"Our One Common Country" author talk in Stratford, CT

[LincolnToddFan]

(08-27-2014 04:35 AM)Eva Elisabeth Wrote:  Yes, thanks David and Roger, for finding and posting these letters!!

(08-26-2014 06:33 PM) LincolnToddFan Wrote:  I remember a letter she wrote to one of her Todd relatives where she laments finding decent household help in Springfield, and says something about how she hopes her husband's death never finds her living outside a slave state. And of course when she and AL visited the Todds in Lexington together, neither of them ever objected at all to the care and attention lavished upon them by the familys' legion of slaves.

Toia, are you sure she really wrote this herself, too? This is, however, also from an interwiew John S. Bradford, a political ally of her husband, gave Jesse W. Weik:
"Some years ago...I invited Mrs. Lincoln to accompany me...in a drive to the country. ...she appeared to be very nervous and more or less wrought up. What had caused her agitation she failed to disclose. We suspected that there had been a collision or disagreement of some kind with her servant, for, just as she settled back in her seat, she exclaimed with a sigh: 'Well, one thing is certain; if Mr. Lincoln should happen to die, his spirit will never find me living outside the boundaries of a slave State.'"

http://lincoln.lib.niu.edu/cgi-bin/philo...:1.lincoln

Hmmm...I could have sworn MTL wrote this to one of her sister's...perhaps Emilie Helm. But your detective skills are beyond reproach Eva, so I trust your opinion here better than mine!

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(08-27-2014 08:26 AM)Eva Elisabeth Wrote:  Here's a very interesting article on the Lincolns' children, the authors claim that "Robert was also one of the most intriguing of all presidential children. Late in life Robert frequently dismissed reporters by saying he either did not know his father or could not remember his father, and he also treated his mother very unfairly."
http://americanaejournal.hu/vol6no1/watson-berger

Thanks Eva.

That was a great article, but when the author of it opines that Robert did not mourn his father's death he couldn't be more wrong. Every account of RTL at his father's deathbed has his sobbing, occasionally overcome with grief even as he tried to console his mother.

Here is an excerpt from a letter he wrote to one of his Harvard professor's two weeks after the assassination"

"....In all my plans for the future, the chief object I had in view was the approbation of my father. And now that he is gone, and in such a way, I feel utterly without spirit or courage. I know that such a feeling is wrong, and that it is my duty to overcome it. I trust for the sake of my mother and little brother that I will be able to do it".

April 28, 1865 (Letter of Robert Todd Lincoln quoted in Looking For Lincoln, Kunhardt, pg#47)

Robert had his faults, but I don't know how anyone can say he did not mourn the loss of his father.