Lincoln and Ann Rutledge

[David Lockmiller]

(05-28-2014 09:38 AM)Gene C Wrote:  [quote='David Lockmiller' pid='33604' dateline='1401251869']
Eva, may I ask your comment regarding Mary's tempers and the possible deleterious affects upon her husband at that time.

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It is well documented that Mary had a temper. Possibly aggravated by her head aches, hormone changes, medication taken, and stress. On the other hand, she was a very kind, compassionate woman. She visited military hospital, took flowers, fresh fruit, listened to to and comforted the wounded soldiers, on a fairly frequent basis. Not a criticism, but our current first lady doesn't do that (and she doesn't have Mary's personality quirks) . After Lincoln's death, and she was pinching pennies, she wrote a kind letter to Abraham's step mother and sent her money. Now I personally think Abraham loved her deeply, and it pained him to see her erratic behavior and see her suffer. He had to know there was something wrong with her. It's hard to stand by and see someone suffer when you don't know how to help them. I'm sure all of this hurt him (especially when Willie died). But how he responded is one of the reasons we have this discussion forum, why thousands of books are written about him. He rose above the circumstances with strength, dignity, compassion, and his faith in God, even when he didn't feel like it.

I very much agree with what you have said, except for the part that Lincoln "deeply" loved Mary. I think that Lincoln suffered in silence for the important concept of family (including Mary) and that it did "pain him to see her erractic behavior and see her suffer."

As you state, the death of Willie was especially disheartening to them both. Willie, Mary said, "was the favorite child, so good, so obedient, so promising."

Professor Burlingame wrote of Willie and his father ("Abraham Lincoln: A Life" Vol. Two, pages 300-01):

With Willie, Lincoln had known the special pleasure that a parent derives from having a child who is a near-clone. The boy's tutor thought that the lad "was the exact counterpart of his father," and the poet and editor Nathaniel P. Willis, a fixture in Mrs. Lincoln's White House circle, agreed that Willie "faithfuly resembled his father" in all important respects.

So close were they that the president could read Willie's mind. One day at breakfast in the White House, Willie's emotional brother Tad broke out crying because soldiers to whom he had given religious tracts mocked him. When paternal hugs and kisses failed to comfort the boy, Willie set his mind to devise some way to ease Tad's hurt feelings. Willie silently thought for a long while, then suddenly looked up with a smile at his father, who exclaimed: "There! you have it now, my boy, have you not?" Turning to a guest, Lincoln remarked: "I know every step of the process by which that boy arrived at his satisfactory solution of the question before him, as it is by just such slow methods I attain results."

The death of Willie deprived Lincoln of an important source of comfort and relief from his heavy official burdens. The boy was his favorite child. The two were quite close. Springfield neighbors said Lincoln "was fonder of that boy than he was of anything else." Bob and Tad took after their mother, and did not resemble Lincoln physically or temperamentally. The president's eldest son, with whom he shared little in common, was attending college at Harvard. His youngest son, the hyperactive, effervescent Tad, was not a clone like Willie but much more like his mother. Julia Taft recalled that he "had a quick, fiery temper," was "implacable in his dislikes," but could be "very affectionate when he chose."

In the wake of Willie's death, the president's love for Tad grew stronger as he displaced onto him the powerful feeling he had harbored for the older boy. He explained to a friend that he wished to give Tad "everything he could no longer give Willie." Lincoln derived great comfort from Tad's fun-loving, irrepressible nature and delighted in his common sense.

As described by Professor Burlingame, Mary's reaction to the death of her son Willie was quite different than that of Mr. Lincoln.

Mary came to regard Willie's death as punishment for her vanity and for her decision to give the elaborate party at the White House with hundreds of guests while two of her sons lay sick abed. Months later she described her "crushing bereavement' to a friend: "We have met with so overwhelming an affliction in the death of our beloved Willie a being too precious for earth, that I am so completely unnerved." In her agony, Mary Lincoln was unable to help care for her younger son, Tad, who also ran a dangerous temperature.

Lincoln summoned Mary's eldest sister, Elizabeth Edwards, from Springfield to help calm her down. Lincoln urged Mrs. Edwards to stay at the White House as long as she possibly could: "you have Such a power & control Such an influence over Mary -- Come do Stay and Console me," he implored her. From Washington, Elizabeth reported that "my presence here, has tended very much to soothe, the excessive grief" of her sister. According to Elizabeth, Mary "has been but little with (Tad), being utterly unable to control her feelings."

When her sister went back to Illinois, Mrs. Lincoln turned for comfort to her dressmaker, Elizabeth Keckly, a black woman whose only son had been killed in battle the previous year. Mrs. Keckley, who had accepted her own loss stoically, looked askance on the First Lady's maifest inability to control her grief. The seamstress, however, did what she could to console her friend.

Public resentment against Mary's excesive grieving swelled when, for over a year, she forbade the traditional weekly White House Marine Band concerts; she even refused permission to have them performed in Lafayette Park across the street. Lincoln had enjoyed those concerts.

Professor Burlingame described one other related episode, but I am not sure when this encounter took place: She wrapped herself so profoundly in mourning that Lincoln one day led her to a window, pointed to an insane asylum in the distance, and said: "Mother, do you see that large white building on the hill yonder? Try and control your grief, or it will drive you mad, and we may have to send you there."

In the final months of the war, Lincoln also had an issue with his wife regarding military service of their eldest son, Robert, in the Civil War. Lincoln, husband and father, had a duty and obligation to the nation as President, as well. (See "Abraham Lincoln: A Life" Vol. Two, pages 737 - 38.)

One partisan Democratic journal sneeringly asked why "Mr. Lincoln's son should be kept from the dangers of the field, while the sons of the laboring men are to be hurried into the harvest of death at the front? Are the sons of the rail-splitter, porcelain, and these other common clay?" When New York Senator, Ira Harris bluntly asked her why Robert was not in uniform, Mary Lincoln replied that her son was "not a shirker as you seem to imply for he has been anxious to go for a long time. If fault there be, it is mine."

Actually, Robert was eager to drop out of Harvard and enlist, but his mother adamantly objected.

"We have lost one son,and his loss is as much as I can bear, without being called upon to make another sacrifice," she insisted to the president.

Lincoln replied; "But many a poor mother has given up all her sons, and our son is not more dear to us than the sons of other people are to their mothers."

"That may be; but I cannot bear to have Robert exposed to danger. His services are not required in the field, and the sacrifice would be a needless one."

"The services of every man who loves his country are required in this war. You should take a liberal instead of a selfish view of the question, mother."

Don't I know that only too well? she cried; before this war is ended I may be like that poor mother, my poor mother in Kentucky, with not a prop left in her old age."

On another occasion, she remarked to her husband: "I know that Robert's plea to go into the Army is manly and noble and I want him to go, but oh! I am so frightened that he may never come back to us!"

In January1865, when the First Lady finally yielded, Lincoln wrote Grant asking that Robert be placed on his staff: "Please read and answer this letter as though I was not President, but only a friend. My son, now in his twenty second year, having graduated at Harvard, wishes to see something of the war before it ends. I do not wish to put him in the ranks, nor yet to give him a commission, to which those who have already served long, are better entitled, and better qualified to hold. Could he, without embarrassment to you, or detriment to the service, go into your Military family with some nominal rank, I, and not the public, furnishing his necessary means? If no, say so without the least hesitation, because I am as anxious, and as deeply interested, that you shall not be encumbered as you can be yourself."

Grant graciously replied: "I will be most happy to have him in my Military family in the manner you propose. The nominal rank given him is immaterial but I would suggest that of Capt. as I have three staff officers now, of considerable service, in no higher grade. Indeed I have one officer with only the rank of Lieut. who has been in the service from the beginnng of the war. This however will make no difference and I would still say give the rank of Capt." On February 11, Robert entered the army as a captain and served creditably on Grant's staff.

I shall end this post with a story about Lincoln that took place late in the Civil War, long after his son Willie's death. There is a narration version of what I believe is this same story within the first posting reference above to Professor Burlingame's work. However, I much prefer the narration of this incident within Emanuel Hertz book "Lincoln Talks, a Biography in Anecdote" at page 662.

Mr. Lincoln said: "Colonel, did you ever dream of a lost friend, and feel that you were holding sweet communiion with that friend, and yet have a sad consciousness that it was not a reality? Just so I dream of my boy Wilie." Overcome with emotion, he dropped his head on the table, and sobbed aloud. --Paul Selby.