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Tag: Consolation

Letter to John Johnston (January 12, 1851)

Ranking

#25 on the list of 150 Most Teachable Lincoln Documents

Annotated Transcript

Context.  Abraham Lincoln grew up in what we call today a blended family. His mother Nancy died when his sister Sarah was eleven and he was only nine. Lincoln’s father Thomas then remarried to a widow named Sarah Bush Johnston who had her own children and the families merged together in on a small farm in southern Indiana. That was how Lincoln grew up until the extended clan relocated to Illinois in the early 1830s. In this letter, Abraham Lincoln explained to his step-brother John Johnston why he had not replied to earlier letters warning of his father’s ill health and why he had decided not to come and visit. The content and tone of the letter suggests that there might have been serious strains in the relationship between father and son. Thomas Lincoln died a week after this letter was written. (By Matthew Pinsker)

“I sincerely hope Father may yet recover his health….”

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On This Date

HD Daily Report, January 12, 1851

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John Johnston
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Other Primary Sources

Abraham Lincoln letter to John Johnston and Thomas Lincoln, December 24, 1848

John Johnston letter to Abraham Lincoln, May 25, 1849

Matilda Johnston Moore, “Interview with William H. Herndon,” September 8, 1865

Sarah Bush Lincoln, “Interview with William H. Herndon,” September 8, 1865

A. H Chapman to William H. Herndon, Charleston, Illinois, September 28, 1865

 

How Historians Interpret

“When Lincoln finally replied to Johnston on January 12, 1851, it was to express a polite but firm unwillingness to make the trip down to Coles County. Mary was still unwell from the birth of William Wallace Lincoln, and, even more to the point, the distance between father and son had simply grown too great to be reconciled, even if the old man was at death’s door. ‘If we could meet now,’ Lincoln told Johnston, ‘it is doubtful whether it would not be more painful than pleasant.’ And almost as if this mysterious inability to find reconciliation with his father reminded Lincoln of another equally painful inability, he dropped back into language from his boyhood which he must have known would be the substance of his father’s religious hopes but which he could only acknowledge as a distant impossibility for himself:… It is hard to imagine the ‘infidel’ of the 1830’s writing such advice, even if it was (as Herndon insisted it only was) designed largely as the dutiful sentiment a tactful but distant son might be expected to offer a dying father. Mixed up together with the sentimentality are all the old echoes of the Lincoln family’s unbending Calvinism; and of Christian redemption. What he was willing to acknowledge as grace for others he could not acknowledge for himself. It was ‘the help of God’ the predestinating Father, not the mediation of Christ the redeeming Son, which was the best Lincoln could offer.”

AllenC. Guelzo, Abraham Lincoln: Redeemer President, (Cambridge: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 1999), 159-160

 

 

“The following year, Lincoln’s father passed away. As Thomas lay dying in Charleston, a day’s journey from Springfield, Lincoln rejected his deathbed appeal for a visit. Coldly Lincoln wrote his stepbrother, John D. Johnston, to tell their father ‘that if we could meet now, it is doubtful whether it would not be more painful than pleasant.’ Lincoln neither attended Thomas’s funeral nor arranged for a tombstone to mark his grave. In some men, the painful questioning that often occurs at midlife can lead to despair; in others it produces stagnation. But it can also be a creative if turbulent period in which inner psychological growth takes place and leads to profound self-realization. Out of the crucible of midlife introspection can emerge an awareness of one’s own identity and uniqueness that breeds self-confidence and inspires confidence in others. A hallmark of such pyschologically maturity is an ability to overcome egotism, to avoid taking things personally, to accept one’s shortcomings and those of others with equanimity, to let go of things appropriate for youth and accept gladly the advantages and disadvantages of age. People able to meet these challenges successfully radiate a kind of pyschological wholeness and rootedness that commands respect. They evolve into the unique individuals that they were meant to be. Clearly Lincoln became such a person.”

Michael Burlingame, Abraham Lincoln: A Life (2 volumes, originally published by Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008) Unedited Manuscript By Chapter, Lincoln Studies Center, Volume 1, Chapter 9 (PDF), pp. 1040-1042

 

“The next winter, when John D. Johnston wrote him two more letters about Thomas Lincoln’s declining health, Abraham Lincoln did not respond. He thought his stepbrother was again crying wolf. Only after he heard independently from Harriet Chapman did he take the news seriously. Repeating his ‘desire that neither Father or Mother shall be in want of any comfort either in health or sickness,’ he explained why he could not come to his father’s sickbed. ‘My business is such that I could hardly leave home now,’ he wrote; besides, his wife was ‘sick-abed’ with ‘baby-sickness.’ Both excuses had some plausibility … The rest of Lincoln’s letter, urging his father to ‘call upon, and confide in, our great, and good, and merciful Maker; who…notes the fall of a sparrow, and numbers the hairs of our heads,’ was in unconvincing and strained language, really addressed to his backwoods relatives who thought in the cliches of Primitive Baptists … Unable to simulate a grief that he did not feel or an affection that he did not bear, Lincoln did not attend his father’s funeral. He was not heartless, but Thomas Lincoln represented a world that his son had long ago left behind him.”

— David H. Donald, Lincoln (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1995), 153

 Further Reading

  • Richard Hart, “Thomas Lincoln Reconsidered,” For the People (Springfield: Abraham Lincoln Association), 2017 [PDF]

 

 Searchable Text

Springfield, Jany. 12. 1851—
Dear Brother: 
On the day before yesterday I received a letter from Harriett, written at Greenup. She says she has just returned from your house; and that Father is very low, and will hardly recover. She also says you have written me two letters; and that although you do not expect me to come now, you wonder that I do not write. I received both your letters, and although I have not answered them, it is not because I have forgotten them, or been uninterested about them—but because it appeared to me I could write nothing which could do any good. You already know I desire that neither Father or Mother shall be in want of any comfort either in health or sickness while they live; and I feel sure you have not failed to use my name, if necessary, to procure a doctor, or any thing else for Father in his present sickness. My business is such that I could hardly leave home now, if it were not, as it is, that my own wife is sick-abed. (It is a case of baby-sickness, and I suppose is not dangerous.) I sincerely hope Father may yet recover his health; but at all events tell him to remember to call upon, and confide in, our great, and good, and merciful Maker; who will not turn away from him in any extremity. He notes the fall of a sparrow, and numbers the hairs of our heads; and He will not forget the dying man, who puts his trust in Him. Say to him that if we could meet now, it is doubtful whether it would not be more painful than pleasant; but that if it be his lot to go now, he will soon have a joyous [meeting] with many loved ones gone before; and where the rest of us, through the help of God, hope ere-long to join them.
Write me again when you receive this. 
Affectionately
A. LINCOLN

Letter to Lydia Bixby (November 21, 1864)

Contributing Editors for this page include Michael Mazzullo

Ranking

#71 on the list of 150 Most Teachable Lincoln Documents

 

Annotated Transcript

‘I have been shown in the files of the War Department a statement of the Adjutant General of Massachusetts, that you are the mother of five sons who have died gloriously on the field of battle.”

On This Date

HD Daily Report, November 21, 1864

The Lincoln Log, November 21, 1864

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Close Readings

Michael Mazzullo, “Understanding Lincoln” blog post (via Quora), June 27, 2014

How Historians Interpret

“The beautiful Bixby letter was not written by Lincoln but rather by John Hay, nor was its recipient the mother of five sons killed in the war. She lost two of her boys and tried to cheat the government out of money by claiming that the others had been killed. Of the three survivors, one had deserted to the enemy, another may have done so, and the third was honorably discharged. Mrs. Bixby was born in Virginia, sympathized with the Confederacy, and disliked Lincoln so much that she apparently destroyed the letter in anger. Evidence suggests that she ran a whorehouse in Boston and was ‘perfectly untrustworthy.’ (Though he did not compose the famous communication to Mrs. Bixby, Lincoln on occasion wrote exceptionally moving and beautiful letters of condolence, like those he sent to the parents of Elmer Ellsworth in 1861 and to Fanny McCullough the following year.) The adjutant general of Massachusetts, after hand-delivering the letter to Mrs. Bixby, provided copies to newspapers, which gave it wide distribution.”

–Michael Burlingame, Abraham Lincoln: A Life (2 volumes, originally published by Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008) Unedited Manuscript by Chapter, Lincoln Studies Center, Volume 2, Chapter 35  (PDF), 3856-3857.

 

“Lincoln’s heart went out to mothers who suffered multiple losses – women such as Sarah Mills of Des Moines, Iowa, who lost her husband, father, and brother at the battle of Corinth, Mississippi, and Polly Ray, a widow in North Carolina whose seven sons were killed in the war. Lincoln had recently written a compassionate and masterful letter to a Massachusetts woman, Lydia Bixby, who claimed to have lost five sons in the war… Years later historians discovered that Lydia Bixby was a Southern sympathizer who ran a whorehouse and that she had lost two, nor five, sons. She did indeed have three other sons: one had deserted the army, another may have deserted, and the third was honorably discharged. Despite the mythology of her case, Lincoln’s Bixby letter is a classic example of presidential compassion from a deeply caring man who would feel the pain of those who had lost loved ones.

–Donald Winkler, Lincoln’s Ladies (Nashville: Cumberland House, 2004), 192.

NOTE TO READERS

This page is under construction and will be developed further by students in the new “Understanding Lincoln” online course sponsored by the House Divided Project at Dickinson College and the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History. To find out more about the course and to see some of our videotaped class sessions, including virtual field trips to Ford’s Theatre and Gettysburg, please visit our Livestream page at http://new.livestream.com/gilderlehrman/lincoln

 

Searchable Text

Executive Mansion,
Washington, Nov. 21, 1864.
 
Dear Madam,
—I have been shown in the files of the War Department a statement of the Adjutant General of Massachusetts, that you are the mother of five sons who have died gloriously on the field of battle.
 
I feel how weak and fruitless must be any words of mine which should attempt to beguile you from the grief of a loss so overwhelming. But I cannot refrain from tendering to you the consolation that may be found in the thanks of the Republic they died to save.
 
I pray that our Heavenly Father may assuage the anguish of your bereavement, and leave you only the cherished memory of the loved and lost, and the solemn pride that must be yours, to have laid so costly a sacrifice upon the altar of Freedom.
 
Yours, very sincerely and respectfully,
A. LINCOLN.

Letter to Fanny McCullough (December 23, 1862)

Contributing Editors for this page include Megan VanGorder

Ranking

#99 on the list of 150 Most Teachable Lincoln Documents

Annotated Transcript

“It is with deep grief that I learn of the death of your kind and brave Father; and, especially, that it is affecting your young heart beyond what is common in such cases. In this sad world of ours, sorrow comes to all; and, to the young, it comes with bitterest agony, because it takes them unawares.”

On This Date

HD Daily Report, December 23, 1862

The Lincoln Log, December 23, 1862

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Close Readings


Posted at YouTube by “Understanding Lincoln” course participant Megan VanGorder, July 2014

How Historians Interpret

“No witnesses described Lincoln’s reaction to his mother’s death, nor did he say anything directly about its effect on him. Many years later, however, he indirectly revealed something of his emotions when he consoled a young girl whose father had been killed in the Civil War: ‘It is with deep grief that I learn of the death of your kind and brave Father; and, especially, that it is affecting your young heart beyond what is common in such cases. In this sad world of ours, sorrow comes to all; and, to the young, it comes with bitterest agony, because it takes them unawares. You are sure to be happy again. To know this, which is certainly true, will make you some less miserable now.’ Significantly he added, ‘I have had experience enough to know what I say.’ Lincoln probably identified with the girl, for he too seems to have suffered the ‘bitterest agony’ at the sudden death of his mother and to have been affected ‘beyond what is common in such cases.’

–Michael Burlingame, Abraham Lincoln: A Life (2 volumes, originally published by Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008) Unedited Manuscript by Chapter, Lincoln Studies Center, Volume 1, Chapter 2 (PDF), 89-90.

 

“Modern writing carries this vision of a compassionate Lincoln to an extreme. A trip to Web sites on the Internet reveals how Lincoln has been almost sanctified. Search ‘Fanny McCullough and Lincoln’ and you find him associated with the compassion of Jesus… There is no doubt that Lincoln could be compassionate. One reason that the general public believes that Lincoln was a compassionate man is that he was one—when it came to friends and young soldiers—to the young especially. His letter to Fanny McCullough conveys empathy and a thoughtful sympathy that has seldom been equaled.”

–Phillip Shaw Paludan,”Lincoln and Negro Slavery: I haven’t Got Time for the Pain,” Journal of the Abraham Lincoln Association 27 no. 2 (2006), 1-23.

NOTE TO READERS

This page is under construction and will be developed further by students in the new “Understanding Lincoln” online course sponsored by the House Divided Project at Dickinson College and the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History. To find out more about the course and to see some of our videotaped class sessions, including virtual field trips to Ford’s Theatre and Gettysburg, please visit our Livestream page at http://new.livestream.com/gilderlehrman/lincoln

 

Searchable Text

Executive Mansion, Washington,
December 23, 1862.
 
Dear Fanny
It is with deep grief that I learn of the death of your kind and brave Father; and, especially, that it is affecting your young heart beyond what is common in such cases. In this sad world of ours, sorrow comes to all; and, to the young, it comes with bitterest agony, because it takes them unawares. The older have learned to ever expect it. I am anxious to afford some alleviation of your present distress. Perfect relief is not possible, except with time. You can not now realize that you will ever feel better. Is not this so? And yet it is a mistake. You are sure to be happy again. To know this, which is certainly true, will make you some less miserable now. I have had experience enough to know what I say; and you need only to believe it, to feel better at once. The memory of your dear Father, instead of an agony, will yet be a sad sweet feeling in your heart, of a purer, and holier sort than you have known before.
 
Please present my kind regards to your afflicted mother.
 
Your sincere friend
A. LINCOLN.

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