To This Place I Owe Everything: Mr. Lincoln's Last Evening in Springfield
A one-man play by Ken Bradbury, To This Place I Owe Everything finds Abraham Lincoln alone on his last evening in Springfield, the night before he boards the inaugural train for Washington and the presidency. The stage is "a jumbled mess of boxes, folded clothing, papers" — the Lincolns have rented out their home at Eighth and Jackson and moved into the Chenery House Hotel for their final days in town. Into this clutter Lincoln steps and, suddenly noticing the audience, apologizes: "This is . . . uh . . . well, it's not the way I usually entertain guests."
What follows is an intimate, unguarded hour with a man on the edge of an almost unimaginable task. Lincoln reflects on a quarter century in Springfield — the law practice of Lincoln & Herndon, his arrival as a young man with a borrowed horse, the friends both personal and political he must now leave behind. He turns over the mundane heartbreak of moving: Mary burning letters in the alley behind the house while souvenir hunters dig through the ashes; his son Tad pleading to bring the family dog Fido on the train; and, most painfully, the grave of his little son Eddie, dead of consumption a month shy of his fourth birthday. "How do you jump on a train and leave your son behind?"
Threaded through the evening are the things Lincoln would never say aloud if he knew anyone were listening — his doubts about whether he is the right man, his weariness of office-seekers, the looming threat of disunion and war, and his quiet sense that he may never return to Springfield alive. He disarms his own fear the way he always has: with stories. The play moves between humor and dread, between the homely tale and the prophetic newspaper warning, and builds toward Lincoln's famous farewell to the friends and neighbors gathered at the Great Western depot.
Production Notes
The script was written by Ken Bradbury at the request of a collaborator named Randy, whose surviving notes shaped the play's content. Randy asked Ken to weave in Lincoln's selection of his cabinet, the writing of the inaugural address, the crush of well-wishers and job-seekers at the Capitol, the details of renting the house and moving, the Crittenden Compromise and the question of whether war with the South could be averted, and the delicate matter of Mary's Southern family. He also asked for "a few 'that reminds me of a story' moments, a little bit of tear-jerking," a pertinent Bible passage, a relevant bit of Shakespeare, and "a touch of reluctant, yet steely resolve." Above all, Randy wanted the play permeated by Lincoln's introspection — "whether he can do this, or whether it's even a possible task at all" — so that an audience might "draw from his example when we have seemingly insurmountable difficulties."
The play is grounded in the documented history of Lincoln's last days in Springfield: the rental of the Eighth and Jackson home to railroad executive Lucian Tilton for $350 a year; the stay at the recently renovated Chenery House; the final, poignant meeting with law partner William Herndon ("Let it hang there undisturbed," Lincoln said of the law-office sign); and the rainy morning of February 11, 1861 — the day before his fifty-second birthday — when roughly a thousand neighbors gathered at the newly remodeled Great Western depot to see him off.
The role of Lincoln had not yet been cast in the surviving materials.