Most important person in Lincoln's life

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(05-19-2015 12:31 PM)Angela Wrote:  What a great topic!

I agree. What a delight to read!

(05-19-2015 12:31 PM)Angela Wrote:  ... while Mrs. Lincoln might have taught him "to see color", Frederick Douglass sure pointed out how much he enjoyed that Lincoln seemed to have forgotten it when talking to him.

This made me laugh. Brilliant.

As for the topic at hand: in the end, it's hard to quantify just how much someone has influenced another person. People are a complex construction of ideas that they have picked up along the ride. For instance: if Mary Todd influenced his ambitions, his anti-slavery, his manners, weren't they simply nudges in order to (re)direct what was already present?

Also, having said that, I started thinking about Thomas Lincoln, his dad, who made Abraham work so much that for the rest of his life he felt he had been, in his youth, a slave (by having to give the money he'd earned to his dad). One of Lincoln's most important ideas was that people deserved what they had worked for, that they earned it "by the sweat of their brow." (Or maybe that was not so much his dad as the society he lived in.)