Carlinville men create Lincoln book
Journal-Courier
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CARLINVILLE Two Carlinville men have created a study of the connections of Abraham Lincoln to Illinois State University in Normal in a work one reviewer has called “monumental.”
Tom Emery and Carl Kasten teamed to produce “Abraham Lincoln and the Heritage of Illinois State University,” a 280-page book that covers a topic largely ignored in the 156 years since Lincoln’s death.
Kasten is a retired attorney and a 1966 ISU graduate who chaired the university’s board of trustees from 2003 to 2008. He approached Emery about the project; Emery handled the research and writing.
“At first, we thought it would be around 100 pages, but then Tom kept uncovering more material, and it kept growing. I cannot believe how much information went into this book,” Kasten said.
Compiling his
Reminiscences in the final years of his life, the sculptor Augustus Saint-Gaudens (1848–1907) recalled how the coming of America’s Civil War had moved him. Saint-Gaudens had been an aspiring artist, aged 13, and a New York cameo-cutter’s apprentice when the war’s first shots were fired; from the lathe where he learned to cut lions, dogs, and horses into amethyst and malachite, he watched the Federal army gather. ‘From my window,’ he wrote, ‘I saw virtually the entire contingent of New England Volunteers on their way to the Civil War, a spectacle profoundly impressive, even to my youthful imagination.’ Amid strains of abolitionist song, and the marching of feet, one silhouette loomed in his memory: ‘above all, what remains in my mind is seeing in a procession the figure of a tall and very dark man, seeming entirely out of proportion in his height with the carriage in which he was driven, bowing to the crowds on each side. […] the man was Abraham Lin