Tad, the "marked character"

[Linda Anderson]

Tad certainly was a fun-loving little rascal like Joe says when Lincoln was alive. But Jean Baker uses the term "marked character" to describe someone doomed by fate to have a difficult life. Maybe Mary meant it in the same way.

In Mary Todd Lincoln: A Biography, Baker writes:

"The miserable way her son died made it impossible to think of her son's death as a triumphal entry into Heaven, where he would join the other Lincolns. It was easier-in fact, by this time necessary-for Mary Lincoln to forget Tad and to see herself as abandoned and punished once again, a marked character. 'Ill luck,' she wrote, 'presided at my birth and has been a faithful attendant ever since.'"

"'She said to me [Emilie Helm, her half-sister], 'What is to be is to be and nothing we can say, or do, or be can divert an inexorable fate, but in spite of knowing this, one feels better even after losing, if one has had a brave, whole-hearted fight to get the better of destiny.'" But she could never be consoled by an appreciation of fate, and so spent her life believing herself a marked character."