5 Things You Should Know About Robert Todd Lincoln

By ethan trex | aug 26, 2015.

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Robert Todd Lincoln was Abraham Lincoln's oldest son and the only Lincoln child to survive into adulthood. While he didn't make quite the mark on history that his father did, Robert Lincoln had a pretty interesting life himself. Let's take a look at five things you might not know about him:

1. He Was on Ulysses S. Grant's Personal Staff

biography of robert lincoln

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Part of Abraham Lincoln's mystique lies in his humble roots as a self-made man who found education where he could. His eldest son didn't have to go through quite as many trials and tribulations to do some learning, though. Robert left Springfield, Illinois, to attend boarding school at New Hampshire's elite Phillips Exeter Academy when he was a young man, and he later graduated from Harvard during his father's presidency.

After completing his undergrad degree, Robert stuck around Cambridge to go to Harvard Law School, but that arrangement didn't last very long. After studying law for just a few months, Lincoln received a commission as a captain in the army. Lincoln's assignment put him on Ulysses S. Grant's personal staff, so he didn't see much fighting. He did get a nice view of history, though; Lincoln was present as part of Grant's junior staff at Robert E. Lee's surrender at Appomattox Courthouse.

After the war ended, Lincoln moved to Chicago with his mother and brother and wrapped up his legal studies.

2. The Booth Family Did Him a Favor

In 1863 or 1864, young Robert Lincoln was traveling by train from New York to Washington during a break from his studies at Harvard. He hopped off the train during a stop at Jersey City, only to find himself on an extremely crowded platform. To be polite, Lincoln stepped back to wait his turn to walk across the platform, his back pressed to one of the train's cars.

This situation probably seemed harmless enough until the train started moving, which whipped Lincoln around and dropped him into the space between the platform and train, an incredibly dangerous place to be.

Lincoln probably would have been dead meat if a stranger hadn't yanked him out of the hole by his collar. That stranger? None other than Edwin Booth, one of the most celebrated actors of the 19th century and brother of eventual Lincoln assassin John Wilkes Booth.

Lincoln immediately recognized the famous thespian "“ this was sort of like if George Clooney pulled you from a burning car today "“ and thanked him effusively. The actor had no idea whose life he had saved until he received a letter commending him for his bravery in saving the President's son a few months later.

3. He Had a Strange Knack for Being Near Assassinations

Lee's surrender wasn't the only history Lincoln ended up witnessing, although things got a bit grislier for him after Appomattox. As he arrived back in Washington in April 1865 Lincoln's parents invited him to go see Our American Cousin at Ford's Theater with them. The young officer was so exhausted after his journey that he begged off so he could get a good night's sleep. That night, of course, John Wilkes Booth shot Lincoln's father, and Robert Todd was with the celebrated president when he passed away the next morning.

By 1881, Lincoln's political lineage and prominence as a lawyer qualified him for a national office, and he became Secretary of War under the newly inaugurated James A. Garfield. That July, Lincoln was scheduled to travel to Elberon, New Jersey, by train with the President, but the trip never took off. Before Lincoln and Garfield's train could leave the station, Charles Guiteau shot the Garfield, who died of complications from the wound two months later.

Oddly, that wasn't all for Lincoln, though. Two decades passed without a presidential assassination, but Lincoln's strange luck reared its head again in 1901. Lincoln traveled to Buffalo at the invitation of President William McKinley to attend the Pan-American Exposition. Although he arrived a bit late to the event, Lincoln was on his way to meet McKinley when anarchist Leon Czolgosz shot the president twice at close range.

Following these three bits of bad luck Lincoln refused to attend any presidential functions. He dryly noted that there was "a certain fatality about the presidential function when I am present."

4. He Realized His Mom Was a Little Nutty

Mary Todd Lincoln is fairly widely renowned today for being mentally ill, but it wasn't quite such an open secret when she was still alive. Robert, however, realized that his mother needed psychiatric help so she didn't become a danger to herself or an embarrassment to her family, so he had her involuntarily committed to a mental hospital in 1875 following a hearing that declared her insane.

Mary Todd was none too pleased about this plan. She not only snuck letters to her lawyer to help her escape from the institution, she also wrote newspaper editors in an effort to convince the public of her sanity. Mary Todd's ploy worked; at a second sanity hearing in 1876 she was declared sane and released from the Batavia, Illinois, sanatorium to which she'd been confined. However, by this point she'd been publicly humiliated and never really patched up her relationship with Robert before her death in 1882.

5. He Made Some Serious Dough on the Railroads

Once he got his legal practice up and running, Lincoln found a particularly lucrative clientele in the booming railroad industry. He spent most of his career working as a corporate lawyer for various railroads and train-related companies; the only breaks were his four-year stint as Secretary of War under Garfield and successor Chester A. Arthur and a four-year hitch as a minister to Britain under President Benjamin Harrison.

One of Lincoln's major clients was the Pullman Palace Car Company, for which he served as general counsel. When founder George Pullman died in 1897, Lincoln became president of the company, and in 1911 he became chairman of the Pullman Company's board. His lofty position in one of the country's most lucrative companies made him a millionaire and enabled Lincoln to build a sprawling estate, Hildene, in Manchester, Vermont.

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Family: Robert Todd Lincoln (1843-1926)

Robert Todd Lincoln, or “Bob” and “Prince of Rails” (a nickname developed on the President-elect’s trip to Washington and one which Robert detested), was named after Mary Todd’s father and was the oldest of the Lincoln children. Cross-eyed as child, he developed into a reserved but determined teenager. He left home at 16 to attend Phillips Exeter and Harvard University. Robert disliked public life although he sometimes liked the public attention he received. Sometime priggish and self-involved, he was emotionally distant from his father, with whom he spent less time as a child than did his brothers. He quickly developed a sense for fashion and clothes that his father lacked. He also had a sense of decorum, which both his mother and father were capable of violating – as when they invited General and Mrs. Tom Thumb for a honeymoon visit to the White House in 1863.

Robert was shy, reserved and fundamentally kind, but he labored under the shadow of his famous and more gregarious father. William O. Stoddard wrote that “Robert Lincoln, the hearty, whole souled and popular ‘Prince of Rails,’ was liked by every one; and by his sincerity of manner, unassuming deportment and general good sense, won a degree of good will and respect that has followed him into private life…His presence, at long intervals, in the White House, was always a pleasant and welcome visitation.” 1

“During the years 1861 to 1865, Robert Lincoln was not only a student, he was a public figure as well,” wrote biographer John S. Goff. “The young man was subjected to almost constant attention from the press and the population in general. This was a difficult position for him, especially as he came more and more to dislike the publicity, Even at this early date a familiar popular notion of this presidential son was beginning to form. If he held himself aloof from the prying gaze of the public, he was haughty and snobbish; if he gave any appearance of capitalizing on his position as the son of the Chief Executive, he was damned for that.” 2 Robert’s brief exposure to Washington before the inauguration was altogether pleasant, according to the New York Herald. It reported on March 5, the day after his father’s inauguration: “Bob, the Prince of Rails, starts for Cambridge to-morrow. He is sick of Washington and glad to get back to his college.” The Herald interest in Robert continued to his father’s presidency, later reporting that “He does everything very well, but avoids doing anything extraordinary. He doesn’t talk much; he doesn’t dance different from the other people; he isn’t odd, outré nor strange in any way.” 3

Unlike the warm bond enjoyed by his younger brothers, Robert’s relationship with his father was more formal. He later wrote a would-be biographer that “During my childhood and early youth he was almost constantly away from home, attending courts or making political speeches. In 1859 when I was sixteen and when he was beginning to devote himself more to practice in his own neighborhood, and when I would have both the inclination and the means of gratifying my desire to become better acquainted with the history of his struggles, I went to New Hampshire to school and afterward to Harvard College, and he became President. Henceforth any great intimacy between us became impossible. I scarcely even had ten minutes quiet talk with him during his Presidency, on account of his constant devotion to business.” 4

Much criticized for not earlier entering the Union Army, Robert interrupted Harvard law school to serve briefly on General Ulysses S. Grant’s staff in 1865. He and his parents battled over his desire to serve in the Army. Robert’s failure to serve led to criticism from even the President’s political allies. When Senator Ira Harris pressed Mary Lincoln on the question, in 1863, she replied: “Robert is making his preparations now to enter the Army; he is not a shirker – if fault there be it is mine, I have insisted that he should stay in college a little longer as I think an educated man can serve his country with more intelligent purpose than an ignoramous.” 5 Seamstress Elizabeth Keckley wrote:

Robert would come home every few months, bringing new joy to the family circle. He was very anxious to quit school and enter the army, but the move was sternly opposed by his mother. ‘We have lost one son, and his loss is as much as I can bear, without being called to make another sacrifice,’ she would say, when the subject was under discussion. ‘But many a poor mother has given up all her sons,’ mildly suggested Mr. Lincoln,’ 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.’ 6

Mary’s half-sister, Emilie Todd Helm, recalled a conversation in which Mary told 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 he may never come back to us!’ President Lincoln replied: “Many a poor mother, May, has had to make this sacrifice and has given up every son she had – and lost them all.'” 7

Robert had suffered one loss already – in the summer of 1863 when the daughter of the Prussian minister to Washington got married. John Hay wrote John Nicolay that “Bob was so shattered by the wedding of the idol of all of us, the bright particular Teutonne, that he rushed madly off to sympathize with nature [the White Mountains of New Hampshire] in her sternest aspects.” 8

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.” His face was more cheerful than I had seen it for a long while, and he seemed to be in a generous, forgiving mood,” wrote Elizabeth Keckley. 9 Robert had to assume the lead role for the family in his father’s funeral – since his mother was completely prostrated by the assassination. Presidential aide Edward Duffield Neil later wrote that “his manly bearing on that trying occasion made me feel that he was a worthy son of a worthy father.” 10 On April 21, 1865, Robert resigned his short-lived commission in the army.

Robert disclaimed any influence on his father. “I was a boy occupied by my studies at Harvard College, very seldom in Washington, and having no exceptional opportunity of knowing what was going on,” he later wrote Pennsylvania journalist Alexander K. McClure. Biographer John S. Goff maintained, however, that there were several instances “in which the President eldest son was privy to affairs of state or, at least, had what might be called inside information.” 11

After his father’s death, Robert resigned from the Army and moved with his mother to Chicago where he practiced law. Robert married Mary Harlan in 1868; they had three children, but their only son died as a teenager. His mother’s spending habits led him to have her confined to an insane asylum in 1875. More public-spirited than a public person, he served under Presidents James Garfield and Chester Arthur as Secretary of War (1881-85) and later as Minister to Great Britain (1889-92). His presence at the assassinations of both Garfield and President William McKinley made him self-conscious about “a certain fatality about the presidential function when I am present.” He served as president of the Pullman Company and led a very quiet life prior to his death in 1926, always attempting to preserve and protect the memory of his father.

Biographer Jason Emerson wrote of Lincoln’s first son: “Robert was a disciplined, hard-working man; he was strong, confident and self-aware; he was intelligent, witty, kind, gentlemanly, proper, and generous. Yet he was also impatient: with laziness, with ingorance, with lies and deception, with dishonorable and selfish people; and, once offended, he knew how to hold a grudge, like many of his mother’s family.” 12

  • Michael Burlingame Editor, Inside the White House in War Times: Memoirs and Report of Lincoln’s Secretary: William O. Stoddard , p. 150. (Sketch 2)
  • John S. Goff, Robert Todd Lincoln: A Man in His Own Right , p. 39
  • Goff, Robert Todd Lincoln: A Man in His Own Right , pp.45-46 (New York Herald , March 5, 1861)
  • Margaret Leech, Reveille in Washington , p. 292 (New York Herald , undated).
  • Rufus Rockwell Wilson, editor, Intimate Memories of Lincoln , p. 499.
  • Jean H. Baker, Mary Todd Lincoln , p. 225.
  • Elizabeth Keckley, Behind the Scenes , pp. 121-22.
  • Michael Burlingame, editor, At Lincoln’s Side: John Hay’s Civil War Correspondence and Selected Writings , p. 48.
  • Keckley, Behind the Scenes , pp. 137-138.
  • Wilson, editor, Intimate Memories of Lincoln , p. 613.
  • Goff, Robert Todd Lincoln: A Man in His Own Right , pp. 53-54.
  • Jason Emerson, Giant in the Shadows: The Life of Robert Todd Lincoln , p. 3.

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Giant in the Shadows: The Life of Robert T. Lincoln

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Jason Emerson

Giant in the Shadows: The Life of Robert T. Lincoln Hardcover – Illustrated, March 27, 2012

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WINNER, Russell P. Strange Memorial Book of the Year Award from the Illinois State Historical Society, 2013! University Press Books for Public and Secondary Schools, 2013 edition Although he was Abraham and Mary Lincoln’s oldest and last surviving son, the details of Robert T. Lincoln’s life are misunderstood by some and unknown to many others. Nearly half a century after the last biography about Abraham Lincoln’s son was published, historian and author Jason Emerson illuminates the life of this remarkable man and his achievements in Giant in the Shadows: The Life of Robert T. Lincoln . Emerson, after nearly ten years of research, draws upon previously unavailable materials to offer the first truly definitive biography of the famous lawyer, businessman, and statesman who, much more than merely the son of America’s most famous president, made his own indelible mark on one of the most progressive and dynamic eras in United States history.

Born in a boardinghouse but passing his last days at ease on a lavish country estate, Robert Lincoln played many roles during his lifetime. As a president’s son, a Union soldier, an ambassador to Great Britain, and a U.S. secretary of war, Lincoln was indisputably a titan of his age. Much like his father, he became one of the nation’s most respected and influential men, building a successful law practice in the city of Chicago, serving shrewdly as president of the Pullman Car Company, and at one time even being considered as a candidate for the U.S. presidency.

Along the way he bore witness to some of the most dramatic moments in America’s history, including Robert E. Lee’s surrender at Appomattox Courthouse; the advent of the railroad, telephone, electrical, and automobile industries; the circumstances surrounding the assassinations of three presidents of the United States; and the momentous presidential election of 1912. Giant in the Shadows also reveals Robert T. Lincoln’s complex relationships with his famous parents and includes previously unpublished insights into their personalities. Emerson reveals new details about Robert’s role as his father’s confidant during the brutal years of the Civil War and his reaction to his father’s murder; his prosecution of the thieves who attempted to steal his father’s body in 1876 and the extraordinary measures he took to ensure it would never happen again; as well as details about the painful decision to have his mother committed to a mental facility. In addition Emerson explores the relationship between Robert and his children, and exposes the actual story of his stewardship of the Lincoln legacy—including what he and his wife really destroyed and what was preserved. Emerson also delves into the true reason Robert is not buried in the Lincoln tomb in Springfield but instead was interred at Arlington National Cemetery.

Meticulously researched, full of never-before-seen photographs and new insight into historical events, Giant in the Shadows is the missing chapter of the Lincoln family story. Emerson’s riveting work is more than simply a biography; it is a tale of American achievement in the Gilded Age and the endurance of the Lincoln legacy.  

“A fine addition to shelves of historians and Lincoln aficionados.”— Kirkus Reviews

“Well written and well researched, this book should. . .become the go-to book on the life of this interesting son of a former president. Highly recommended."— Choice

“I found this book gripping, ingeniously argued, and exhaustively investigated. I could not put it down. . . . And I suspect that every reader with an interest in Lincoln will feel exactly the same way. For me, and for them, this book will become an essential item in the history of the era in a way that Robert himself, try as Emerson does, can never be. Emerson reminds us at the outset that Robert Lincoln never wanted to be the subject of a biography. Well, like it or not, he has one now—and a fine one, too."— Civil War Monitor

 “‘Robert’s life is a fantastic journey through a rich period of American history,’ writes Jason Emerson. And it is to his great credit as a biographer and historian that he so successfully brings Robert T. Lincoln out of history’s shadows and the times in which he lived back to vivid life.”— The American Spectator

“Emerson’s biography of Robert Todd Lincoln is set within the context of Gilded Age culture, which was vastly different from that during the Civil War. His extensive and fresh research, as well as his inclusion of many never-before-seen photographs, should make this account one of choice for both scholars and Lincoln enthusiasts.”— America’s Civil War “Jason Emerson, the premier young Lincoln scholar today, has written the definitive biography of one of America’s neglected and misunderstood leaders in both 19th- and 20th-century industry, law and politics. Beautifully written and illustrated, this is one of the best Lincoln books to appear in many years.”— Wayne C. Temple , author of Abraham Lincoln: From Skeptic to Prophet

“Here at last is the biography Lincoln aficionados have been waiting for. Historian Jason Emerson sweeps away a century of myths and misinformation about Robert T. Lincoln, including the musty old canard that he had no respect for his famous father and no sympathy for his emotionally fragile mother. This is an intimate, in-depth portrait that will be praised, quoted, and consulted for years to come.”— Thomas J. Craughwell , author of Stealing Lincoln’s Body

“This path-breaking biography tells the story of Lincoln’s only surviving son: a man utterly unlike his father in talent and temperament, yet who nonetheless found his own way to national prominence. Contemporaries of this reticent yet extraordinarily successful figure often referred to him as ‘Lincoln’s Silent Son.’ Now, thanks to Emerson’s thorough scholarship, Robert T. Lincoln is silent no more.”— Nora Titone , author of My Thoughts Be Bloody: The Bitter Rivalry Between Edwin and John Wilkes Booth That Led to an American Tragedy

About the Author

  • Print length 640 pages
  • Language English
  • Publisher Southern Illinois University Press
  • Publication date March 27, 2012
  • Dimensions 6.13 x 2.1 x 9.25 inches
  • ISBN-10 9780809330553
  • ISBN-13 978-0809330553
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  • ASIN ‏ : ‎ 0809330555
  • Publisher ‏ : ‎ Southern Illinois University Press; First Edition (March 27, 2012)
  • Language ‏ : ‎ English
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  • ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 9780809330553
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  • Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 2.65 pounds
  • Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 6.13 x 2.1 x 9.25 inches
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About the author

biography of robert lincoln

Jason Emerson

Jason Emerson is an independent historian and journalist living near Syracuse, NY.

He is the author or editor of eight books of American history, has published numerous articles and reviews in both scholarly and popular publications, and has appeared on multiple television programs, including on Book TV, American History TV, and The History Channel.

He has worked as a National Park Service park ranger at the Lincoln Home National Historic Site and the Jefferson National Expansion Memorial (the Arch) in St. Louis, and as an SCA volunteer at Gettysburg National Military Park.

HIs website is www.jasonemerson.com.

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Lincoln Lore

How and why did Robert Lincoln decide to go to Harvard?

Newly revealed letter gives the answer.

By Jason Emerson

biography of robert lincoln

The earliest-known letter by Robert Lincoln has recently surfaced, and its contents answer the longstanding question of exactly how and why Robert ended up attending Harvard College in Massachusetts and exactly what role his parents played in the decision. The letter, written from Springfield in 1859 when Robert was 16 years old, shows that the oldest son of Abraham Lincoln was a typical teenager in that he didn’t care where he went to college as long as he could escape the “dullness” of Springfield, and that his parents were the ones deciding on where he would ultimately attend. The letter also offers up a previously unknown acquaintance of Robert’s, Louis James, who became a renowned Shakespearian actor as an adult.

The origin of Robert’s attendance at Harvard has always been somewhat of a mystery to scholars desirous of understanding Abraham Lincoln’s role as parent. Existing evidence has offered no explanation for the choice, so all scholars have had to offer was supposition that Robert chose Harvard because it was prestigious, all his friends and social peers were attending Ivy League schools in the East and he was following suit, and his parents wanted him to have the best education possible. In his early years, Robert did obtain the best education he could receive in Springfield. It began in 1849 with brief attendance at a Springfield day school. In 1850, he became a student at Abel Estabrook’s Springfield Academy, a private subscription-based school, and three years later, at age 11, he entered the preparatory department of Illinois State University. Robert spent six years at ISU — attending today’s equivalents of middle school and high school — and by the spring of 1859 he was considering college.

By March of that year, Robert was 16, the older brother to eight-year-old Willie and five-year-old Tad, his mother was a strong-willed educated woman raising the children, and his father was an attorney renowned throughout the Midwest who had only months before lost a U.S. Senate race to Stephen A. Douglas, but had, in the process, gained national attention as a rising Republican politician.

Robert’s story — in general and in regard to his education — has been one rarely investigated or told except as to how it related to his famous father. In the 1960s, historian John Goff wrote an article focused completely on Robert’s education, which he followed with a full biography, Robert Todd Lincoln: A Man in His Own Right . I wrote a biography of Robert that was published in 2012 titled, Giant in the Shadows: The Life of Robert T. Lincoln . Neither Goff nor I found any information on exactly why Robert chose to attend Harvard. The only written evidence was something Robert wrote in his college autobiography that he “became aware that I could never get an education in that way [at Illinois State University] and resolved to enter Harvard College” — and that has been the extent of any known explanations. A few years ago, I was contacted by a man who was a descendant of an old acquaintance of Robert Lincoln who had a letter from Robert and was curious to get my opinion of it as Robert’s biographer. After seeing and reading it, I was astounded by its contents and the meaning it adds to the Lincoln family story.

The letter reads:

Springfield, Ill

March 4th/59

Friend Louis

I am ashamed of not having written to you before but I have been so busy at school that I have had no time for any thing else. We have had a gay time this winter, the legislature having favoured [sic] us with an extremely long session, so long, indeed, that the republican members got tired of it and went home. What has been going on in “The Garden City”? If it has been as dull there all winter as it is here just now, you have been having a sorry time.. [sic] Father came home yesterday from Chicago and told me your father would probably send you to Harvard University next fall. They have been thinking of sending me somewhere but have not made up their minds yet[.]

It is a matter of indifference to me where I go so I can get away from this place.. [sic] Are you certain of going? What class do you wish to enter? There is a young man who graduated at Harvard and wants me to go there. He gave me a catalogue, which, if you would like to see it, I will send to you. Hoping to hear from you soon I remain

Yours truly

R.T. Lincoln

The envelope is addressed to Louis James, Care of Benjamin James, Esq., Chicago, Ills., with a postmark of Springfield, Ill.

Historically, everything in the letter checks out:

Louis Levitte James, born in Tremont, Ill., on Oct. 3, 1842 (only two months after Robert Lincoln), was the son of Benjamin Franklin James. Benjamin James was a lawyer who practiced in Tazewell County, Illinois, and was the publisher of the short-lived Tazewell Whig . He was admitted to the Illinois bar in 1841 (Abraham Lincoln was on the committee that examined him for admission) where he practiced in Tremont and participated in Whig politics. He moved his family to Chicago in the late 1850s and set up his law practice in that city. He was a strong supporter of Abraham Lincoln for Congress in the 1840s, Senate in the 1850s, and the presidency in 1860. He was appointed a U.S. patent examiner in Washington, D.C., during the war.

Abraham Lincoln and Benjamin James were definitely acquaintances and possibly friends. There are multiple letters between them in Lincoln’s collected papers. In a letter from Lincoln to James, dated August 31, 1860, Lincoln thanks James for his congratulations on receiving the Republican presidential nomination, and adds, “How time gallops along with us! Look at these great big boys of yours and mine, when it was but yesterday that we and their mothers were unmarried. Make my respects to Mrs. James and Louis.” Clearly, James knew Abraham Lincoln and their two boys became acquainted through their fathers.

biography of robert lincoln

It is also verified that Abraham Lincoln was in Chicago in late February 1859 and returned to Springfield on March 3, just as Robert declares in the letter. Lincoln was in Chicago on legal business for his client Jonathan Haines. (This is likely the case of Ruggs v. Haines , in which Jonathan and Ansel Haines, inventors and manufacturers of the Illinois Harvester, hired Lincoln in 1856 to sue George H. Ruggs for patent infringement. Lincoln’s clients won at trial and on appeal.) While in town, Lincoln also gave a speech at the city’s Republican party headquarters to celebrate the party’s victory in the municipal elections. Lincoln wrote a letter (to Peter H. Watson) from Chicago on March 2 and a letter from Springfield (to Hayden Keeling) on March 3.

As to the contents of the letter of young Robert Lincoln to Louis James, there are many aspects of it that are fascinating and exciting to the study of the Lincoln family. First of all, this is the earliest known letter by Robert Lincoln to ever be seen. Prior to this letter, the earliest letter written by Robert was one to his mother on December 2, 1860, which he wrote from Phillips Exeter Academy in New Hampshire. (Robert obviously wrote many letters as a teen in Springfield, but none of them have ever been publicly found. Robert did burn many of his letters as an adult in the typical Victorian house cleaning procedure, and it is known that Mary Lincoln burned many family papers in 1861 while preparing to go to Washington, so his teen letters were probably destroyed during such events.)

Another interesting aspect to the letter is the neatness of the handwriting. Robert’s handwriting as an adult is much more angular and tightly knit; it is also atrocious and difficult to read. Also, his adult signature was “Robert T. Lincoln” or “RTL” to friends, so his signature in the 1859 letter as “RT Lincoln” is rare and unusual. However, considering that he was 16 when this was written and in the midst of school, this makes sense that he would still be writing in a neat script and had not yet adopted his adult signature.

For me, as someone who spent nearly a decade researching and writing Robert’s life, the most exciting (and valuable) aspect to the letter is the viewing of Robert’s typical teen unhappiness in where he lives, and, most importantly, the information about Robert Lincoln’s college plans. The fact that Robert talks about how “dull” life is in Springfield and how he just wants to “get away from this place” shows that Robert was a normal teenager despite his father’s fame, and that the Lincoln family was a normal family.  Robert’s statement that his parents “have been thinking of sending me somewhere,” and that his father was talking to the elder James about Harvard, shows for the first time that the decision for Robert Lincoln to attend Harvard College was one that was driven by Abraham and Mary Lincoln. Also, Robert’s statement, “There is a young man here who graduated Harvard and wants me to go there,” is interesting because there was a clerk in the Lincoln & Herndon Law Office named Charles B. Brown who not only graduated from Harvard in 1856 but also wrote a letter of introduction for Robert to Brown’s former classmate William W. Burrage. When Robert went to Harvard in summer 1859 to take the exams, he visited with Burrage to get advice on how to proceed, he told a correspondent in 1909. [*]

Interestingly, other than this letter, no other letter to or from Louis James to Robert Lincoln is known to exist. It appears Louis never entered Harvard, but instead joined the Union army at the outset of the Civil War. “I served through the war and when it was over went to Louisville, where I got my first engagement … in 1864,” as he told one writer in 1902. James became a Shakespearean actor of some note (rated “second tier” by New York critics at the time). He toured with Lawrence Barrett’s acting company from 1877 to 1886. “With a commanding vocal and physical presence as well as ease of emotional range, James earned respect in the profession and faithful audiences on the road, even if he never attained Broadway stardom,” according to Felicia Hardison Londré in her book, The Enchanted Years of the Stage: Kansas City at the Crossroads of American Theater, 1870-1930 .

James’s first wife, Lillian Scanlon, died in 1876; he married his co-star Marie Wainwright in 1882, and divorced in 1889; he married Alphia Hendricks in December 1892. Hendricks (1868-1940) performed as Aphie James. She performed in vaudeville and on Broadway during her career. The couple trouped together in James’s own company and had a large summer house at Monmouth Beach, New Jersey.

Louis died unexpectedly in Montana while touring with his company in 1910. Alphie passed in 1940. Their remains are buried in the Hendricks family plot in Kansas City, Missouri. Alphie was the aunt of the father of the letter’s owner who made the correspondence available to me. He has since sold the letter to a private collector.

Robert Lincoln did attend Harvard College, but he did not enroll until 1860. When he took the entrance exams in 1859 he failed miserably and, upon receiving advice from Harvard President Dr. James Walker, undertook a year of preparatory work at Phillips Academy, in Exeter, New Hampshire.

biography of robert lincoln

Robert graduated from Phillips Exeter Academy not long after his father’s nomination as the Republican presidential candidate on May 18, 1860. In early July, he again attempted the Harvard entrance exams and this time passed easily. “After the commencement in 1860, I was able to inform my father that I had succeeded in entering College without a condition, quite a change from the previous year,” Robert wrote in his college biography four years later. Abraham was pleased to brag about his son’s achievements. He wrote to his friend Anson G. Henry, “Our oldest boy ‘Bob’ has been away from us nearly a year at school. He will enter Harvard University this month. He promises well, considering we never controlled him much.” Robert Lincoln graduated Harvard in 1864, served briefly on General U.S. Grant’s staff during the final months of the Civil War, and ultimately became a lawyer in Chicago.

Jason Emerson is a journalist and historian.  He is the author of The Madness of Mary Lincoln.

[*] One of the many incorrect stories about Robert Lincoln’s life was that when he journeyed to Harvard College in 1859 is that he carried with him a letter of introduction from U.S. Senator Stephen A. Douglas, presenting Robert as the son of his friend Abraham Lincoln, “with whom I have lately been canvassing the state of Illinois.” Though untrue, the story, related by Edward Everett Hale at the end of the nineteenth century, has been repeated by every historian since. Robert even told Hale—twice, in 1899—that his facts were incorrect, stating the second time, “I certainly never told the story to you, because I do not believe it to have any foundation whatever.” Robert thought it “quite impossible” that he carried a letter from Douglas, for, even though the elder Lincoln and Douglas had known each other well, “I do not think they were ever what can be called friends.” Robert also said he was “quite sure” that the relations of the two men after the 1858 senatorial campaign “were not such as to permit that my father should have asked of Senator Douglas a letter of introduction for me to anybody. More than that, Senator Douglas had been from early manhood away from the New England States, and I think it very unlikely that he had such relations as to authorize him to give a letter of introduction to anyone at Cambridge.”

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Robert Lincoln

  • Born August 1 , 1843 · Springfield, Illinois, USA
  • Died July 25 , 1926 · Manchester, Vermont, USA
  • Birth name Robert Todd Lincoln
  • Height 5′ 9½″ (1.77 m)
  • Robert Lincoln was born on August 1, 1843 in Springfield, Illinois, USA. He was married to Mary Harlan. He died on July 25, 1926 in Manchester, Vermont, USA.
  • Spouse Mary Harlan (September 24, 1868 - July 25, 1926) (his death, 3 children)
  • U.S. Secretary of War, 1881-1885. Son of President Abraham Lincoln.
  • He declined an invitation to join his father, President Abraham Lincoln at Ford Theatre the night of his assassination, although he was at his father's bedside when he died. He accepted invitations to attend the events where both President James A. Garfield and President William McKinley were assassinated in 1881 and 1901 respectively. After McKinley's assassination, he became deeply troubled by the co-incidence that every time a President had invited him to a public function, they had been assassinated whether or not he accepted the invitations. Consequently, he politely let it be known to all of McKinley's successors that they refrain from inviting him to public functions that they would be attending. He made an exception in 1923 when he was invited by President Warren G. Harding to attend the dedication ceremony for the Lincoln Memorial, which was his final public appearance.
  • He served in the Union Army in 1865 as a Captain in the final months of the civil war. He served on General Ulysses S. Grant's staff and was one of the Union Army officers present the Appotomex Courthouse where Grant accepted the surrender of the Confederate forces by General Robert E. Lee .
  • Lincoln's life was saved in 1864 by noted stage actor Edwin Booth when Lincoln accidentally slipped off a train platform in 1864 in Jersey City. Lincoln recognized the actor and thanked him. Ironically, Edwin's brother, John Wilkes Booth, assassinated his father one year later. When Lincoln recounted the story publicly in 1909, he said that he sincerely hoped that Edwin's saving his life gave him some comfort in the years following the assassination.
  • Served as both President of the Pullman Company (1901-1911) and Chairman of the Board (1911-1922).

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Abraham Lincoln

President Abraham Lincoln preserved the Union during the American Civil War and issued the Emancipation Proclamation, freeing enslaved people.

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Abraham Lincoln was the 16 th president of the United States , serving from 1861 to 1865, and is regarded as one of America’s greatest heroes due to his roles in guiding the Union through the Civil War and working to emancipate enslaved people. His eloquent support of democracy and insistence that the Union was worth saving embody the ideals of self-government that all nations strive to achieve. In 1863, he issued the Emancipation Proclamation, which freed slaves across the Confederacy. Lincoln’s rise from humble beginnings to achieving the highest office in the land is a remarkable story, and his death is equally notably. He was assassinated by John Wilkes Booth in 1865, at age 56, as the country was slowly beginning to reunify following the war. Lincoln’s distinctively humane personality and incredible impact on the nation have endowed him with an enduring legacy.

FULL NAME: Abraham Lincoln BORN: February 12, 1809 DIED: April 15, 1865 BIRTHPLACE: Hodgenville, Kentucky SPOUSE: Mary Todd Lincoln (m. 1842) CHILDREN: Robert Todd Lincoln , Edward Baker Lincoln, William Wallace Lincoln, and Thomas “Tad” Lincoln ASTROLOGICAL SIGN: Aquarius HEIGHT: 6 feet 4 inches

Abraham Lincoln was born on February 12, 1809, to parents Thomas Lincoln and Nancy Hanks Lincoln in rural Hodgenville, Kentucky.

Thomas was a strong and determined pioneer who found a moderate level of prosperity and was well respected in the community. The couple had two other children: Lincoln’s older sister, Sarah, and younger brother, Thomas, who died in infancy. His death wasn’t the only tragedy the family would endure.

In 1817, the Lincolns were forced to move from young Abraham’s Kentucky birthplace to Perry County, Indiana, due to a land dispute. In Indiana, the family “squatted” on public land to scrap out a living in a crude shelter, hunting game and farming a small plot. Lincoln’s father was eventually able to buy the land.

When Lincoln was 9 years old, his 34-year-old mother died of tremetol, more commonly known as milk sickness, on October 5, 1818. The event was devastating to the young boy, who grew more alienated from his father and quietly resented the hard work placed on him at an early age.

In December 1819, just over a year after his mother’s death, Lincoln’s father Thomas married Sarah Bush Johnston, a Kentucky widow with three children of her own. She was a strong and affectionate woman with whom Lincoln quickly bonded.

Although both his parents were most likely illiterate, Thomas’ new wife Sarah encouraged Lincoln to read. It was while growing into manhood that Lincoln received his formal education—an estimated total of 18 months—a few days or weeks at a time.

Reading material was in short supply in the Indiana wilderness. Neighbors recalled how Lincoln would walk for miles to borrow a book. He undoubtedly read the family Bible and probably other popular books at that time such as Robinson Crusoe, Pilgrim’s Progres s, and Aesop’s Fable s.

In March 1830, the family again migrated, this time to Macon County, Illinois. When his father moved the family again to Coles County, 22-year-old Lincoln struck out on his own, making a living in manual labor.

Lincoln was 6 feet 4 inches tall, rawboned and lanky yet muscular and physically strong. He spoke with a backwoods twang and walked with a long-striding gait. He was known for his skill in wielding an ax and early on made a living splitting wood for fire and rail fencing.

Young Lincoln eventually migrated to the small community of New Salem, Illinois, where over a period of years he worked as a shopkeeper, postmaster, and eventually general store owner. It was through working with the public that Lincoln acquired social skills and honed a storytelling talent that made him popular with the locals.

Not surprising given his imposing frame, Lincoln was an excellent wrestler and had only one recorded loss—to Hank Thompson in 1832—over a span of 12 years. A shopkeeper who employed Lincoln in New Salem, Illinois, reportedly arranged bouts for him as a way to promote the business. Lincoln notably beat a local champion named Jack Armstrong and became somewhat of a hero. (The National Wrestling Hall of Fame posthumously gave Lincoln its Outstanding American Award in 1992.)

When the Black Hawk War broke out in 1832 between the United States and Native Americans, the volunteers in the area elected Lincoln to be their captain. He saw no combat during this time, save for “a good many bloody struggles with the mosquitoes,” but was able to make several important political connections.

As he was starting his political career in the early 1830s, Lincoln decided to become a lawyer. He taught himself the law by reading William Blackstone’s Commentaries on the Laws of England . After being admitted to the bar in 1837, he moved to Springfield, Illinois, and began to practice in the John T. Stuart law firm.

In 1844, Lincoln partnered with William Herndon in the practice of law. Although the two had different jurisprudent styles, they developed a close professional and personal relationship.

Lincoln made a good living in his early years as a lawyer but found that Springfield alone didn’t offer enough work. So to supplement his income, he followed the court as it made its rounds on the circuit to the various county seats in Illinois.

mary todd lincoln sitting in a chair and holding flowers for a photo

On November 4, 1842, Lincoln wed Mary Todd , a high-spirited, well-educated woman from a distinguished Kentucky family. Although they were married until Lincoln’s death, their relationship had a history of instability.

When the couple became engaged in 1840, many of their friends and family couldn’t understand Mary’s attraction; at times, Lincoln questioned it himself. In 1841, the engagement was suddenly broken off, most likely at Lincoln’s initiative. Mary and Lincoln met later at a social function and eventually did get married.

The couple had four sons— Robert Todd , Edward Baker, William Wallace, and Thomas “Tad”—of whom only Robert survived to adulthood.

Before marrying Todd, Lincoln was involved with other potential matches. Around 1837, he purportedly met and became romantically involved with Anne Rutledge. Before they had a chance to be engaged, a wave of typhoid fever came over New Salem, and Anne died at age 22.

Her death was said to have left Lincoln severely depressed. However, several historians disagree on the extent of Lincoln’s relationship with Rutledge, and his level of sorrow at her death might be more the makings of legend.

About a year after the death of Rutledge, Lincoln courted Mary Owens. The two saw each other for a few months, and marriage was considered. But in time, Lincoln called off the match.

In 1834, Lincoln began his political career and was elected to the Illinois state legislature as a member of the Whig Party . More than a decade later, from 1847 to 1849, he served a single term in the U.S. House of Representatives. His foray into national politics seemed to be as unremarkable as it was brief. He was the lone Whig from Illinois, showing party loyalty but finding few political allies.

As a congressman, Lincoln used his term in office to speak out against the Mexican-American War and supported Zachary Taylor for president in 1848. His criticism of the war made him unpopular back home, and he decided not to run for second term. Instead, he returned to Springfield to practice law.

By the 1850s, the railroad industry was moving west, and Illinois found itself becoming a major hub for various companies. Lincoln served as a lobbyist for the Illinois Central Railroad as its company attorney.

Success in several court cases brought other business clients as well, including banks, insurance companies, and manufacturing firms. Lincoln also worked in some criminal trials.

In one case, a witness claimed that he could identify Lincoln’s client who was accused of murder, because of the intense light from a full moon. Lincoln referred to an almanac and proved that the night in question had been too dark for the witness to see anything clearly. His client was acquitted.

As a member of the Illinois state legislature, Lincoln supported the Whig politics of government-sponsored infrastructure and protective tariffs. This political understanding led him to formulate his early views on slavery, not so much as a moral wrong, but as an impediment to economic development.

In 1854, Congress passed the Kansas-Nebraska Act , which repealed the Missouri Compromise , allowing individual states and territories to decide for themselves whether to allow slavery. The law provoked violent opposition in Kansas and Illinois, and it gave rise to today’s Republican Party .

This awakened Lincoln’s political zeal once again, and his views on slavery moved more toward moral indignation. Lincoln joined the Republican Party in 1856.

In 1857, the Supreme Court issued its controversial Dred Scott decision, declaring Black people were not citizens and had no inherent rights. Although Lincoln felt Black people weren’t equal to whites, he believed America’s founders intended that all men were created with certain inalienable rights.

Lincoln decided to challenge sitting U.S. Senator Stephen Douglas for his seat. In his nomination acceptance speech, he criticized Douglas, the Supreme Court , and President James Buchanan for promoting slavery then declared “a house divided cannot stand.”

During Lincoln’s 1858 U.S. Senate campaign against Douglas, he participated in seven debates held in different cities across Illinois. The two candidates didn’t disappoint, giving stirring debates on issues such as states’ rights and western expansion. But the central issue was slavery.

Newspapers intensely covered the debates, often times with partisan commentary. In the end, the state legislature elected Douglas, but the exposure vaulted Lincoln into national politics.

With his newly enhanced political profile, in 1860, political operatives in Illinois organized a campaign to support Lincoln for the presidency. On May 18, at the Republican National Convention in Chicago, Lincoln surpassed better-known candidates such as William Seward of New York and Salmon P. Chase of Ohio. Lincoln’s nomination was due, in part, to his moderate views on slavery, his support for improving the national infrastructure, and the protective tariff.

In the November 1860 general election, Lincoln faced his friend and rival Stephen Douglas, this time besting him in a four-way race that included John C. Breckinridge of the Northern Democrats and John Bell of the Constitution Party. Lincoln received not quite 40 percent of the popular vote but carried 180 of 303 Electoral College votes, thus winning the U.S. presidency. He grew his trademark beard after his election.

Lincoln’s Cabinet

Following his election to the presidency in 1860, Lincoln selected a strong cabinet composed of many of his political rivals, including William Seward, Salmon P. Chase, Edward Bates, and Edwin Stanton.

Formed out the adage “Hold your friends close and your enemies closer,” Lincoln’s cabinet became one of his strongest assets in his first term in office, and he would need them as the clouds of war gathered over the nation the following year.

abraham lincoln stands next to 15 union army soldiers in uniform at a war camp, lincoln holds onto the back of a chair and wears a long jacket and top hat

Before Lincoln’s inauguration in March 1861, seven Southern states had seceded from the Union, and by April, the U.S. military installation Fort Sumter was under siege in Charleston Harbor, South Carolina. In the early morning hours of April 12, 1861, the guns stationed to protect the harbor blazed toward the fort, signaling the start of the U.S. Civil War , America’s costliest and bloodiest war.

The newly President Lincoln responded to the crisis wielding powers as no other president before him: He distributed $2 million from the Treasury for war material without an appropriation from Congress; he called for 75,000 volunteers into military service without a declaration of war; and he suspended the writ of habeas corpus, allowing for the arrest and imprisonment of suspected Confederate States sympathizers without a warrant.

Crushing the rebellion would be difficult under any circumstances, but the Civil War, after decades of white-hot partisan politics, was especially onerous. From all directions, Lincoln faced disparagement and defiance. He was often at odds with his generals, his cabinet, his party, and a majority of the American people.

On January 1, 1863, Lincoln delivered his official Emancipation Proclamation , reshaping the cause of the Civil War from saving the Union to abolishing slavery.

The Union Army’s first year and a half of battlefield defeats made it difficult to keep morale high and support strong for a reunification of the nation. And the Union victory at Antietam on September 22, 1862, while by no means conclusive, was hopeful. It gave Lincoln the confidence to officially change the goals of the war. On that same day, he issued a preliminary proclamation that slaves in states rebelling against the Union would be free as of January 1.

The Emancipation Proclamation stated that all individuals who were held as enslaved people in rebellious states “henceforward shall be free.” The action was more symbolic than effective because the North didn’t control any states in rebellion, and the proclamation didn’t apply to border states, Tennessee, or some Louisiana parishes.

As a result, the Union army shared the Proclamation’s mandate only after it had taken control of Confederate territory. In the far reaches of western Texas, that day finally came on June 19, 1865—more than two and a half years after the Emancipation Proclamation took effect. For decades, many Black Americans have celebrated this anniversary, known as Juneteenth or Emancipation Day, and in 2021, President Joe Biden made Juneteenth a national holiday.

Still, the Emancipation Proclamation did have some immediate impact. It permitted Black Americans to serve in the Union Army for the first time, which contributed to the eventual Union victory. The historic declaration also paved the way for the passage of the 13 th Amendment that ended legal slavery in the United States.

a painting of the gettysburg address with abraham lincoln standing on a stage and talking to a crowd

On November 19, 1863, Lincoln delivered what would become his most famous speech and one of the most important speeches in American history: the Gettysburg Address .

Addressing a crowd of around 15,000 people, Lincoln delivered his 272-word speech at one of the bloodiest battlefields of the Civil War, the Gettysburg National Cemetery in Pennsylvania. The Civil War, Lincoln said, was the ultimate test of the preservation of the Union created in 1776, and the people who died at Gettysburg fought to uphold this cause.

Lincoln evoked the Declaration of Independence , saying it was up to the living to ensure that the “government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth,” and this Union was “dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.”

A common interpretation was that the president was expanding the cause of the Civil War from simply reunifying the Union to also fighting for equality and abolishing slavery.

Following Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation in 1863, the war effort gradually improved for the North, though more by attrition than by brilliant military victories.

But by 1864, the Confederate armies had eluded major defeat and Lincoln was convinced he’d be a one-term president. His nemesis George B. McClellan , the former commander of the Army of the Potomac, challenged him for the presidency, but the contest wasn’t even close. Lincoln received 55 percent of the popular vote and 212 of 243 electoral votes.

On April 9, 1865, General Robert E. Lee , commander of the Army of Virginia, surrendered his forces to Union General Ulysses S. Grant . The Civil War was for all intents and purposes over.

Reconstruction had already began during the Civil War, as early as 1863 in areas firmly under Union military control, and Lincoln favored a policy of quick reunification with a minimum of retribution. He was confronted by a radical group of Republicans in Congress that wanted complete allegiance and repentance from former Confederates. Before a political debate had any chance to firmly develop, Lincoln was killed.

Lincoln was assassinated on April 14, 1865, by well-known actor and Confederate sympathizer John Wilkes Booth at Ford’s Theatre in Washington. Lincoln was taken to the Petersen House across the street and laid in a coma for nine hours before dying the next morning. He was 56. His death was mourned by millions of citizens in the North and South alike.

Lincoln’s body first lay in state at the U. S. Capitol. About 600 invited guests attended a funeral in the East Room of the White House on April 19, though an inconsolable Mary Todd Lincoln wasn’t present.

His body was transported to his final resting place in Springfield, Illinois, by a funeral train. Newspapers publicized the schedule of the train, which made stops along various cities that played roles in Lincoln’s path to Washington. In 10 cities, the casket was removed and placed in public for memorial services. Lincoln was finally placed in a tomb on May 4.

On the day of Lincoln’s death, Andrew Johnson was sworn in as the 17 th president at the Kirkwood House hotel in Washington.

Lincoln, already taller than most, is known for his distinctive top hats. Although it’s unclear when he began wearing them, historians believe he likely chose the style as a gimmick.

He wore a top hat to Ford’s Theatre on the night of his assassination. Following his death, the War Department preserved the hat until 1867 when, with Mary Todd Lincoln’s approval, it was transferred to the Patent Office and the Smithsonian Institution. Worried about the commotion it might cause, the Smithsonian stored the hat in a basement instead of putting it on display. It was finally exhibited in 1893, and it’s now one of the Institution’s most treasured items.

Lincoln is frequently cited by historians and average citizens alike as America’s greatest president. An aggressively activist commander-in-chief, Lincoln used every power at his disposal to assure victory in the Civil War and end slavery in the United States.

Some scholars doubt that the Union would have been preserved had another person of lesser character been in the White House. According to historian Michael Burlingame , “No president in American history ever faced a greater crisis and no president ever accomplished as much.”

Lincoln’s philosophy was perhaps best summed up in his Second Inaugural Address , when he stated, “With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation’s wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan, to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.”

The Lincoln Memorial

a large statue of abraham lincoln with an engraving behind it

Since its dedication in 1922, the Lincoln Memorial in Washington has honored the president’s legacy. Inspired by the Greek Parthenon, the monument features a 19-foot high statue of Lincoln and engravings of the Gettysburg Address and Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Address. Former President William Howard Taft served as chair of the Lincoln Memorial Commission, which oversaw its design and construction.

The monument is the most visited in the city, attracting around 8 million people per year. Civil rights icon Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his famous “I Have a Dream” speech on the memorial’s steps in 1963.

Lincoln has been the subject of numerous films about his life and presidency, rooted in both realism and absurdity.

Among the earlier films featuring the former president is Young Mr. Lincoln (1939), which stars Henry Fonda and focuses on Lincoln’s early life and law career. A year later, Abe Lincoln in Illinois gave a dramatized account of Lincoln’s life after leaving Kentucky.

The most notable modern film is Lincoln , the 2012 biographical drama directed by Steven Spielberg and starring Daniel Day-Lewis as Lincoln and Sally Field as his wife, Mary Todd Lincoln . Day-Lewis won the Academy Award for Best Actor for his performance, and the film was nominated for Best Picture.

A more fantastical depiction of Lincoln came in the 1989 comedy film Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure , in which the titular characters played by Keanu Reeves and Alex Winter travel back in time for the president’s help in completing their high school history report. Lincoln gives the memorable instruction to “be excellent to each other and... party on, dudes!”

Another example is the 2012 action film Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter , based on a 2010 novel by Seth Grahame-Smith. Benjamin Walker plays Lincoln, who leads a secret double life hunting the immortal creatures and even fighting them during the Civil War.

Lincoln’s role during the Civil War is heavily explored in the 1990 Ken Burns documentary The Civil War , which won two Emmy Awards and two Grammys. In 2022, the History Channel aired a three-part docuseries about his life simply titled Abraham Lincoln .

  • Those who deny freedom to others deserve it not for themselves.
  • I claim not to have controlled events, but confess plainly that events have controlled me.
  • No man is good enough to govern another man, without that other ’ s consent.
  • I have learned the value of old friends by making many new ones.
  • Government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.
  • Whenever I hear anyone arguing over slavery, I feel a strong impulse to see it tried on him personally.
  • To give the victory to the right, not bloody bullets, but peaceful ballots only, are necessary.
  • Our defense is in the preservation of the spirit which prizes liberty as the heritage of all men, in all lands, everywhere. Destroy this spirit, and you have planted the seeds of despotism around your own doors.
  • Don ’ t interfere with anything in the Constitution. That must be maintained, for it is the only safeguard of our liberties.
  • Always bear in mind that your own resolution to succeed is more important than any other one thing.
  • With malice toward none; with charity for all; with firmness in the right, as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in; to bind up the nation ’ s wounds; to care for him who shall have borne the battle, and for his widow, and his orphan—to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace, among ourselves, and with all nations.
  • I walk slowly, but I never walk backward.
  • Nearly all men can handle adversity, if you want to test a man’s character, give him power.
  • I ’ m the big buck of this lick. If any of you want to try it, come on and whet your horns.
  • We can complain because rose bushes have thorns.
  • Am I not destroying my enemies when I make friends of them?
  • It is better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to open one’s mouth and remove all doubt.
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frederick douglass posing for camera in a suit

Frederick Douglass

Nathan Bedford Forrest

Nathan Bedford Forrest

jefferson davis

Jefferson Davis

ulysses s grant

Ulysses S. Grant

The Assassination of Abraham Lincoln

A Smithsonian magazine special report

The History of How We Came to Revere Abraham Lincoln

The slain president’s two personal secretaries battled mudslingers for a quarter-century to shape his image

Joshua Zeitz

Lincoln

John Hay, one of Abraham Lincoln’s two private secretaries, spent the evening of April 14, 1865, Good Friday, at the White House, drinking whiskey and talking with the president’s 21-year-old son, Robert, an officer attached to General Ulysses S. Grant’s staff. Shortly before 11 p.m., Tad Lincoln burst through the front door of the mansion, crying “They’ve killed Papa dead!” Hay and Robert rushed by carriage to Tenth Street, where the mortally wounded president had been transferred to the Petersen House, a boardinghouse across from Ford’s Theatre. Upon their arrival, a doctor informed them that the president would not survive his wounds.

With John Hay at his side, Robert Todd Lincoln walked into the room where his father lay stretched out on a narrow bed. Unconscious from the moment of his shooting, the president “breathed with slow and regular respiration throughout the night,” Hay later recalled. Family friends and government officials filed in and out of the chamber. “As the dawn came and the lamplight grew pale,” Hay recalled, the president’s “pulse began to fail.” Hay and Robert were at the president’s side when he passed.

The next day, 33-year-old John Nicolay, who served as the president’s other private secretary, was aboard a Navy warship, returning from a brief excursion to Cuba, where he had traveled to take the ocean air. As his party entered Chesapeake Bay, Nicolay reported, they “took a pilot on board [and] heard from him the first news of the terrible loss the country had suffered....It was so unexpected, so sudden and so horrible even to think of, much less to realize that we couldn’t believe it, and therefore remained in hope that it would prove one of the thousand groundless exaggerations which the war has brought forth during the past four years. Alas, when we reached Point Lookout at daylight this morning, the mournful reports of the minute guns that were being fired, and the flags at half-mast left us no ground for further hope.”

It is little wonder that historians consult Hay’s and Nicolay’s writing frequently—their letters and journals provide eyewitness accounts of their White House years. But their major life’s work after the Civil War is a largely forgotten story.

biography of robert lincoln

“The boys,” as the president affectionately called them, became Lincoln’s official biographers. Enjoying exclusive access to his papers—which the Lincoln family closed to the public until 1947 (the 21st anniversary of the death of Robert Todd Lincoln)— they undertook a 25-year mission to create a definitive and enduring historical image of their slain leader. The culmination of these efforts—their exhaustive, ten-volume biography, serialized between 1886 and 1890—constituted one of the most successful exercises in revisionism in American history. Writing against the rising currents of Southern apologia, Hay and Nicolay pioneered the “Northern” interpretation of the Civil War—a standard against which every other historian and polemicist had to stake out a position.

Hay and Nicolay helped invent the Lincoln we know today—the sage father figure; the military genius; the greatest American orator; the brilliant political tactician; the master of a fractious cabinet who forged a “team of rivals” out of erstwhile challengers for the throne; the Lincoln Memorial Lincoln .

That Abraham Lincoln was all of these things, in some measure, there can be no doubt. But it is easy to forget how widely underrated Lincoln the president and Lincoln the man were at the time of his death and how successful Hay and Nicolay were in elevating his place in the nation’s collective historical memory.

While Lincoln prided himself on his deep connection to “the people,” he never succeeded in translating his immense popularity with the Northern public into similar regard among the nation’s political and intellectual elites. The profound emotional bond that he shared with Union soldiers and their families, and his stunning electoral success in two presidential elections, never fully inspired an equivalent level of esteem by the influential men who governed the country and guarded its official history. To many of these men, he remained in death what he was in life: the rail-splitter and country lawyer—good, decent and ill-fitted to the immense responsibilities that befell him.

Leading into the 1864 election cycle, many prominent in Lincoln’s own party agreed with Iowa senator James Grimes that the administration “has been a disgrace from the very beginning to every one who had any thing to do with bringing it into power.” Charles Sumner, a radical antislavery leader, fumed that the nation needed “a president with brains; one who can make a plan and carry it out.”

From across the political spectrum, influential writers and politicians blamed Lincoln for four years of military stalemate and setbacks and for a series of political blunders that cost his party dearly in the 1862 midterm elections. John Andrew, the governor of Massachusetts, spoke for many Republicans when he explained his support of Lincoln’s re-election. The president, he said, was “essentially lacking in the quality of leadership,” but now that he had been renominated, “correction is impossible...Massachusetts will vote for the Union Cause at all events and will support Mr. Lincoln so long as he remains the candidate.”

Years later, Hay remarked that had Lincoln “died in the days of doubt and gloom which preceded his reelection,” rather than in the final weeks of the war, as the Union moved to secure its great victory, he would almost certainly have been remembered differently, despite his great acts and deeds.

John Hay and John George Nicolay were prairie boys who met in 1851 as gifted, inquiring students in a rural Illinois school. Hay, a physician’s son and one of six children born into a close-knit family, and Nicolay, orphaned at 14 after his parents emigrated from Bavaria in 1838, forged a close friendship that endured over a half century. Fortune placed them in the right place (Springfield, Illinois) at the right time (1860) and offered them a front-row seat to one of the most tumultuous political and military upheavals in American history.

By 1856, Nicolay, the editor of an Illinois antislavery newspaper, had become active in Republican party politics. Appointed an aide to the Illinois secretary of state that year, he was a well-known figure in the statehouse. Hay returned to Illinois in 1859 after graduation from Brown University and was studying law, having joined his uncle Milton Hay’s Springfield practice, housed in the same building as Lincoln’s law offices.

Lincoln took on Nicolay as his secretary in June 1860, in the midst of the presidential campaign. During the heady post-election interlude in Springfield, Nicolay, installed in the governor’s office, controlled access to Lincoln and labored alone, answering between 50 and 100 letters a day.

When the mail and visitors became unmanageable, Hay began assisting his friend on an informal basis. By the end of December, Lincoln offered Nicolay the post of presidential secretary, at a princely sum of $2,500 per year—almost three times what he earned as campaign secretary. Not long after, Nicolay suggested that Hay be appointed assistant secretary. “We can’t take all Illinois down with us to Washington,” Lincoln replied. When Milton offered to pay his nephew’s salary for six months, the president-elect relented. “Well, let Hay come,” he agreed.

As Abraham Lincoln’s private secretaries, Nicolay and Hay became closer to the president than anyone outside his immediate family. Still in their 20s, they lived and worked on the second floor of the White House, performing the functions of a modern-day chief of staff, press secretary, political director and presidential body man. Above all, they guarded the “last door which opens into the awful presence” of the commander in chief, in the words of Noah Brooks, a journalist and one of many Washington insiders who coveted their jobs, resented their influence and thought them a little too big for their britches (“a fault for which it seems to me either Nature or our tailors are to blame,” Hay once quipped).

In demeanor and temperament, they could not have been more different. Short-tempered and dyspeptic, Nicolay cut a brooding figure to those seeking the president’s time or favor. William Stoddard, formerly an Illinois journalist and then an assistant secretary under their supervision, later remarked that Nicolay was “decidedly German in his manner of telling men what he thought of them...People who do not like him—because they cannot use him, perhaps—say he is sour and crusty, and it is a grand good thing, then, that he is.”

Hay cultivated a softer image. He was, in the words of his contemporaries, a “comely young man with peach-blossom face,” “very witty boyish in his manner, yet deep enough—bubbling over with some brilliant speech.” An instant fixture in Washington social circles, fast friend of Robert Todd Lincoln’s and favorite among Republican congressmen who haunted the White House halls, he projected a youthful dash that balanced out Nicolay’s more grim bearing.

Hay and Nicolay were party to the president’s greatest official acts and most private moments. They were in the room when he signed the Emancipation Proclamation, and by his side at Gettysburg, when he first spoke to the nation of a “new birth of freedom.” When he could not sleep—which, as the war progressed, was often—Lincoln walked down the corridor to their quarters and passed the time reciting Shakespeare or mulling over the day’s political and military developments. When his son Willie died in 1862, the first person to whom Lincoln turned was John Nicolay.

Though the White House was under military guard—later, as the war progressed, plainclothes detectives mingled among household staff for added security—the public, including hordes of patronage seekers, was at liberty to enter the mansion during regular business hours. Visiting hours “began at ten o’clock in the morning,” Hay explained, “but in reality the anterooms and halls were full before that hour—people anxious to get the first axe ground.”

After rising at dawn and eating a sparse breakfast of one egg, toast and black coffee, the president read the morning dispatches from his generals, reviewed paperwork with his secretaries and conferred with members of his cabinet. Breaking at noon for a solitary lunch—“a biscuit, a glass of milk in the winter, some fruit or grapes in the summer”—he returned to his office and received visitors until 5 or 6 in the evening. Most days, Lincoln worked until 11 p.m.; during critical battles, he stayed up until the early daylight hours, reviewing telegraphic dispatches from the War Department. Unlike modern presidents, Lincoln never took a vacation. He worked seven days each week, 52 weeks of the year, and generally left Washington only to visit the field or, on one occasion, to dedicate a battleground cemetery in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania.

For the secretaries, too, the work was punishing. When their boss was in the office, often 14 hours each day, they remained on call. “The boys” soon came to know him intimately. He often took carriage rides with them, and when the first lady was out of town or indisposed, they accompanied him to the theater. In good humor, the secretaries referred to Lincoln privately as “the Tycoon” and “the Ancient,” though they always addressed him directly as “Mr. President.” Charles G. Halpine, an Irish-born writer who came to know Hay during the war, later judged that “Lincoln loved him as a son.”

Nicolay’s rapport with Lincoln was more formal but they were still close. Nicolay decided which visitors would enjoy a presidential audience and which dispatches would fall under Lincoln’s gaze. In many cases, Nicolay issued orders and responses without consulting the president, whose policies and priorities he came instinctively to understand and anticipate. Even his detractors did not second-guess his standing.

In the weeks following Lincoln’s burial in Springfield, Nicolay and Hay returned to Washington, where they spent several weeks arranging the presidential papers for shipment to Illinois. The archives would be overseen by Lincoln’s son, Robert, now devoted to a growing law practice in Chicago. Lincoln’s official correspondence comprised more than 18,000 documents, sprawled across roughly 42,000 individual pieces of paper. Most items were letters and telegrams written to the president, but dispersed among dozens of boxes were copies of thousands of Lincoln’s outgoing letters and telegrams, memoranda, Congressional reports and speeches.

During the next half-dozen years, the Lincoln papers remained sealed behind closed doors. When William Herndon, Lincoln’s Springfield law partner, who was planning his own Lincoln biography, asked Robert for access, Robert insisted that he had “not any letters which could be of any interest whatever to you or anyone.”

The first substantive attempt at memorializing Lincoln fell to George Bancroft, the unofficial dean of the American historical enterprise, whom Congress invited to deliver a tribute in early 1866. A Democrat who had served in James Polk’s cabinet, Bancroft was an unusual choice to eulogize the first Republican president. The two men were not well acquainted. Bancroft cast a critical eye on Lincoln’s abilities. Speaking from the well of the House for more than two and a half hours, the gray-haired relic offered little background beyond a stock biographical sketch of the 16th president, though he managed to issue a cool, outwardly polite rebuke of Lincoln’s administrative skills and intellectual capacity for high office. John Hay later fumed that “Bancroft’s address was a disgraceful exhibition of ignorance and prejudice.” The former secretary was particularly offended that Bancroft seemed fundamentally to underestimate Lincoln’s native genius. It was an error Hay had seen committed time and again during the war, by better-educated but lesser men who remained stubbornly ignorant of the president’s inner reserve of intelligence and strength.

William Herndon likely shared Hay’s contempt for George Bancroft, though for reasons of his own. Lincoln’s friend and law partner of 16 years, Herndon was an abolitionist and temperance man, though also an alcoholic who relapsed repeatedly. Yet for all his faults, Herndon understood Lincoln intimately and frowned upon the popular impulse to apoth- eosize the man whom he had known in the flesh and blood.

No biographer was more guilty of this historical mischief than Josiah Holland, the deeply pious editor of the Springfield Republican in Massachusetts, who paid Herndon a visit in May 1865. In the 1866 Holland’s Life of Abraham Lincoln , the author introduced the president as a Bible-quoting evangelical whose hatred of slavery flowed from an eschatological belief that “the day of wrath was at hand.” The book reinvented Lincoln from whole cloth, but the reading public eagerly bought up 100,000 copies, making it an overnight best seller.

Ultimately, Herndon—although he delivered a series of lectures on Lincoln’s life—was unable to complete a biography, particularly once he became sidetracked by stories he collected regarding Lincoln’s doomed courtship of Ann Rutledge. The New Salem, Illinois, innkeeper’s daughter contracted typhoid and died at age 22 in 1835; rumor had it that she and Lincoln had been engaged. Herndon’s subtext was impossible to mistake: Lincoln had loved only one woman (Ann Rutledge) and his grief for her was so profound that he never loved another woman, including his wife, Mary Todd Lincoln.

Mary, of course, was enraged. “This is the return for all my husband’s kindness to this miserable man!” she fumed. Robert was equally incensed, but also concerned. “Mr. Wm. H. Herndon is making an ass of himself,” he told David Davis, the executor of his father’s estate, and pleaded with him to intercede. Because Herndon “speaks with a certain amount of authority from having known my father for so long,” his stories, Robert believed, could do great injury to the family’s reputation. (Years later, as late as 1917, Robert still bristled at any suggestion that his father had been a simple, rough-hewn relic of the frontier, a characterization advanced aggressively by Herndon.) Fortunately for the Lincoln family, Herndon lacked the necessary discipline to sit down and write a proper book.

Unfortunately for the family, by 1867, Herndon, in increasingly dire financial straits, sold copies of his extensive collection of Lincoln materials—interview transcripts, court records, testimonial letters and newspaper clippings—to Ward Hill Lamon, a bluff, gregarious lawyer whom Lincoln had befriended on the circuit in the 1850s. Lamon went to Washington with Lincoln, served as U.S. marshal for the city during the war and later established a law practice in Washington, D.C. with Jeremiah Black, a prominent Democrat who had served in President Buchanan’s cabinet.

Realizing that he lacked a way with words, Lamon joined forces with his partner’s son, Chauncey Black, who undertook the task of ghostwriting Lamon’s history of Lincoln. The Black family held the Republican Party and its martyr in low esteem. “He certainly does not compare well with the refined and highly cultivated gentlemen (fifteen in number) who preceded him in the executive chair,” the elder Black scoffed. “He also lacked that lofty scorn of fraud and knavery which is inseparable from true greatness. He was not bad himself but he tolerated the evil committed by others when it did not suit him to resist it.”

On the eve of the book’s publication in 1872, Davis, who had learned of its contents, all but locked Lamon in a room and compelled him to excise an entire chapter representing Lincoln as a bumbling, inept president who inadvertently pushed the nation to war. Black was incensed by the eleventh-hour omission, but what remained in print proved sufficiently explosive. Incorporating Herndon’s material, Black and Lamon, in The Life of Abraham Lincoln , were the first to publish alleged details of Lincoln’s troubled marriage to Mary Todd, the depth of the future president’s putative atheism and a charge—long thereafter disputed, and much later discredited—of Lincoln’s illegitimate patrimony. Hay beseeched a mutual friend, “Can’t you stop him? ... For the grave of the dead and the crime of the living prevent it if possible. Its effect will be most disastrous.” Robert, too, was furious. “It is absolutely horrible to think of such men as Herndon and Lamon being considered in the light that they claim.”

Herndon, for his part, countered that he was helping the world to appreciate the complex of hurdles that Lincoln overcame, including bastardy, poverty and obscurity. Unsurprisingly, the Lincoln family took exception to Herndon’s declarations of friendship. Robert also came gradually to understand that to tell the story his way, he would need help.

Hay and Nicolay had begun planning a biography of Lincoln as early as midway through their White House tenure. The president’s death upended whatever initial scheme they had in mind. Over the next five years, the secretaries turned their attention to other endeavors. Nicolay took pleasure in travel and family life with his wife and daughter before settling in the nation’s capital, while Hay kept busy as a newspaper editor and poet, for the most part in New York City, and devoted time to his courtship of Clara Stone, a daughter of wealthy Cleveland industrialist Amasa Stone.

By 1872, however, Hay was “convinced that we ought to be at work on our ‘Lincoln.’ I don’t think the time for publication has come, but the time for preparation is slipping away.”

That same year, Charles Francis Adams—a scion of the famous Massachusetts family (and father of Henry Adams) who had served in the Lincoln administration as minister to Great Britain—delivered a memorial address on William Seward that portrayed him as the glue that kept the government together in perilous times. “I must affirm, without hesitation,” he avowed, “that in the history of our government, down to this hour, no experiment so rash has ever been made as that of elevating to the head of affairs a man with so little previous preparation for the task as Mr. Lincoln.” Only by good grace and luck did Lincoln possess the wisdom to appoint as his first minister Seward, the “master mind” of the government and savior of the Union. The speech enraged Lincoln’s stalwart defenders, first among them Gideon Welles, secretary of the Navy in Lincoln’s cabinet, who issued a stinging rebuke.

Then, in his popular account of the war years, The American Conflict , the ever-erratic newspaper editor Horace Greeley portrayed Lincoln as a bungling leader who squandered multiple opportunities to end the war early, either on the battlefield or through negotiation. Lincoln acolytes might have rolled their eyes, but he sold books, so his opinion mattered.

Shortly after Seward’s death, Nicolay wrote once more to Robert, urging him to allow for the “collection and arrangement of the materials which John and I will need in writing the history we propose. We must of necessity begin with your father’s papers.” Robert agreed to grant access in April 1874.

That summer, several dozen boxes made their way from Illinois to Washington, D.C., where Nicolay, who had been appointed marshal to the Supreme Court in 1872, deposited them in his office. There, in the marble confines of the Capitol building, they would be safe from fire, water damage or theft.

Hay and Nicolay were especially troubled by the historical amnesia that was quickly taking hold over the reunited states. In popular literature and journalism, the war was being recast as a brothers’ squabble over abstract political principles like federalism and states’ rights, rather than as a moral struggle between slavery and freedom. Magazines and newspapers commonly took to celebrating the military valor of both Confederate and Union soldiers, as though bravery, rather than morality, were the chief quality to be commemorated.

The authors pointedly emphasized the salient moral and political issues that had divided the nation before, and in many respects after, the war. The conflict had been caused by “an uprising of the national conscience against a secular wrong” that could never be blotted out by the romance of reunion.

By 1875, the secretaries were fully immersed in research and slowly coming to appreciate the mammoth task for which they had volunteered. The biography would consume them for the next 15 years. During that time, both men held other jobs: Nicolay remained at the Supreme Court until 1887, while Hay worked for his father-in-law and served briefly as assistant secretary of state under Republican President Rutherford B. Hayes. Their labors were frequently interrupted by their own illnesses or those of their wives and children. Editors begged them for an advance peek at the work. Publishers courted them. For the time being, they held their suitors at bay. “We [are] in no hurry to make arrangements,” Hay told one hopeful.

Though Nicolay and Hay made little effort to mask their bias, they did set out to write a history grounded in evidence. In the early days of the project, Nicolay spent several months interviewing dozens of individuals who had known Lincoln in Illinois and Washington. The transcripts of these discussions informed their work, but they came to cast a skeptical eye on memories recorded years or decades after the fact. If a fact or an anecdote could not be confirmed by the written record, they usually discounted it entirely. Luckily, what they could not find in Lincoln’s vast manuscript collection they often located in their personal archives.

On rare occasions they relied on personal recollection of events to bring the biography to life—for instance, Nicolay’s vivid description of the moment that Lincoln was nominated at Chicago. They scoured newspapers for speech transcripts. They collected vast quantities of government documents, both Union and Confederate, related to the war. They swapped materials with the War Department, which retained copies of Lincoln’s in-going and out-going telegrams. They asked the children of long-departed Civil War notables to look through their attics for important documents, and they purchased materials from manuscript and book dealers. “I am getting together quite a little lot of books,” Nicolay reported as early as 1876.

The oversize first-floor study in Nicolay’s Capitol Hill row house came to accommodate one of the largest private collections of Civil War documentation and secondary scholarship in the country. Later, when Hay lived in Washington, between 1879 and 1881 as assistant secretary of state, and again from 1885 onward, he and Nicolay would walk between each other’s homes to swap materials and chapter drafts.

“The two would never divulge how the actual writing was divided between them,” Nicolay’s daughter, Helen, later explained. “They seemed to take a mischievous delight in keeping it a secret, saying they were co-authors, and that was all the public need know.” In some cases they alternated chapters. In other cases, each might assume responsibility for an entire volume. Hay and Nicolay had been so long acquainted that they were able to develop a common prose style with little effort.

By 1885, Hay and Nicolay had written some 500,000 words and were scarcely halfway through the Civil War. Hay grew increasingly concerned by the scope of the undertaking. What was needed was an incentive to bring the project to a close. Roswell Smith and Richard Gilder, publisher and editor, respectively, of the Century magazine, provided that motivation. “We want your life of Lincoln,” Smith told Hay. “We must have it. If you say so, I shall give you all the profit. We will take it, and work it for nothing ...It is probably the most important literary venture of the time.”

Soon they had a contract. Century offered unprecedented terms: $50,000 for serial rights, as well as royalties on sales of the full ten-volume set, to be issued following the magazine run.

The long-awaited serialization began in late 1886. Almost from the start, the work proved controversial. By virtue of their exhaustive treatment of Lincoln’s political career, Nicolay and Hay seared into the national awareness episodes largely unknown to the public, and themes and arguments that would influence Lincoln scholars and Civil War historians for generations.

Among its many famous contributions to the nation’s shared historical consciousness were revelations that William Seward drafted the closing lines of Lincoln’s first inaugural address, which the president-elect then fashioned into a work of literary genius. Nicolay and Hay were the first to report George McClellan’s vainglorious assurance that he could “do it all” when Lincoln gave him command of the Union Army. They were the first to write of Lincoln’s great distress early in the war, when Washington, D.C. was cut off from the North and the president, keeping anxious vigil for fresh troops, wondered, “Why don’t they come!” The biographers offered unprecedented insight into Lincoln’s decision-making on emancipation and the enlistment of black soldiers and an insider’s view of his interaction with the Union’s high command.

Above all, Nicolay and Hay created a master narrative that continues to command serious scrutiny more than a century after its introduction. Populating his cabinet with former opponents for the Republican presidential nomination, Lincoln demonstrated his discernment and magnanimity in choosing men whom he “did not know...He recognized them as governors, senators, and statesmen, while they yet looked upon him as a simple frontier lawyer at most, and a rival to whom chance had transferred the honor they felt to be due to themselves.” Presaging the popular argument that Lincoln forged a “team of rivals,” Nicolay and Hay insisted that the strong personalities and talents who constituted his inner circle did not always appreciate “the stronger will and...more delicate tact [that] inspired and guided them all.”

Hay’s love for Lincoln shines through in his imagining of the future president’s solitary childhood. Describing Lincoln’s boyhood habit of reading and rereading Aesop’s Fables, Robinson Crusoe , the Bible and Parson Weems’ biography of George Washington, he drew a moving portrait of a young boy sitting “by the fire at night,” covering his “wooden shovel with essays and arithmetical exercises, which he would shave off and begin again. It is touching to think of this great-spirited child, battling year after year against his evil star, wasting ingenuity upon devices and makeshifts, his high intelligence starving for want of the simple appliances of education that are now afforded gratis to the poorest and most indifferent.” Hay presented the future president as a hero in the wilderness, doing solitary battle against the privations of his upbringing.

Nicolay and Hay gave a prominent place to the elephant in the room: slavery. Few white Americans were interested in discussing the question by 1885. Hay, in his discussion of sectional politics that formed the backdrop of Lincoln’s political rise, stated matter-of-factly that “it is now universally understood, if not conceded, that the Rebellion of 1861 was begun for the sole purpose of defending and preserving to the seceding States the institution of African slavery and making them the nucleus of a great slave empire.” Rejecting the increasingly widespread argument that the Civil War was about a great many things, but not slavery, Hay reduced the conflict to “that persistent struggle of the centuries between despotism and individual freedom; between arbitrary wrong, consecrated by tradition and law, and the unfolding recognition of private rights.”

Breaking his own rule against believing the memories of old men long after the fact, Hay gave credence to the claim of John Hanks, Lincoln’s cousin, who recalled a journey that he and Lincoln had taken. Hired to escort a barge of goods down the Mississippi River in 1831, Hanks claimed that it was there that Lincoln first saw “negroes chained, maltreated, whipped, and scourged. Lincoln saw it; his heart bled; said nothing much, was silent, looked bad. I can say, knowing it, that it was on this trip that he first formed his opinion of slavery.”

As an antebellum politician, Lincoln—though not an abolitionist or a radical—had boldly affirmed that black Americans were fellow men and women. After four years of war, his own thinking evolved even further. The secretaries followed his moral and intellectual lead. They also understood that his legacy would forever be linked with his emancipation agenda. In this regard, they were writing for posterity.

As young presidential aides, Nicolay and Hay often missed the significance of events that they’d witnessed and in which they’d participated. They were actors in “stirring times,” Nicolay observed in the first weeks of the war, though “I hardly realize that they are so, even as I write them.” In November 1863, the secretaries drank their way through a 24-hour trip to Gettysburg, in part because it was their job to work the swing-state reporters and politicians on hand for the dedication of the cemetery, but also because they were young men who enjoyed a good time. In hindsight, they appreciated the gravitas of the moment. The pair acknowledged the growing consensus around the magnitude of the Gettysburg Address when they devoted a stand-alone chapter, 13 pages, to the speech. They reproduced the entire address, along with a photo facsimile of the original manuscript in Lincoln’s hand.

In securing Lincoln’s historical legacy, Hay believed it was imperative that the biography diminish the reputation of George McClellan, the former Union general, Democratic presidential candidate and thorn in Lincoln’s side during the war.

Hay portrayed McClellan as an inept general given to “delusions” and “hallucinations of overwhelming forces opposed to him,” a man who “rarely estimated the force immediately opposed to him at less than double its actual strength.” Hay disclosed for the first time McClellan’s discourteous refusal to meet with Lincoln, when the president called at his house in late 1861, and zeroed in mercilessly on the general’s botched effort at the Battle of Antietam, where, thanks to a Union private’s discovery of Lee’s battle plans, he “knew not only of the division of his enemy’s army in half, but he knew where his trains, his rear-guard, his cavalry, were to march and to halt, and where the detached commands were to join the main body.” McClellan failed to act on this intelligence, Hay disclosed, and “every minute which he thus let slip away was paid for in the blood of Union soldiers the next day.” McClellan’s “deplorable shortcomings” were a constant source of agony, as was his “mutinous insolence” in routinely denigrating the president behind his back.

Nicolay and Hay scrupulously avoided distortions. Yet their bias was evident not only in what they wrote but what they omitted. The secretaries were fully cognizant of Mary Todd Lincoln’s misappropriation of the official household expense account. They also witnessed the distress that her actions visited upon the president. The subject appears nowhere in their work.

As for the president’s liberal suspension of the writ of habeas corpus—protection against indefinite confinement without benefit of legal proceeding—they dismissed critics. “The greatest care was taken by the President to restrain the officers acting under his authority from any abuse of this tremendous power,” they wrote. In retrospect, even historians who believe that Lincoln had little choice but to jail certain vituperous Northern opponents of the war would disagree with the secretaries’ overly generous assessment.

The Lincoln whom Hay and Nicolay introduced to the reading public was a deft operator. He exerted control “daily and hourly” over “the vast machinery of command and coordination in Cabinet, Congress, army, navy, and the hosts of national politics.” When the military high command failed to deliver victory, the president schooled himself in the art of battle, and “it is safe to say that no general in the army studied his maps and scanned his telegrams with half the industry—and, it may be added, with half the intelligence—which Mr. Lincoln gave to his.” Unlike many of his generals, the president displayed a “larger comprehension of popular forces” and understood that “a free people...can stand reverses and disappointments; they are capable of making great exertions and great sacrifices. The one thing that they cannot endure is inaction on the part of their rulers.” He was, in the eyes of his secretaries, the most skilled executive ever to have lived in the White House.

Hay was certain that he and Nicolay had placed “the truth before the country.” “Year after year of study,” he wrote to Robert Lincoln, “has shown me more clearly than ever how infinitely greater your father was than anybody about him, greater than ever we imagined while he lived. There is nothing to explain or apologize for from beginning to end. He is the one unapproachably great figure of a great epoch.”

Reviews of the massive Nicolay-Hay work—in its final form, Abraham Lincoln: A History was ten volumes and 1.2 million words—were mixed. Some reviewers were baffled by its scope. Even a friendly newspaper remarked that “no one will suspect the writers of being lukewarm Republicans.”

William Dean Howells, the dean of American literature who, as a young man, had written Lincoln’s campaign biography in 1860, called it “not only...the most important work yet accomplished in American history” but also “one of the noblest achievements of literary art.” By far, the critic whose opinion held the greatest sway with the authors was Robert Lincoln, and he was “much pleased...with the results of your long work,” he told Hay. “It is what I hoped it would be.” “Many people speak to me & confirm my own opinion of it as a work in every way excellent—not only sustaining but elevating my father’s place in History,” he assured his friend of three decades. “I shall never cease to be glad that the places you & Nicolay held near him & in his confidence were filled by you & not by others.”

Hefty and expensive, Abraham Lincoln: A History sold only 7,000 copies, but for every person who bought the collection, 50 others read extensive excerpts in its serial run. More important than sales was the book’s intellectual reach. For at least half a century, the Nicolay-Hay volumes formed the basis of all major scholarship on Lincoln.

Nicolay continued to labor in Lincoln’s shadow. He contributed articles on matters of Lincoln lore and legend. He condensed the ten volumes of his effort with Hay, creating an abridged history that achieved strong sales. That his life had become an extension of Lincoln’s did not seem to trouble Nicolay. He had not grown as rich as Hay (though he surely understood that Hay married, rather than earned, his money). He was by no means as famous. He never held high office or seemed even to aspire to it.

Hay, approaching 60, finally achieved the political heights that many of his friends had expected of him. In spring 1898, President William McKinley forced the increasingly senile John Sherman out of the State Department and later that year tapped Hay to replace him as secretary of state. Over the next six and a half years, until his death, Hay played an instrumental role in expanding America’s strategic position over two oceans and two hemispheres.

Days after William McKinley, struck down by an assailant’s bullet, expired on September 14, 1901, Hay rode by carriage from his home on Lafayette Square to Capitol Hill, where his oldest friend, John Nicolay, lay dying. Hay wore black crepe on his arm, a sign of mourning for the president. Helen greeted him in the hall and explained that her father did not have long to live. She asked that Hay not tell him of the president’s assassination, for fear that the news would agitate him. “I must take this off before I go up to him,” Hay said as he removed his armband. “I had to tell him that my father would not see it—that he was already more in the other world than in this,” Helen later wrote. “He mounted the stairs slowly. I stayed below. He came down more slowly still, his face stricken with grief. He never saw his old friend again.”

Shortly following Theodore Roosevelt’s inauguration in 1905, Hay took a leave of absence from the State Department and traveled to Europe with Clara, where he hoped that doctors might help cure him of mounting heart trouble. The sojourn seemed to have had a restorative effect. Yet by the time John and Clara boarded the RMS Baltic for the journey home, the old troubles seemed to afflict him once again. After conferring with the president in Washington, Hay left with Clara for the Fells, his New Hampshire country house, where he died in the early hours of July 1, 1905.

On July 25, 1947, some 30 scholars and scions of the Civil War era gathered in the Whittall Pavilion of the Library of Congress for a gala dinner. Poet and Lincoln biographer Carl Sandburg was there—so were historians James G. Randall and Paul Angle, the leading expert on Lincoln’s Springfield years. Ulysses S. Grant III was pleased to attend; Helen Nicolay, now 81, was compelled by poor health to send her regrets. “Not since that morning in the Petersen House have so many men who loved Lincoln been gathered in one room,” remarked one of the attendees.

Shortly before midnight, the party took leave of the banquet and walked across the street to the library annex. There they waited for the clock to strike 12, signaling the 21st anniversary of Robert Todd Lincoln’s death—the date that the Lincoln family had designated to make the president’s papers available. Among the crowd of 200 onlookers, newspaper cameramen lit the room with their flashbulbs, while CBS Radio News interviewed several dignitaries.

At the appointed hour, the library staff unlocked the vaulted doors that had guarded the Lincoln collection, and the scholars rushed the card catalog. Elated, Randall felt as though he were “living with Lincoln, handling the very papers he handled, sharing his deep concern over events and issues, noting his patience when complaints poured in, hearing a Lincolnian laugh.” Many of the Lincoln papers were written in Nicolay’s or Hay’s hand and signed by the president. Most had passed through their fingers at least twice—during the war, when they were young men, and decades later, when they were old.

Soon after release of the manuscript collection, Roy P. Basler, the 41-year-old secretary of the Abraham Lincoln Association, entered into an agreement with the Library of Congress to edit The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln . Basler was among a handful of individuals, then and since, who could claim to have read almost every extant scrap Lincoln ever wrote, from the mundane to the truly profound (with the exception of the late president’s legal papers). In 1974, speaking as “one of the few people yet alive who once read Nicolay and Hay complete,” he judged their work “indispensable” and predicted that it “will not be superseded.” Theirs was “not merely a biography of a public man but a history of the nation in his time.” The secretaries, he concluded, made “use of the stuff of history” in a way that few of their successors could claim. 

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Joshua Zeitz | | READ MORE

Joshua Zeitz has taught American history and politics at both Cambridge and Princeton. His previous books include Flapper and White Ethnic New York . He lives in Hoboken, New Jersey.

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Lincoln Watchalong Background Image

Abraham Lincoln’s Inner Circle: Family, Friends, Cabinet and Others

By Missy Sullivan

For Abraham Lincoln, relationships mattered. Throughout his life, this lawyer, statesman, friend, husband and father was known to be warmly engaging, open and empathetic. Below, meet the people most important to America’s 16th president, and tap or mouse over the photos to see how they appear in HISTORY Channel’s three-part documentary event “Abraham Lincoln.” Click on a category below or scroll through all.

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Friends & Colleagues

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Edward Bates

Attorney General

Lincoln offered the more conservative Missourian—a dark-horse rival for the 1860 Republican presidential nomination—his choice of cabinet posts. Bates ultimately wearied of the then-limited attorney general job, and lobbied for a Supreme Court seat—to no avail.

Played by: Robin Smith

John Wilkes Booth photo

John Wilkes Booth

Actor Turned Assassin

A celebrated actor from an illustrious thespian family, Booth was a rabid Confederate sympathizer. He not only shot Lincoln at Ford's Theatre, but he organized a conspiracy to kill the vice president and secretary of state.

Played by: Rory Acton Burnell

Salmon P. Chase photo

Salmon P. Chase

Treasury Secretary

Chase established the first federal currency and sold $500 million in bonds to fund the war. But the Radical Republican never abandoned his own presidential ambitions—or political scheming. To redirect that ambition, Lincoln appointed him to the Supreme Court.

Played by: Dirk Jonker

Judge David Davis photo

Judge David Davis

Friend & Legal Colleague

Davis presided over Illinois's 8th circuit court, where Lincoln often argued legal cases. They traveled the circuit together, becoming devoted friends despite political differences. Davis served as Lincoln's 1860 campaign manager, a Supreme Court justice and later, executor of Lincoln's estate.

Played by: Joe Vaz

Stephen A. Douglas photo

Stephen A. Douglas

Political Rival & Debater

Nicknamed “Little Giant,” the ambitious short-statured legislator was a leading figure of the conservative Democrats, famed for passing the Compromise of 1850 and the Kansas-Nebraska Act. Douglas debated Lincoln, his rival for Illinois' Senate seat, in seven legendary 1858 debates.

Played by: Richard Lothian

Frederick Douglass photo

Frederick Douglass

Abolitionist, Author & Orator

Douglass, who escaped slavery, visited Lincoln's White House three times. While impatient with Lincoln's political caution over emancipation, he deeply respected him, writing that he was “emphatically the black man's President: the first to show any respect to their rights.”

Played by: Oluwasanya Adegbola

Ulysses S. Grant photo

Ulysses S. Grant

Union General

Lincoln found in Grant the aggressive leader he had long sought. Given command in March 1864, Grant relentlessly pursued Confederate troops, enduring repeated bloodbaths until the April 1865 surrender. A week later, Grant declined Lincoln's invitation to Ford's Theatre.

Played by: Justin Salinger of "Grant"

John Milton Hay photo

John Milton Hay

Private Secretary & Confidant

Hired as Lincoln's assistant private secretary, the dapper, Ivy-educated young man—closer in age to Lincoln's son Robert—lived in the White House, often sharing late-night chats with the president. He later co-wrote a Lincoln biography and became U.S. secretary of state.

Played by: Luke Tyler

Elizabeth Keckley photo

Elizabeth Keckley

Dressmaker & Companion to Mrs. Lincoln

Born into slavery, Keckley purchased her freedom, rising from seamstress to high-society couturier in Washington, D.C. She became Mary Todd Lincoln's personal dressmaker and close confidant, later writing a memoir offering unprecedented insight into the Lincoln White House.

Played by: Megan Alexander

Mary Todd Lincoln photo

Mary Todd Lincoln

Dogged by tragedy—she lost her mother at age 6, three of her four sons died young and she witnessed her husband's assassination—the well-educated, ambitious Kentucky belle drew criticism for her spending and volatile behavior. Her son committed her to a sanitarium.

Played by: Jenny Stead

Robert Lincoln photo

Robert Lincoln

The only of Lincoln's four sons to survive to adulthood, Robert later practiced law and twice served as secretary of war. Eerily, John Wilkes Booth's brother Edwin once saved his life. And Robert was close by for two other presidential assassinations.

Played by: Daniel Lasker

Sally Lincoln photo

Sally Lincoln

Two years older than Abe, Sally assumed home and caretaking duties at age 11 after their mother died. Quick-minded and good humored, Sally died at age 20 in childbirth, devastating her brother.

Played by: Kieren Prince

Sarah Bush Lincoln photo

Sarah Bush Lincoln

Abe was 10 years old and living an almost feral existence on the Illinois frontier when his stepmother arrived. The Kentucky widow brought touches of comfort to the Lincolns' rough-hewn lives, encouraged Abe's education and offered lifelong love and support.

Played by: Lucy Tops

Thomas 'Tad' Lincoln photo

Thomas 'Tad' Lincoln

Youngest Son

Nicknamed “Tad” because he was “wriggly as a tadpole,” Lincoln's youngest son was a high-spirited 7-year-old when his father became president. Mischievous and charming, he brought welcome levity to a somber wartime White House. He died of unknown causes at age 18.

Played by: Jude Barton

Thomas Lincoln photo

Thomas Lincoln

A homesteading farmer and carpenter, Thomas Lincoln was a stern patriarch who never fully understood Abraham's drive to educate himself; he berated his son for reading instead of tending to chores. Abraham did not travel to attend his funeral.

Played by: Steve Larter

William 'Willie' Lincoln photo

William 'Willie' Lincoln

In February 1862, 11-year-old Willie died of typhoid in the White House, crushing his parents. “My poor boy, he was too good for this earth. God has called him home,” lamented Lincoln. Mary visited a spiritualist for news of her son.

Played by: Ben Smollan

George B. McClellan photo

George B. McClellan

The first general Lincoln appointed to head the Army of the Potomac, McClellan had some early wins. But Lincoln grew exasperated with his lack of aggressiveness and sacked him when he failed to pursue Robert E. Lee's army after Antietam.

Played by: Sven Ruygrok

George Meade photo

George Meade

A top U.S. general and civil engineer, Meade led the Union to victory at Gettysburg, but Lincoln castigated him for allowing Lee's hobbled army to escape. Meade ceded top command decisions to Grant, but stayed on through the war's end.

Played by: Nicky Rebelo

Allan Pinkerton photo

Allan Pinkerton

Private Detective

Scottish immigrant Pinkerton, who started his own national detective agency in 1850, devised an elaborate plan to protect Lincoln from an assassination plot before his first inauguration. He later served as chief intelligence officer during the Civil War.

Played by: Richard Wright-Firth

William H. Seward photo

William H. Seward

Secretary of State

Lincoln's rival for the Republican presidential nomination, Seward took the secretary of state role, focusing on dissuading foreign support of the Confederacy; he also negotiated with Russia to purchase Alaska. Seward survived an assassination attempt the same night Lincoln was killed.

Played by: Colin Moss

Joshua Fry Speed photo

Joshua Fry Speed

Intimate Friend

When the general store owner met 28-year-old Lincoln, a poor, clientless new lawyer, he offered to share his room. They cohabitated for four years, developing a lifelong friendship later nurtured by intimate letters ranging in subject from romantic anxiety to the morality of emancipation.

Played by: Evan Hengst

Edwin M. Stanton photo

Edwin M. Stanton

Secretary of War

An early critic of Lincoln's war efforts, the Ohio-born lawyer and politician became the president's second secretary of war—and one of his closest advisers. Lincoln admired his management skills, and gave Stanton, famously obstinate and overbearing, wide berth to do his job.

Played by: Wayne Harrison

Kate Warne photo

Allan Pinkerton hired the 23-year-old widow as the nation's first female detective. She played a key role in the scheme to thwart an 1861 Lincoln assassination plot, posing as a woman seeking privacy on a train for her sickly “brother.”

Played by: Natalie Robbie

Abraham Lincoln portrait photo

Abraham Lincoln Stories

Read more than 30 stories on Abraham Lincoln—from his hardscrabble youth to his tragic assassination.

Abraham Lincoln: His Life and Legacy

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  4. Robert Lincoln at the White House

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COMMENTS

  1. Robert Todd Lincoln

    Robert Lincoln became a business lawyer and company president, and served as both United States Secretary of War and the U.S. ambassador to Great Britain . Lincoln was born in Springfield, Illinois, and graduated from Harvard College.

  2. Robert Todd Lincoln

    (1843-1926) Who Was Robert Todd Lincoln? Robert Todd Lincoln was the first-born son of President Abraham Lincoln, and the only one of Lincoln's four children to live to adulthood....

  3. Robert Todd Lincoln: The Tragic Tale Of Abraham's Eldest Son

    By Leah Silverman Published November 13, 2019 Updated November 7, 2023 After his father was assassinated, Robert Todd Lincoln kept an insanity file on his mother that he later used to have her committed to an asylum. The legacy of President Abraham Lincoln is one that has inspired boundless national admiration and pride.

  4. Robert Todd Lincoln

    Robert Todd Lincoln (born Aug. 1, 1843, Springfield, Ill., U.S.—died July 26, 1926, Manchester, Vt.) eldest and sole surviving child of Abraham Lincoln, who became a millionaire corporation attorney and served as U.S. secretary of war and minister to Great Britain during Republican administrations.

  5. 5 Things You Should Know About Robert Todd Lincoln

    Robert Todd Lincoln was Abraham Lincoln's oldest son and the only Lincoln child to survive into adulthood. While he didn't make quite the mark on history that his father did, Robert...

  6. Family: Robert Todd Lincoln (1843-1926)

    Robert Todd Lincoln, or "Bob" and "Prince of Rails" (a nickname developed on the President-elect's trip to Washington and one which Robert detested), was named after Mary Todd's father and was the oldest of the Lincoln children. Cross-eyed as child, he developed into a reserved but determined teenager.

  7. Giant in the Shadows: The Life of Robert T. Lincoln

    WINNER, Russell P. Strange Memorial Book of the Year Award from the Illinois State Historical Society, 2013! University Press Books for Public and Secondary Schools, 2013 edition Although he was Abraham and Mary Lincoln's oldest and last surviving son, the details of Robert T. Lincoln's life are misunderstood by some and unknown to many others. . Nearly half a century after the last ...

  8. Robert Lincoln

    Robert Todd Lincoln, first child of Mary and Abraham, was born on August 1, 1843, in a boarding house called the Globe Tavern in Springfield. (This was before Lincoln had purchased the house on Eighth and Jackson Streets.) He was named after Mary's father, Robert Smith Todd.

  9. Robert Todd Lincoln

    LINCOLN, ROBERT TODD. Robert Todd Lincoln was a lawyer, a presidential elector for the Illinois branch of the republican party in 1880, secretary of war in the cabinets of Presidents james garfield and chester a. arthur, U.S. minister to Great Britain from 1889 to 1893, president and chairman of the board for the Illinois-based Pullman Palace Car Company, and the son of President abraham lincoln.

  10. Robert Todd Lincoln

    Robert Todd Lincoln. Lincoln c. 1865. Robert Todd Lincoln (August 1, 1843 - July 26, 1926) was an American lawyer and Secretary of War. He was the first son of President Abraham Lincoln and his wife, Mary Todd Lincoln. Born in Springfield, Illinois, United States, he was the only one of Lincoln's four sons to live to be an adult.

  11. Robert Todd Lincoln Biography

    Born on August 1, 1843, in Springfield, Illinois, Robert Lincoln was the first of the four sons of Abraham Lincoln and Mary Todd Lincoln. His three younger brothers were Edward Baker Lincoln, William Wallace Lincoln, and Thomas "Tad" Lincoln. As he was growing up, his father was becoming an important figure in the national politics.

  12. Robert Lincoln

    Jessie Harlan Lincoln, who lived until 1948, married Warren Beckwith in 1897, and they had two children, Mary "Peggy" Beckwith (1898-1975) and Robert Todd Lincoln Beckwith (1904-1985), both of whom never had any children. Robert's wife, Mary, was shy and often sickly. By 1875 Robert had become extremely concerned with his mother's mental state.

  13. How and why did Robert Lincoln decide to go to Harvard?

    It began in 1849 with brief attendance at a Springfield day school. In 1850, he became a student at Abel Estabrook's Springfield Academy, a private subscription-based school, and three years later, at age 11, he entered the preparatory department of Illinois State University.

  14. New Biography of Robert Lincoln, Son of Abraham, Is Subject of Book

    New Biography of Robert Lincoln, Son of Abraham, Is Subject of Book Discussion. Press Contact: Guy Lamolinara (202) 707-9217. Public Contact: Center for the Book (202) 707-5221. Contact: Request ADA accommodations five business days in advance at (202) 707-6362 or [email protected].

  15. In His Father's Shadow: Robert Todd Lincoln

    The History Guy remembers a famous man's son, Robert Todd Lincoln. Because of his father, Abraham Lincoln, Robert Todd's life has been largely forgotten.The ...

  16. Abraham Lincoln

    Category: History & Society Byname: Honest Abe, the Rail-Splitter, or the Great Emancipator Born: February 12, 1809, near Hodgenville, Kentucky, U.S. Died: April 15, 1865, Washington, D.C. (aged 56) Title / Office: presidency of the United States of America (1861-1865), United States House of Representatives (1847-1849), United States (Show more)

  17. Robert Lincoln

    Robert Lincoln was born on August 1, 1843 in Springfield, Illinois, USA. He was married to Mary Harlan. He died on July 25, 1926 in Manchester, Vermont, USA. Family Spouse Mary Harlan (September 24, 1868 - July 25, 1926) (his death, 3 children) Trivia U.S. Secretary of War, 1881-1885. Son of President Abraham Lincoln.

  18. Abraham Lincoln: Biography, U.S. President, Abolitionist

    Abraham Lincoln was the 16 th president of the United States, serving from 1861 to 1865, and is regarded as one of America's greatest heroes due to his roles in guiding the Union through the...

  19. The History of How We Came to Revere Abraham Lincoln

    From across the political spectrum, influential writers and politicians blamed Lincoln for four years of military stalemate and setbacks and for a series of political blunders that cost his party...

  20. Abraham Lincoln: Facts, Birthday & Assassination

    Abraham Lincoln, a self-taught lawyer, legislator and vocal opponent of slavery, was elected 16th president of the United States in November 1860, shortly before the outbreak of the Civil War.

  21. Robert Todd Lincoln Beckwith

    Abraham Lincoln (great-grandfather) Robert Todd Lincoln Beckwith (July 19, 1904 - December 24, 1985) was an American gentleman farmer and the great-grandson of Abraham Lincoln. [1] In 1975, he became the last known undisputed legal descendant of Lincoln when his sister, Mary Lincoln Beckwith, died without children. [2]

  22. Abraham Lincoln

    Lincoln was born into poverty in a log cabin in Kentucky and was raised on the frontier, primarily in Indiana. He was self-educated and became a lawyer, Whig Party leader, Illinois state legislator, and U.S. representative from Illinois. In 1849, he returned to his successful law practice in Springfield, Illinois.

  23. Abraham Lincoln's Important People: Friends, Family, Cabinet ...

    The only of Lincoln's four sons to survive to adulthood, Robert later practiced law and twice served as secretary of war. Eerily, John Wilkes Booth's brother Edwin once saved his life.