At the 1860 Republican National Convention in Chicago, the Vermont delegation was heavily courted by Presidential hopefuls Nathaniel Banks (governor of Massachusetts) and William Seward (senator from New York). The Vermont delegation, however, kept their options open and on the first ballot supported Vermont Sen. Jacob Collamer for President (Collamer later withdrew). On the second ballot, Vermont was the third state to vote . . . and the first state to shift their support to the relatively unknown dark-horse candidate, Abraham Lincoln.
   

7. Vermont Gov. J. Gregory Smith held Lincoln in such high regard that in 1864 he sent the President a can of maple honey and some maple sugar. In 1865, Gov. Smith travelled to Washington to meet with the President and discuss Vermont's quota for the Union Army draft. Lincoln's reply, which Gov. Smith received permission to publish, painstakingly discussed the number of recruits from Vermont and New Hampshire compared with each state's quota. (Famously, a small group of confederates took over St. Albans in the waning months of the Civil War, with the intent to burn down Gov. Smith's home. The St. Albans Raid goes down as the northernmost engagement of the Civil War).

8. Robert Todd Lincoln died in Vermont at the Hildene mansion in 1926. He was the only one of Lincoln's four sons to live to adulthood. Robert Todd Lincoln also had the unfortunate distinction of being present (or nearby) at three presidential assasinations: he arrived at Ford's Theater shortly after his father was shot in 1865; he was an eyewitness to President James Garfield's assassination at a Washington DC train station in 1881; and he accompanied President William McKinley to the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo, New York in 1901 - where McKinley was shot and killed

9. Stephen Douglas, who defeated Lincoln for a U.S. Senate seat in 1858, but then lost to him in the Presidential election of 1860, was born in Brandon. The Lincoln-Douglas Debates are an important part of American history. The Douglas birthplace is now home to the Brandon Museum and Visitor Center.

10. The last two descendants of President Lincoln were raised at Hildene in Manchester. Mary Lincoln Beckwith, nicknamed Peggy by her grandfather Robert Todd Lincoln, inherited Hildene upon her grandmother's death and spent her remaining years there as a recluse. She died at Rutland Hospital in 1975. Her brother Robert Todd Lincoln Beckwith, also raised at Hildene, died a few years later in Washington, D.C., as the last undisputed descendant of Abraham Lincoln.