6
Robert Todd Lincoln was a young man trying sincerely not to be a snob, not to be blasé or obviously aware that his father was President of the United States. A medium tall, erect lad, Robert’s dark hair was sleeked down over a head rounded like his mother’s, but his long arms and still growing legs and feet he had from his father.
That long-tailed coat with braided collar was too old for Bob, Abraham Lincoln was thinking. So was his manner too old, a boyish kind of gravity that obviously he strove to keep from being condescending. His mother fluttered about him adoringly as they sat at the family breakfast table. She was continually straightening his cravat, feeling his brow anxiously, smoothing his hair. Lincoln, shrewdly sensitive, could see that his older son was a trifle annoyed by his mother’s solicitous attentions.
“Bob hasn’t got a fever, Mama,” he interposed cheerfully. “He’s the healthiest human being I’ve seen in a long time. Why don’t we all go and see what Tad got for Christmas?” He pushed back his chair.
“Robert must get some sleep,” argued his mother. “He says he didn’t get a wink on that train.”
“The cars were cold and smelly and they were jammed with soldiers, all of them cold and miserable,” stated Robert. “Most of them coming South to join Pope’s army and all sulky because they had to be away from home for Christmas. One chap sat with me—couldn’t have been any older than I am and he had been home to Rhode Island to bury his wife. They all talked and they were plenty bitter against the bounty boys—those fellows who bought their way out of the draft for three hundred dollars.”
“That was a compromise and an evil one, I fear,” said his father. “Everything about war is evil. You can only contrive and pray for ways to make it a little less evil.”
Robert stood up. His face was very white. “Pa—and Mama—I told lies coming down on that train. I told them I was coming home to enlist. I’ve got to get into the Army—I’ve got to! Those men on that train, they were dirty and shabby and some hadn’t shaved or washed in a long time, and most of them were rough and some ignorant but every one of them was a better man than I was! I could feel them looking at me—with contempt at first. It was in every man’s mind that I was a bounty boy. A shirker. Hiding behind a screen of cash! I was thankful nobody knew my name.”
“You could have told them your name,” insisted his mother. “You could have made them respect you as the son of the President.”
“No, Mary—no, no!” protested Lincoln. “Bob couldn’t do that.”
“I don’t know why not? Certainly your family are entitled to respect, Abraham Lincoln!”
“You don’t understand, Mama,” said Robert unhappily. “I was thankful I’d been able to duck away from those soldiers Mr. Stanton had detailed in New York. I didn’t want to be Robert Lincoln. I wanted to be nobody. Then when I got off here in Washington, there was that escort! Troops to guard me, as though I were a crown prince or something. A coward of a prince!”
“No, no!” Mary upset her cup in her agitation. “I still say you must finish your education. You must graduate from Harvard. You’ll be much more valuable to the country as an educated man than just another private in the army. Even if your father gave you a commission—”
“I don’t want a commission. Not if it has to be given to me,” Robert cried. “I’d deserve all the contempt I saw in some of those men’s faces if I took a commission I hadn’t earned.”
Lincoln’s face relaxed in a slow smile. There were times when his older son troubled him, but now a quiet pride warmed his spirit. But his heart sank again when he saw the stony set of Mary’s mouth, the flush that always heated her face when she was angry and determined to carry her point. She would not change. Her attitude was the same as that with which she had faced down General Sickles and Senator Harris not too long ago. They had inquired, coldly, why Robert was not in the service. The boy should, declared the General, have been in uniform long since. Mary had talked them down then, firmly, just as she would talk down all Robert’s arguments now. But it was a joy to Lincoln that Robert did have pride and perhaps a mind of his own.
Mary’s eyes were already glittering behind their pale lashes. Now the shine was exasperation but in a moment, after her fashion, it would melt into tears. Robert’s chin was jutting and his hands trembled on the back of his chair. Lincoln interposed quickly trying to ease the tension, gain a postponement of a crisis.
“Let’s talk this over later,” he suggested. “Let’s not spoil Christmas morning with an argument. Did Tad eat any breakfast, Mama?”
“No, he didn’t.” Mary got her control back with a gusty breath. “He wouldn’t even take time to drink his milk. He took it with him and likely he’s upset the glass all over the carpet by this time.”
“Well, let’s go and see what he found under the Christmas tree.”
Robert followed them, silently, up the stairs to the sitting room, strewn now with paper wrappings and a confusion of toys. Tad was standing in the middle of the floor buckling on a wide military belt trimmed with metal. Hanging from it was a small sword. Tad worked awkwardly because his hands were lost in great white gauntlet gloves that reached almost to his elbows.
“From Mr. Stanton,” he grinned, patting the belt. “I thought he didn’t like me. I thought he didn’t like boys.”
“He likes being Secretary of War,” said Robert dryly. He reached for a small package. “This is for you, Mama. The man said these things were real jade from China.”
Mary took the parcel eagerly, kissed Robert, undid the wrapping, exclaimed over the necklace, pin, and earbobs.
“Oh, Bob, they’re so pretty! I can wear them with my green taffeta.”
She was a child for trinkets, Lincoln was thinking indulgently. He was glad that he had given her the big white muff. She would love carrying it to parties and on their carriage drives, nestling her two little round chins into the delicate fur. He thanked Robert for a pair of gold cuff links and there was laughter when they discovered that his gift to Robert had been an almost identical pair.
“At least,” said Robert, “I shall have the distinction of imitating the President of the United States.”
“Well, they’ll fasten your shirt sleeves anyway,” drawled Lincoln. “That’s all a man can ask of them.”
Tad strutted around the room flourishing his sword. He gulped the last of his milk hastily at his mother’s command, put on his uniform cap, and swished a shine on the toes of his boots with his cuff.
“Now I have to show these to the boys,” he announced.
“But son,” protested his mother, “aren’t you going to play with all your pretty toys? Look—this little cannon. It shoots!”
“Yeh—shoots a cork!” Tad dismissed the weapon indifferently, “A ole Rebel would sure laugh if you shot him with that. Papa, I want a real gun. One with bullets in it.”
“My Heaven, Tad, you’re too little to have a gun,” declared Mary.
“If I had a gun I could ride with Papa and perteck him,” argued Tad. “Then nobody would dare shoot holes in his hat.”
Lincoln caught the startled look on Mary’s face, got his son hastily by the elbow. “Come along, Tad. Go show off your finery. And I’ve got work to do.” He hustled the boy down the hall. “Who told you somebody shot a hole in my hat?” he demanded, when they were out of earshot.
Tad grinned. “Oh, I get information,” he said blandly, “but if I had been along with a good ole gun nobody would have dared do it.”
“Don’t mention it again in front of your mother, you hear?” Lincoln seldom spoke sharply to the boy and Tad looked scared briefly.
“No, sir—no, sir, I won’t,” he stammered, his palate tripping him again.
“Mind now! And get along with you!” His father gave him a little shove, as he entered the office door.
Even on a holiday he was not free from intrusion, of being faced with the woeful problems of the people. A lad of about seventeen, in the faded uniform of a private, was standing, twisting thin hands together, his face scared and anxious.
“Sit down, son,” ordered Lincoln, closing the door. “How did you get in here and what did you want to see me about?”
The boy dropped on the edge of a chair, twisted his legs about each other nervously.
“Nobody let me in, sir,” he stammered. “I just told the man downstairs that I had to see the President and he searched me, and I didn’t have no gun or nothing so he told me to come on up here and wait. And what I wanted to see you about, Mr. President—I want to be a captain.”
Lincoln’s long lips drew back and quirked up a little at one corner. “I see. And what military organization did you want to be captain of?”
“No organization, Mr. President, but I been a private in the Sixty-third Ohio a long time, sir—”
“How long a time?”
“Four months, Mr. President.”
“And you have a company organized, maybe, that you want me to make you captain of?”
“No, sir—I haven’t got any company organized. But I just want to be a captain. My mother says I should be a captain. She told me to see you about it.”
Lincoln clasped his bony hands around a knee. “What’s your name, soldier?”
“Milo, sir. Milo Potter.”
“Milo, did you ever hear the story about the farmer out in Illinois, where I was raised? Well, this fellow he was a good farmer and a dutiful son to his mother but he got up towards forty years old and he’d never married a wife. So his mother fretted at him, said she was getting too old to churn and milk and he ought to fetch a wife home to take some of the work off of her. So this farmer, call him Jim, he goes down to the church and hunts up the preacher. ‘Preacher’, says Jim ‘I got to get married. Mammy says so.’ ‘All right, Jim,’ agrees the preacher, ‘I’ll be proud to marry you. You go get your license and bring the woman here with you and I’ll give you a real good marrying.’ ‘But I haven’t got any woman, Preacher,’ Jim argues kind of dashed. ‘Well, you can’t get married without a woman, Jim’, the preacher tells him. That’s your problem, Milo. You want to be a captain and you haven’t got any organization to captain. What made you think you could be a captain, anyway?”
“Well, Mr. President,” the boy flushed unhappily, “it was that captain we got in B Company. That last battle—he made us retreat. And right there in front of us there was a hole in that Rebel line I could have drove four wagons through. There wasn’t no sense in that retreat, Mr. President. All of us boys said so. All of us was mad. So I thought I can be a better captain than that.”
“Maybe you can, Milo. You go on back to B Company and be a good soldier and likely you’ll make captain before this war is over.”
“Mr. President, I can’t do it! I run off. They’ll put me in the guardhouse!”
Lincoln scratched his chin. “That was very unwise of you, soldier. But you can’t dodge your military responsibility. I reckon you’ll just have to go to the guardhouse. If you should try to hedge out of it you’d be as poor a soldier as that captain of B Company you complain about. It won’t be too bad. Good luck to you, son.”
The boy said, “Thank you, sir,” and backed out, twisting his cap in his hands.
“Stand up straight, look the captain in the eye, and admit you ran off, son,” advised Lincoln. “You needn’t tell him you came here to get his job away from him.”
“No, sir, I sure won’t.”
John Hay came in when the young trooper had gone. “I shouldn’t have let him in perhaps, Mr. President,” he explained, “but he said he had an important message for you.”
“It was important. To Milo Potter,” smiled Lincoln. “No harm done, Johnny.”
“Your son is waiting, sir. Shall I send him in?”
“Must be Bob. Tad would have already been in.”
Robert came in, took a chair, and folded his hands, his young mouth sober. “I had to know, sir,” he began, “have they been making attempts to kill you?”
“Bob, there are several million people who think that the man who kills me should wear a hero’s crown. And there are a lot of people who yearn to be heroes,” Lincoln said calmly.
“You should be better protected. You shouldn’t take risks!”
“They’re trying to protect me now, Bob, till I can’t hardly draw my own breath.”
“That fellow who just went out. Did you even know him?” persisted the boy.
“He was harmless. I reckon Johnny even took his jackknife away from him. I have to see ’em, son. I have to hear their story. That’s why they put me here,” declared his father.
“About the Army, Papa—I’m deadly serious.”
“The trouble is, Bob, that your mother is deadly serious, too. She’s lost two boys,” Lincoln reminded him.
“So have other women.”
“I know. Give her a little more time, Bob. Till the end of this year anyway. The war isn’t going to end before New Years’ Day.”
“I shan’t wait much longer, I promise you,” threatened Robert, standing tall.
“Just promise me to the end of this school year. Then we’ll talk about it again.”
“And you’ll talk to Mama? Make her see that it’s something I have to do?”
“I’ll talk to Mama,” agreed Abraham Lincoln. “I’ll do my best, son.”
But when, he was thinking wearily after the boy had gone, had his best ever been good enough to prevail against Mary’s ready tears?