Doane Alumnus Receives State of Illinois' Highest Award

Article Body: A special Abraham Lincoln Bicentennial edition of The Order of Lincoln was awarded to 1957 Doane College graduate Douglas L. Wilson and his partner Rodney O. Davis. The highest honor that can be bestowed by the State of Illinois, this award from The Lincoln Academy of Illinois recognizes Wilson and Davis for their exemplary work in commemorating President Abraham Lincoln.

The Lincoln Academy, unique among the 50 states, was established in 1964 to honor Illinois' most distinguished citizens, either by birth or residence, who have brought honor to the state by their achievements. Some years, only one or two people are honored; in most years, five or six are recognized. This year is special because Feb. 12 marks the 200th birthday of Abraham Lincoln. To celebrate this anniversary, a special edition of the Order of Lincoln was established, honoring 30 people. These special awards are a departure from the usual practice in that the laureates were selected from among worldwide nominations and did not need to have an Illinois connection.

The Order of Lincoln awards were presented to the laureates during a formal ceremony on Saturday, Feb. 7, 2009, at the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Museum in downtown Springfield, Illinois.

Past honorees include President Ronald Reagan, the Chicago Bears' Walter Payton, Poet Laureate Gwendolyn Brooks, author Saul Bellow, biographer David Herbert Donald, business leader Lester Crown, Nobel scientist Leon Lederman, and educator Richard H. Moy.

"This is a very prestigious award and a distinguished group of honorees," Wilson said. "It's very gratifying that Rodney Davis and I are being recognized for our contributions to Lincoln studies."

For information about The Lincoln Academy, visit www.thelincolnacademyofillinois.org.

After graduating with a bachelor of arts in English from Doane in 1957, Wilson attended the University of Pennsylvania where he earned his Master's and Ph.D. in English in 1959 and 1964, respectively. In 1961, he joined the faculty of Knox College, where he taught English and American Literature for 33 years, and retired as George A. Lawrence Distinguished Service Professor. A founder of the interdisciplinary American Studies program at Knox, Wilson spent many years studying and writing about President Thomas Jefferson.

Interestingly, his work on Thomas Jefferson led to his research on Lincoln.

"I had spent several years researching and writing about Thomas Jefferson's education, the sources of his ideas, and especially his library. I like comparisons because they lend perspective, and I had the idea of making a comparison of Jefferson and Lincoln's early years, and particularly their formative reading."

Wilson said he's been interested in Lincoln for a long time. "Illinois is, of course, proud to be the home state of Lincoln," Wilson said. "Galesburg and Knox College have strong Lincoln connections. When I taught American Literature, I used to teach the Gettysburg Address and the Second Inaugural as great works of literature. But for this comparison with Jefferson, I needed to research the basic sources for information about Lincoln's early life, and this led me to the materials collected by William H. Herndon, Lincoln's law partner.

After Lincoln's assassination, Herndon contacted more than 250 people who knew Lincoln at different times in his life and created an archive of what those informants told him in letters and interviews. This collection is in the Library of Congress, and most of it had never been published.

After Wilson completed his comparison of Lincoln and Jefferson's early reading, which appeared as a cover story in the Atlantic Monthly (January 1991), he continued studying and writing about the contents of Herndon's massive archive. Convinced that these materials deserved to be better known, he asked his Knox teaching partner Rodney O. Davis, an American historian, to help him edit them for publication. After almost 10 years of work, the entire collection was published by the University of Illinois Press in 1998 as Herndon's Informants: Letters, Interviews, and Statements about Abraham Lincoln.

While working with Herndon's archive, Wilson became interested in researching various aspects of Lincoln's early life, and this resulted in the publication of Honor's Voice: The Transformation of Abraham Lincoln, published by Alfred A. Knopf in 1998.

When Wilson and Davis retired from teaching, they founded the Lincoln Studies Center at Knox College, principally as a base of operations for further Lincoln research. They intended to edit other important Lincoln source material.

"We had just started on our work," Wilson said, "when the Library of Congress offered us a contract to transcribe and annotate for their Web site the most important manuscripts from its Abraham Lincoln papers." During this project, which ran from 1999 through 2002, Wilson became very familiar with Lincoln's handwritten manuscripts, most of which are rough, or composition drafts. In some cases there are several drafts of the same work.

"From my perspective, thinking of Lincoln as a writer, all these drafts and revisions constitute important evidence of Lincoln as a literary craftsman," Wilson said. "It turns out that Lincoln was a very deliberate writer, in direct contrast to the popular notion that he can take an envelope and whip off a speech." This was the inspiration and starting place for Wilson's book Lincoln's Sword: The Presidency and the Power of Words, published by Alfred A. Knopf in 2006.

Wilson's work on Abraham Lincoln has appeared in The Atlantic Monthly, American Heritage, Time, The American Scholar, as well as other magazines and scholarly journals, and has resulted in six books. In addition to Herndon's Informants mentioned above, he and Davis have edited two other works for publication by the University of Illinois Press: Herndon's Lincoln (2006), and The Lincoln-Douglas Debates: The Lincoln Studies Center Edition (2008). The first of the three Lincoln books he has published on his own is a collection of Lincoln articles and essays, Lincoln before Washington: New Perspectives on Lincoln's Illinois Years, University of Illinois Press, 1997. Both Honor's Voice and Lincoln's Sword, mentioned above, were awarded the prestigious Lincoln Prize.

Wilson is grateful for the education he received at Doane. "When I graduated from Doane," Wilson said, "I thought that I had received a very good education, and I knew I had had wonderful teachers. But, when I went to graduate school at the University of Pennsylvania, I had no way to judge how my education would compare in with others in a distinguished Ivy League school. The people who were my fellow students were from Harvard, Princeton, Yale, Vassar and so forth. I soon discovered, however, that my training at Doane had been excellent and that I was very well prepared for graduate school. So, I think very well of Doane and its traditions because it passed that very practical test."

For more information about Wilson, visit http://www.knox.edu/x5743.xml <http://www.knox.edu/x5743.xml> .

Posted by Nancy Weyers on 2/12/2009 9:35:00 AM