AL and God

[Eva Elisabeth]

After the deaths of Eddie and Willie - and knowing the limitations of Tad - I'm sure that Robert was the favored child and was expected to achieve greatness.

There is IMO some indication he overall maybe was not and they had a rather cool relationship:

- Robert himself stated: "My Father's life was of a kind, which gave me but little opportunity to learn the details of his early career. During my childhood and early youth he was almost constantly away from home, attending courts or making political speeches. In 1859 when I was sixteen and when he was beginning to devote himself more to practice in his own neighborhood, and when I would have had both the inclination and the means of gratifying my desire to become better acquainted with the history of his struggles, I went to New Hampshire to school and afterward to Harvard College, and he became President. Henceforth any great intimacy between us became impossible. I scarcely even had ten minutes quiet talk with him during his Presidency, on account of his constant devotion to business."

- ...and related the following incident:
"I returned [after graduating] from college in 1864 and one day I saw my father for a few minutes. He said: 'Son, what are you going to do now?' I said: 'As long as you object to my joining the army, I am going back to Harvard to study law.' Lincoln cooly replied, 'If you do, you should learn more than I ever did, but you will never have so good a time.' Robert added resentfully,'That is the only advice I had from my father as to my career.'"

- On another occasion, Robert boasted to John Nicolay: “Well, I have just had a great row with the President of the United States!”

- Herndon (who disliked all the Lincolns' kids though) wrote: "Bob...is his mother’s ‘baby’ all through. Years older than Willie and Tad, he seemed jealous and resentful of the way Lincoln fawned over them, which only added to Robert’s alienation."

- When Robert was three, his father remarked: “I sometimes fear he is one of the little rare-ripe sort, that are smarter at about five than ever after.”

- AFAIK, Robert is the only of Lincoln's children ever reportedly being slapped by him. At his farewell reception, "the house grew so crowded that some guest had to wait twenty minutes just to get through the front door. Willie and Tad viewed the event merrily, causing havoc wherever and whenever they could but earning no reprimand from their parents, as usual. But when Bob managed to squeeze into the receiving line in the parlor, he had far worse luck trying to amuse his parents. Attempting a joke, Bob greeted his father as if he were a stranger 'Good evening Mr. Lincoln!' he announced gravely. For this, in front of all the guest, 'his father gave him a gentle slap in the face'." (H. Holzer: "Father Abraham's Sons")

If A. L. had any favorite child, it was, I think, Willi as he was the closest to his father in mind. Lincoln himself once said:
“I know every step of the process by which that boy arrived at his satisfactory solution of the question before him, as it is by just such slow methods I attain results.”

One friend of the Lincoln family in Springfield, Joseph R. Kent, recalled “that... Will was the true picture of Mr. Lincoln, in every way, even to carrying his head slightly inclined toward his left shoulder.”

After Willie's death, it was certainly Tad who took his place, not Robert. Once he said of Tad: "I want to give him all the toys I did not have, and all the toys that I would have given the boy who went away."