All in the Day's Work: An Autobiography

by Ida M. Tarbell

“Now, Robert,” she ordered as she filled our cups, “I want you to give her something worth while.”

To be drinking tea with the son of Abraham Lincoln was so unbelievable to me that I could scarcely take note of his reply. I searched his face and manners for resemblances. There was nothing. He was all Todd, a big plump man perhaps fifty years old, perfectly groomed, with that freshness which makes men of his type look as if they were just out of the barber’s chair, the admirable social poise of the man who has seen the world’s greatest and has come to be sure of himself; and this in spite of such buffeting as few men had had—the assassination of his father when he was twenty-four, the humiliation of Mary Lincoln’s half-crazed public exhibition of herself and her needs, the death of his brother Tad, the heartbreaking necessity of having his mother committed for medical care, and more recently the loss of his only son. Robert Lincoln had had enough to crush him, but he was not crushed. At the moment he looked and felt, I think, that he had arrived where he belonged. The Republican party would have been happy, no doubt, to make him its leader if he had shown political genius recalling that of his father. They tried him out. Garfield and Arthur made him Attorney General, Harrison named him minister to the Court of St. James’s, but nothing happened. He was not political timber, but by this time big business wanted him. It was his field. He was now president of the Pullman Company.

I devoured him with my eyes. He was very friendly. To Mrs. Lyons’ order to do his best for me he laughingly replied, “Of course if you say so, Emily.” But he went on to say he was afraid he had little that would help me. Herndon had taken all his father’s papers from the law office. I think he used the word “stolen,” but I am not sure; at least I knew he felt they were stolen. He had protested, but was never able to get anything back. As for the Presidential period, all the correspondence was packed away in Washington, but it had been fully used by Nicolay and Hay. However, he had what he believed to be the earliest portrait made of his father—a daguerreotype never published. I could have that.

I held my breath. If it was true! I held my breath still longer when the picture was finally in my hands for I realized that this was a Lincoln which shattered the widely accepted tradition of his early shabbiness, rudeness, ungainliness. It was another Lincoln, and one that took me by storm.

Of course we made it the frontispiece to our first installment, and the office saw to it that those whose opinions were of value had fine prints of it. It called out some remarkable letters. Woodrow Wilson wrote that he found it “both striking and singular—a notable picture.” He was impressed by “the expression of the dreaminess, the familiar face without its sadness.” Charles Dudley Warner wrote that he found it “far and away the most outstanding presentation of the man” he had ever seen. “To my eyes it explains Mr. Lincoln far more than the most elaborate engraving which has been produced.” A common enough comment was that it “looks like Emerson.” Edward Everett Hale wrote us that he had shown the picture to “two young people of intelligence who each asked if it was not Waldo Emerson.”

A valuable and considered comment came from John T. Morse, the author of a Life of Abraham Lincoln, as well as editor of a series on leading American statesmen:

I have studied this portrait with very great interest [wrote Mr. Morse]. All of the portraits with which we are familiar show us the man as made; this shows us the man in the making. And I think every one will admit that the making of Abraham Lincoln presents a more singular, puzzling, interesting study than the making of any other man in human history. I have shown it to several persons without telling them who it was. Some say a poet; others a philosopher, a thinker, like Emerson. These comments also are interesting, for Lincoln had the raw material of both these characters very largely in his composition though political and practical problems so overlaid them that they show only faintly in his later portraits. This picture, therefore, is valuable evidence as to his natural traits.

Robert Lincoln was almost as proud as I was of the character of the comment. If he felt, as he well may have done, that he was taking a chance in responding so generously to his friend Mrs. Lyons’ order, he was rewarded by the attention the picture received from those whose opinions he regarded highly. Always thereafter he was quick to see me when I took a Lincoln problem to him, as I did when I had exhausted all other sources. He was always frank and downright. One puzzle I brought amused him no little. It was the recurring rumor that Abraham Lincoln had written a letter to Queen Victoria early in the war begging her not to recognize the Confederacy. He was said to have sent it direct. Now no hint, however unlikely, no clue, however shadowy, was passed by in what had become in the McClure office a veritable bureau of Lincoln research. “Anything is possible,” was our watchword. I was carrying on a widespread correspondence and continually dashing in one direction or another on what turned out often to be wild-goose chases, but also not infrequently brought in valuable game. Mr. McClure was especially excited over this letter. The State Department pooh-poohed the idea; the curator of documents in London was noncommittal. I interviewed people who were in position to know what was going on, but learned nothing. Finally I went to Chicago to see Robert Lincoln. His eye seemed harder to me in his office than over Mrs. Lyons’ tea table, but he quickly put me at ease. I was certain that my quest was going to seem ridiculous to him; indeed, it had become a little so to me. But he didn’t throw it aside. He picked it up and played with it. He had never heard of such a letter and doubted if it had been written.

“If father had done that,” he said with emphasis, “and Mr. Adams”—Charles Francis Adams, then minister to Great Britain—“had learned of it, he would have resigned. Father knew of course that all communication between governments must be carried on by the credited ambassadors.”

And then he fell to talking laughingly of his own experiences at the Court of St. James’s. He said he had received all sorts of things to be presented to the Queen—patchwork quilts, patent medicines, books, sheet music. “I suppose,” he said, “that lots of Americans fancy that their ambassador smokes cigarettes awhile every morning after breakfast with the Queen. They take it for granted he can drop in for tea any time and present quilts. Of course such people see no reason why a President cannot write a Queen direct.” And he laughed until the tears came.