Robert Todd Lincoln --The vitals

[Anita]

(01-09-2018 08:31 AM)RJNorton Wrote:  Many historians feel the Cooper Union Address delivered on February 27, 1860, propelled Abraham Lincoln to the 1860 Republican nomination.

I am curious if anyone has an opinion....was Robert exaggerating?....would Abraham Lincoln not have accepted the invitation to speak in New York City had the trip not also afforded the opportunity for him to visit his son at Exeter?

In Holtzer's book, "Lincoln At Cooper Union", Contrary to one of the most stubbornly enduring of Cooper Union legends, Lincoln did not seize the chance to speak in the East just to get a free cross-country trip to the East to see his boy. The future publisher George Haven Putnam, who would witness the Cooper Union address, later fueled the myth in a 1909
biography that pointed to Robert himself as the source of the story.

"I heard from Robert Lincoln" insisted Putnam, "that his father had in January been planning to make a trip Eastward to see the boy..." but had postponed it when a client failed to pay the fee he needed to pay for the trip. Then came further word, "Some men in New York have asked me to come speak to them and have sent me money for the trip. I can manage the rest of the way."

Robert Lincoln was alive and well when Putnum introduced this fantastic tale, and the fact that Robert didn't move quickly to correct it, as he often did when writers misrepresented his father, suggest that he rather enjoyed believing it himself. However it is not true. His father had already accepted and scheduled his trip east well before January. He already knew he would earn a two hundred dollar honorarium reconfirmed in November. Lincoln was hardly dependent on a legal fee to finance a trip to New York.

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(01-10-2018 12:53 PM)kerry Wrote:  Eva, until you posted that piece from Keckley, I never noticed that the ending line is different from what Robert supposedly told a friend. In that telling, Lincoln told him he could go to law school if he wished, but wouldn't have nearly as much fun as he did, and Robert jested about the lack of serious career advice. My take on it would be that he said something rather lighthearted about Robert giving law a try, and moving on from the war. I don't read it as an ultimatum, but who knows the exact wording.

Kerry, from what I have determined these are two different statements made on two different occasions.

Emerson "Giant in the Shadows" Chapter 5 page 88
At some point in his upper-class years Robert decided his profession after graduation would be the law, just like his father...On his return to Washington after his graduation, Robert again approached his father about enlisting. ... Lincoln deferred to Mary who still refused permission...Robert vented his frustration to his father that summer when the President asked his future plans and the son retorted that since he cou;d not join the army, he would go back to Cambridge to the law school. Robert recalled his father saying, "If you become a lawyer, you will probably make more money at it than I ever did, but you won't have half the fun."

Keckly(Thanks Eva)
" On the day President Lincoln was assassinated, Captain Robert Lincoln breakfasted with the family. After Robert showed the President a picture of General Robert E. Lee, Mr. Lincoln told Robert: ‘It is a good face; it is the face of a noble, noble, brave man. I am glad the war is over at last.’ Looking up at Robert, he continued: ‘Well, my son, you have returned safely from the front. The war is now closed, and we soon will live in peace with the brave man that have been fighting against us. I trust that the era of good feeling has returned with the war, and henceforth we shall live in peace. Now listen to me, Robert: you must lay aside your uniform, and return to college. I wish you to read law for three years, and at the end of that time I hope that we will be able to tell whether you will make a lawyer or not.”