![]() ![]() In 1905, she moved Jessie and both children to Europe, leaving Warren behind. After the children were born, Mary Harlan Lincoln tried to control them, too. Her brother, Robert Todd Lincoln Beckwith, was born in 1904. Mary Lincoln Beckwith was born in 1898 and called “Peggy” to set her apart from the other Marys. She’d never stopped mourning Jack and could not bear to be parted from her daughter.ĭespite her mother’s meddling, the couple managed to produce two children-yet another Mary and another Robert. Beckwith claimed that his mother-in-law meddled in his marriage from the start. Against her parents’ wishes, she married a college football star named Warren Wallace Beckwith in 1897. Mamie’s sister, Jessie, got to keep her name, but she rebelled anyway. The following year, her only child, Lincoln Isham, was born. In 1891, the year after her brother’s death, 22-year-old Mamie married Charles Bradford Isham, her father’s secretary. Mary was nicknamed “Mamie” to distinguish her from her mother (Mary Harlan) and her grandmother (Mary Todd). That left Jack’s two younger sisters-Jessie and Mary-to carry on the line. Lancing the carbuncle sent the staph infection into Jack’s lymph and vascular systems, and within a few months Honest Abe’s namesake was dead. Bad idea: Carbuncles are typically infected with staphylococcus, a particularly nasty strain of bacteria. There, the 16-year-old heir to one of the most revered names in American history discovered a carbuncle-a boil-like abscess-in his armpit. But first he was sent off to Versailles, France, to prepare for his entrance exams. Their only son-Abraham Lincoln II, called “Jack”-was a brilliant young man and was ready to follow in his father’s footsteps at Harvard. Robert and his wife, Mary Harlan Lincoln, had three children. Historians say that the president’s son was ashamed of the modest cabin in which his father grew up and had already started referring to Hildene as his “ancestral home.” The organ was installed in 1908 at a cost of $11,000-about $282,000 in today’s dollars.īy 1909, the family had moved so far from Abe Lincoln’s log-cabin roots that when President Theodore Roosevelt presided over a ceremony designating Lincoln’s birthplace in Kentucky a “national historic site,” not a single Lincoln descendent showed up. He called the estate “Hildene.” Inside the mansion was an impressive library decorated in the style of a first-class Pullman coach and an entry hall that boasted a thousand-pipe electromagnetic organ. In 1902, he acquired a 412-acre property in Vermont, where he built a luxurious 24-room mansion. (Ironically, he’d been dubbed “the Prince of Rails” during the 1860 presidential campaign because of his presidential father’s reputation as a “rail-splitter.”)Īs a railroad tycoon, Robert made enough money to leave his father’s humble beginnings behind. Nevertheless, Robert Todd Lincoln did become president…of the Pullman Railroad Company. In fact, he was said to have an almost “morbid repugnance” for public life. But he was not “a man of the people” like his father. Secretary of War under President James Garfield. “They wanted Abraham Lincoln’s son.” What they got was a Harvard-educated lawyer, banker, and corporate executive who also served as U.S. Robert Lincoln not only survived, he thrived, perhaps driven by a compulsion to prove he was more than just Abe Lincoln’s son. So who was this kid, and why did Lincoln’s estate pay him?Īt the time of Abraham Lincoln’s assassination, his family tree had a single living shoot: Robert Todd Lincoln, the only one of the president’s four children (all sons) to survive to adulthood. None of the three were believed to have produced any kids. Beckwith was the last of the 16th president’s three great-grandchildren to pass away. Or did it?Ī year after Robert Todd Lincoln Beckwith’s death in 1985, a 17-year-old boy appeared in court to accept a million-dollar settlement from the Lincoln estate. The Abraham Lincoln bloodline shed its last drop in 1985. The following is an article from Uncle John’s Bathroom Reader
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