(Host) Today
is both President’s Day and the anniversary of an event that caused
great sadness in the Lincoln White House. Commentator and Vermont
Humanities Council
executive director Peter Gilbert has the story – not of a
President, but a President’s child.
(Gilbert) Eleven-year-old
Willie Lincoln had had a fever for a week when his eight-year-old
brother, Tad, became sick, too. Doctors assured President and Mrs.
Lincoln that there was no cause for alarm, but the parents couldn’t help
but remember the death of their second child, three-year-old "Eddie,"
twelve years earlier. The President spent hours at the boys’ bedsides,
stroking their hair and comforting them.
The doctors said it was
a bilious fever, probably typhoid, a byproduct of poor sanitation and
contaminated water in Washington. Tad had been sick for a week and
Willie for two weeks when, on February 20, 1862, a hundred and fifty
years ago today, Willie lapsed into a coma and died.
Lincoln
said to one of his private secretaries, John Nicolay, "Well, Nicolay, my
boy is gone – he is actually gone." Then he broke down in tears. "He
was too good for this earth."
"I know that he is much better off in heaven, " Lincoln said, " but then we loved him so. It is hard, hard to have him die."
Mary
Todd Lincoln was so devastated that Lincoln worried for her health. She
took to her bed for three weeks, and for months the mere mention of
Willie’s name was enough to bring on tumultuous weeping. She brought
Spiritualists to the White House in an effort to communicate with her
dead son.
People close to Lincoln wondered if he would be able
to carry on. The fifteen months since his election – including almost a
year as President – had been trying in the extreme. But on February 24,
the New York Evening Post reported, accurately or not, that "Mr.
Lincoln… is again at his ordinary duties, spending, not infrequently,
eighteen out of the twenty-four hours upon the affairs of the nation."
The
Lincolns had four sons. Robert Todd Lincoln, born in 1843, was the only
one to live to adulthood. Edward Baker Lincoln or "Eddie," was born
three years later and named after Lincoln ‘s close friend Senator Edward
Baker, who died in combat just four months before Willie’s death.
Willie was the third son. And finally, there was Thomas or "Tad"
Lincoln. Although he survived the bout with typhoid that killed Willie,
he died of heart failure in 1871 at the age of eighteen. It was the
eldest son, Robert, who eventually made his home in Vermont. It was he
who built Hildene, a Georgian Revival mansion, now open to the public in
Manchester. Robert died there in 1926, at the age of 82.
Five
presidents have lost a child while in office. In addition to Lincoln,
John Adams lost a thirty-one-year-old son, and Thomas Jefferson a
twenty-five year-old daughter. Sixteen-year-old Calvin Coolidge, Jr.
died in 1924 of blood poisoning from an infected blister on his foot;
and two-day-old Patrick Bouvier Kennedy died in August 1963, just three
months before his father.
Personal losses like these remind us that Presidents are people, too.