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kerry · (This post was last modified: 01-11-2018 10:47 PM by kerry.)

(01-11-2018 07:27 PM)Anita Wrote:
(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.

(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.”

My guess would be Robert joked around about the Cooper Union thing and some people took it seriously. I feel like most of their relationship was wry, and with Robert Lincoln's dry manner of retelling and Lincoln's saintly image, it was retold with exaggerated solemnity. But that's just speculation.

(01-11-2018 10:23 PM)Eva Elisabeth Wrote:
(01-11-2018 07:27 PM)Anita Wrote:
(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."
Michael Burlingame, The Inner World of Abraham Lincoln, p. 61 has the entire quote and context of Robert's version, I'm sorry I don't have it here to check Burlingame's source:
‘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.'

The actual quote does not include the words "coolly" or "resentfully" -- that's definitely speculation by Burlingame. The quote comes from a journalist who knew him, who was told the story while they played golf. He released the story shortly after Robert's death. It's highly likely that he was paraphrasing, and that Robert was making light conversation, not confessing a deep resentment. It also leaves out that the reason Robert gave, according to this person, was that something might happen to Robert in the army that would cause him "more official embarrassment" than his military service would offset. I have always felt this was at least as big a consideration of Lincoln's as Mary's mental state. Imagine how much the Confederacy would have loved him as a hostage, or how anyone, even on the Union side, would have liked to blow up any little mistake or alleged assertion of status. Reading the James Edward Kelly interviews published by Styple, you get a lot of glimpses of things normally not discussed. One person claims Robert tried to get a train to transport him and his horse at City Point so he wouldn't have to ride - far from a big deal, but exactly the sort of thing that would have gotten blown up in the papers. Robert's temperament also did not seem conducive to the horrors of war. I think an underexplored issue is how many political hits Lincoln willingly incurred based on his indulgence of his family, rightly calculating he had the political capital to withstand them and that the alternative could be worse. I know the Helms are the source for Mary being the underlying reason, but personally I believe that book to be largely fictionalized. I interpret the "that's the only advice I received" comment to be less resentful than acknowledging that Lincoln wasn't pushy in that manner. I think by the end of the Civil War, had Robert told him he wanted to be an opera singer, Lincoln would have said "that's nice, have fun." Anything besides the War. He wanted peace and didn't micromanage his family.