Extra Credit Questions

[David Lockmiller]

Doris Kearns Goodwin recounted the same incident that I copied from F.B. Carpenter's book in a single paragraph in her book Team of Rivals at pp 706-07.

However, Doris Kearns Goodwin had the following introductory sentence to this single paragraph: Like his mother, Tad Lincoln possessed "an emotional temperament much like an April day, sunning all over with laughter one moment, the next crying as though [his] heart would break." (Helm, The True Story of Mary, p. 32.)

After this sentence, there followed: The painter Francis Carpenter recounted an incident when photographers from Brady's studio set up their equipment in an unoccupied room that Tad had turned into a little theater. . . . Finally, the president had to intervene. He left his office and returned a few minutes later with the key. Though Tad "was violently excited when I went to him," Lincoln told Carpenter, "I said, 'Tad, do you know you are making your father a great deal of trouble?' He burst into tears, instantly giving me up the key."

Doris Kearns Goodwin immediately followed this text at page 707 with two paragraphs of observations by John Hay regarding Tad and Tad's relationship with his father.

Most of the time, however, Tad was "so full of life an vigor," recalled John Hay, "so bubbling over with health and high spirits, that he kept the house alive with his pranks and his fantastic enterprises." From dawn to dusk, "you could hear his shrill pipe resounding through the dreary corridors of the Executive residence . . . and when the President laid down his weary pen toward midnight, he generally found his infant goblin asleep under his table or roasting his curly head by the open fire-place; and the tall chief would pick up the child and trudge off to bed with the drowsy little burden on his shoulder, stooping under the doors and dodging the chandeliers."

Though Tad never developed a love of books, and "felt he could not waste time in learning to spell," he had a clever, intuitive mind and was a good judge of character. "He treated flatterers and office-seekers with a curious coolness and contempt," marveled Hay, "but he often espoused the cause of some poor widow or tattered soldier, whom he found waiting in the anterooms." His enterprising nature and natural shrewdness would augur well for him once his schooling was completed. With all his heart, Lincoln loved his "little sprite."