Projo Politics Blog

On that same trip to Rhode Island last week, Chief Justice John Roberts was talking about Abraham Lincoln. So where was Rhode Island’s top jurist, a Lincoln expert and collector?

As is turns out, Supreme Court Chief Justice Frank J. Williams was in Kentucky, where Lincoln was born, for the inaugural ceremony of the Abraham Lincoln Bicentennial, a courts spokesman said.

Roberts launched the centennial celebration of the federal courthouse in downtown Providence and, noting that Tuesday was the 199th anniversary of Lincoln’s birth, he delivered a speech that traced Lincoln’s career as a lawyer.

Williams would have liked to have been here, courts spokesman Craig N. Berke said. But the chief justice is a member of the national Abraham Lincoln Bicentennial Commission, and he was scheduled to take part in ceremonies in Hodgenville, Ky., along with First Lady Laura Bush and Law & Order star Sam Waterston.

Williams did end up speaking at an event, Berke said. But according to the Associated Press, “Ice coated the birthplace site near Hodgenville, leading officials to cancel a late-morning ceremony promoted as a kickoff of a two-year national bicentennial commemoration of the nation’s 16th president, who spent part of his childhood in Indiana. First Lady Laura Bush postponed her visit to the Lincoln birthplace amid a treacherous combination of snow and ice that hit the region.” The News-Enterprise in Elizabethtown, Ky., reported the cancellation in a story under the headline “Lincoln Letdown.”

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