Lincoln and Obama, linked by Illinois roots, shaped U.S. history 150 years apart

As America turns 250 years old in 2026, CBS News Chicago is looking back at two presidents who called Illinois home.

Nearly 150 years separated the presidencies of Abraham Lincoln and Barack Obama, who both launched political careers Illinois.

In their times in office, they faced very different challenges, but the nation’s 44th president drew inspiration from the 16th president.

On a frigid February morning in 2007, then a U.S. Senator, Obama announced he was running for president. The symbolism of where he delivered the speech was unmistakable – at the Old State Capitol building in Springfield.

At the same building in 1858, Lincoln gave one of the most famous speeches in American history.

“I believe this government cannot endure, permanently half slave and half free,” Lincoln told the crowd.

“The Lincoln that Obama is linking himself to in that moment in announcing his candidacy is the Lincoln who gave the ‘House Divided’ speech,” said University of Chicago professor Jane Dailey. “And that’s the Lincoln Obama, I think, was channeling in that moment as he talks about visions of community and democracy.”

Lincoln and Obama will be forever linked. Both lawyers from Illinois. Both served in the Illinois legislature before they were elected to Congress and later the White House. The Great Emancipator and the nation’s first Black president.

“You ask me what they have in common, and I think they both have a very strong belief in regular people; the capacity of Americans to be moral people, not every minute of every day, to take a stand on the right side of things if given the opportunity,” Dailey said.

Both Lincoln and Obama came to Illinois from other places. Lincoln was born in Kentucky and moved to Indiana at age 7 before his family came to Illinois when he was 21. Obama was born in Hawaii and lived in Seattle, Indonesia, Los Angeles, and New York before moving to Chicago in 1985.

Where Obama is a product of Ivy League schools, Lincoln was largely self-taught.

“He just read voraciously all the time. He didn’t boast about that, but someone asked him once, ‘Who did you study law with?’ and he said ‘Nobody. I read,” Dailey said.

Poverty drove Lincoln from Kentucky to Indiana then to Illinois. Obama, inspired by the city’s first Black mayor, Harold Washington, moved to Chicago to become a community organizer.

“He ends up serving the state of Illinois. I’m not sure he would have imagined that. When he came to Chicago, I think he was coming specifically to Chicago to do the kind of organizing and activism that he wanted to do in the tradition of people who had gone before him,” Dailey said.

When Obama took the presidential oath of office on Jan. 20, 2009, he placed his hand on Lincoln’s bible. In his second term in 2013, Obama hand wrote an essay submitted to the Lincoln Presidential Library to mark the 150th anniversary of Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address.

“In the evening, when Michelle and the girls have gone to bed, I sometimes walk down the hall to a room Abraham Lincoln used as his office.  It contains an original copy of the Gettysburg address, written in Lincoln’s own hand,” Obama wrote. “I linger on these few words that have helped define our American experiment: ‘A new nation, conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.’”

“One of the things that I think he was signaling – and Lincoln himself signaled this all the time – was the open possibility of the future. Obama says constantly, we want to have a more perfect union. We’re never going to get there, we’re never going to have a perfect union, but if we all work really hard, we might have a more perfect union,” Dailey said.

In writing about Lincoln, Obama went on to say “Lincoln’s words give us confidence that whatever trials await us, this nation and the freedom we cherish can, and shall, prevail.”