Most important person in Lincoln's life

[LincolnToddFan]

(05-19-2015 07:43 AM)Juan Marrero Wrote:  Lincoln was tempted first to accept the offer of the governorship of the Oregon territory (the salary was $ 3,000 a year), but then decided to accept if Mary consented to go. She refused and “put her foot down about moving”.

Yes, that is probably the single greatest contribution to the U.S. by a (future) first lady. I wonder, nonetheless, if the Lincolns would have been personally happier if they had gone to the Far West.

I agree with all of you that Mary most influenced his life, yet I still think that Nancy Hanks marked his character most. I suspect that the melancholy that was the engine of his compassion came from his mother's tragic and sudden death. Lincoln as the American Job begins with his mother's death, I believe. Being practically left alone in the woods with his younger sister while his father went "courting" must have been traumatic.

Brilliant, I agree. I want to point out to Gene that even though their basic survival needs were met after being left to themselves in the wilderness, that's about all. Their new stepmother Sarah Bush was appalled at how dirty and ragged they were and the first thing she did was to give them both a good scrubbing.

And that's just on the outside...who knows the emotional and psychological consequences of the sole surviving parent leaving two young children who have just lost their mother to basically fend for themselves for weeks...if not months? I tend to think it must have been traumatic. I believe the trauma was internalized by the boy Lincoln as a child and that it was probably the root of his melancholy and his career as the "American Job" as you succinctly put it.

I'm also with YOU Eva. We need to differentiate on who had the most crucial effect on Lincoln's CHARACTER and who had the most influence over the direction of his life as a whole. It's not the same at all. I am not sure I can answer the question of who had the most influence on the development of his character, as you said it's a congruence of many influences both genetic and external. If I had to venture a guess I would say it was his step-mother Sarah. Who knows how he would have turned out if she had not encouraged his intellectual curiosity and provided him with the emotional nourishment that even the most self reliant child needs?

But I stand by my opinion that it was Mary Todd who most influenced the direction of his life in it's entirety. She was intelligent, driven, well-connected and would not let him give up when he was discouraged and depressed. She also changed his life by giving him a family of his own.

As for the assertion that Lincoln was color-blind when it came to Blacks, I like and admire the man but that is simply not true. The fact that he was gracious (and brave enough) to welcome Frederick Douglass to socialize at the WH does not erase the fact that he also told a delegation of Black men who visited him there that it would be better if they were colonized to Liberia or the Caribbean because of the impossibility of Whites and Blacks living together in peace, and that they(Blacks) were basically the cause of the war in the first place. As Frederick Douglass himself angrily wrote, it was like a thief who steals a horse and then blames the horse for being stolen in the first place.

That was, in my opinion, the low point of his presidency.