Lincoln: Prelude to the Presidency
A new documentary produced by WILL-TV

DVD available:  $24.95 (+$3.00 postage)  

Watch a preview video, and see interviews and stories.

Abraham Lincoln's experiences on muddy roads, in homes of friends and in courtrooms on Illinois' Eighth Judicial Circuit shaped the views and honed the skills that guided him when he became president.Riding through prairie grass on trails just barely wide enough for his horse, Abraham Lincoln traveled more than 500 miles each spring and fall as a lawyer on Illinois’ Eighth Judicial Circuit, then the fastest growing area of the country.

His experiences from 1837 to 1860 on muddy roads, in homes of friends and in courtrooms on the circuit in central Illinois shaped the views and honed the skills that guided him when he became president. WILL-TV’s Lincoln: Prelude to the Presidency tells the story of the cases he tried and people he met during this critical period of his life. “That’s where he really got a sense of the various kinds of problems people faced,” said historian Doris Kearns Goodwin, one of the experts featured in the documentary. “He got a sense of the exuberance of their dreams and their hopes. In a certain sense, I think it was the root of his political education.”

Reenactments of Lincoln on horseback on the dusty circuit, telling stories with friends and trying cases in court help viewers envision his formative experiences on the circuit. Viewers see Lincoln as they’ve never seen him before: defending a slave holder trying to reclaim a slave named Jane Bryant and her children; brandishing a sword on the banks of the Mississippi River at dawn before being talked out of fighting a duel; and crossing the prairie reading a book atop his horse, Old Tom, on the way to his next stop on the circuit.

The one-hour documentary shows how Lincoln’s work on the circuit meshed neatly with his political career. In the evenings after finishing his legal work, he would gather a crowd for a speech, enabling him to advance careers in both politics and law during his travels. As he made friends and visited in people’s homes, he was building the political base that supported him in the years ahead, experts say.

The gangly, disheveled Lincoln made an impression when he came into town. “People noticed him. Here on the frontier, he didn’t drink, he didn’t smoke, he hardly ever used foul language. There was some special quality about him that people did notice,” said historian Orville Vernon Burton.

He mesmerized audiences in the courtroom with his storytelling and speaking skills. “He had a tremendous sense of the music of language and of the rhythm of language and this was completely self-taught,” said James Cornelius, a historian at the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum.

Lincoln also had a remarkable ability to think through both sides of a case, startling his opponents in court by making all the arguments on the other side of the case, and then picking them apart sentence by sentence. He developed skills as a negotiator as he encouraged clients to settle out of court. By the mid 1850s, Lincoln was the leading attorney in the state of Illinois, trying more than 300 cases heard by the Illinois Supreme Court.

Of the 5,000 cases Lincoln handled during his legal career, the documentary features his representation of slaveholder Robert Matson; his defense of Melissa Goings, who was accused of murdering her abusive husband; his successful defense of murder suspect Duff Armstrong by using the moon tables in the Farmer’s Almanac; and his representation of Rebecca Thomas, a Revolutionary War soldier’s widow whose pension was threatened by a pension agent.

The documentary examines Lincoln’s attitudes toward race and slavery, which developed in discussions with people on the circuit. His anti-slavery speeches emphasize over and over again the inherent unfairness of slavery, said historian Michael Burlingame. Lincoln said that making someone work all day while the profits went to someone else was “organized, systematized robbery,” said Burlingame.

The WILL-TV documentary was produced and written by Alison Davis Wood, co-produced and directed by Tim Hartin, and edited by Colin Hartin. Wood was the producer of Gold Star Mothers: Pilgrimage of Remembrance, Walter Burley Griffin: In His Own Right, and other documentaries. Hartin was the producer of Ten Sisters: A True Story, The Song and the Slogan, and other documentaries.

Wood said that she at first envisioned the documentary as a kind of road movie, looking at Lincoln with his buddies, traveling around having a good time. “That’s certainly part of it,” she said. “But we realized that Lincoln was making several simultaneous journeys during this time. He was becoming a well-liked and well-respected attorney, but he was also becoming a national political figure while shaping and refining his views on the important issues he would face in the White House.”

Lincoln: Prelude to the Presidency was made possible by contributions from the Illinois Abraham Lincoln Bicentennial Commission; Country Financial; the University of Illinois College of Law; the Monticello Chamber of Commerce; the Office of the Chancellor, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign; the Illinois State Bar Association and the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library & Museum.

Memorial Stadium: True Illini Spirit
A new documentary produced by WILL-TV

DVD available:  $19.95 (+$3.00 postage)  

This new documentary looks at the legends and the history that have emerged within the granite columns of Memorial Stadium at the University of Illinois, and at the spirit that is reawakened every time a game is played there.

From the Galloping Ghost who emerged on the stadium's dedication day, to crucial wins and losses, to the feats of players with names like Butkus, Grabowski, and Halas, the memories created there have sustained generations of Illini fans. (more)