Robert Todd Lincoln --The vitals

[RJNorton]

(12-14-2017 03:56 AM)ScholarInTraining Wrote:  I can definitely see RTL's resemblance to his father in the eyes, ears, nose, and hairline. Especially those rare portraits taken of him where he appears more "natural" - messier hair, chin stubble, etc. I think historians have liked to exaggerated his physical differences to his father as much as possible, to emphasize their supposedly "not close" relationship. However, less than his parents, I think he may have looked like someone else....like an ancestor of the Lincolns or Todds. He appears to have had some Native American-esque elements about him. (From Lincoln's mother Nancy?)

Sorry to bump an old-ish thread, but it's interesting!

Thank you for posting your opinion, Mari. Reactions to Robert Lincoln vary greatly. People see him through very different eyes. For example, here is what Ida Tarbell wrote:

"To be drinking tea with the son of Abraham Lincoln was so unbelievable to me that I could scarcely take note of his reply. I searched his face and manners for resemblances. There was nothing. He was all Todd, a big plump man perhaps fifty years old, perfectly groomed, with that freshness which makes men of his type look as if they were just out of the barber's chair, the admirable social poise of the man who has seen the world's greatest and has come to be sure of himself; and this in spite of such buffeting as few men had had the assassination of his father when he was twenty-four, the humiliation of Mary Lincoln's half-crazed public exhibition of herself and her needs, the death of his brother Tad, the heartbreaking necessity of having his mother committed for medical care, and more recently the loss of his only son. Robert Lincoln had had enough to crush him, but he was not crushed. At the moment he looked and felt, I think, that he had arrived where he belonged."