Giant in the Shadows: The Life of Robert T.
Lincoln
By Jason Emerson
(Southern Illinois University Press, 752 pages,
$39.95)
Robert Todd Lincoln (he never used the Todd, Jason Emerson tells
us), the oldest of Abraham Lincoln’s four sons and the only one to
live to adulthood, was one of those Midwestern men of business who
made Chicago the post-Civil War center of American commerce and
industry—a city, wrote Andrew Ferguson in his splendid Land of
Lincoln, that “grew with the Lincoln legend and was, in part,
a creature of it,” a city leveled by fire and rebuilt, epitomizing
the “entrepreneurial capitalism that came roaring out of the Civil
War period and Lincoln came to symbolize.”
The Chicago connection is central to Emerson’s study, and
interestingly enough, this magazine has strong Chicago ties as
well. Andrew Ferguson, who made his bones as a journalist at
The American Spectator, writes that his father worked as a
lawyer in Chicago at the firm founded by Robert Todd Lincoln.
And hanging in the home library of Bob Tyrrell, the founder and
editor of TAS, and himself a Chicago product, is a large
picture of Abraham Lincoln, with a bronze plaque that reads:
“Presented To P. D. Tyrrell, U.S.S.S. By Robert T. Lincoln April
14, 1887 For Loyalty And Service to his Father Abraham
Lincoln.”
Captain P.D. Tyrrell of the U.S. Secret Service, head of its
regional office in Chicago, was Bob Tyrrell’s
great-great-grandfather; and his service to Robert Lincoln’s
father, performed twelve years after the assassination of the
president, was to prevent the theft of Abraham Lincoln’s body by a
Chicago gang of body snatchers (they were also counterfeiters) from
its burial place in Springfield, Illinois.
Grave robbing, Emerson tells us, a somewhat macabre form of
kidnapping, was not uncommon at the time. In 1830, for instance,
one sensational case occurred when “a fired gardener at George
Washington’s home in Mount Vernon tried to steal the first
president’s skull, but ended up with the bones of a distant
relative.”
In the end, the plot to snatch Lincoln’s body, discussed in some
detail in one of the most readable sections of this highly readable
book, was foiled by Captain Tyrrell. Tyrrell, Emerson tells us, was
an immigrant, born in Dublin, Ireland, in 1835, who moved to
America at age three. He grew up in Buffalo, New York, and after a
variety of jobs in law enforcement, made his way to Chicago, where
he was named a police detective and “established himself as one of
the department’s best men,” solving several of the department’s
most difficult cases.
When the Chicago chief of police was appointed chief of the U.S.
Secret Service in 1874, “he brought Tyrrell with him and made the
Irishman head of the Chicago regional office. There, Tyrrell again
distinguished himself as a top operative by shutting down and
arresting numerous counterfeiters and gangs, operations large and
small.”
P. D. Tyrrell, Emerson writes, “was one of the Service’s most
outstanding operatives, and later in his career would be considered
one of the most distinguished law enforcement officers in the
country.”
The attempt to steal Lincoln’s body is worth a book in itself,
and at least one has already been written. But for Emerson’s
purpose, the whole episode also helps define the great
responsibility to preserve and protect his father’s memory and
legacy that Robert Lincoln charged himself with bearing throughout
his life and career:
In September 1901, the final re-burial of Abraham Lincoln took
place.…This was the seventeenth time the body was moved, and the
sixth time it was exposed and viewed since 1865…. After thirty-six
years of dealing with events concerning his father’s tomb—the
history of which one newspaper called “a sort of burlesque”—Robert
never again had to worry about it, Abraham Lincoln was finally and
permanently at rest. The entire affair, however, was only one small
piece of the Lincoln legacy—a legacy that would occupy, satisfy,
and very often aggravate Robert his entire life.
His self-appointed role as guardian of the Lincoln legacy also
involved making judgments on the various works about the president
and his family increasingly pouring out of the printing presses. He
especially despised the life of Lincoln written by William Herndon,
who as a boy had known the future president and later became his
law partner. Some students of Abraham Lincoln find Herndon
indispensable for his depiction of the fast-disappearing world of
the frontier that helped shape and define Lincoln. (Interestingly,
Robert Lincoln was enthusiastic about the two-volume life of his
father written by Ida Tarbell, the noted muckraker.)
Part of Robert Lincoln’s distaste for Herndon apparently grew
out of what he considered “the negative depiction of Mary Lincoln.”
According to Emerson, a significant amount of his time was spent
discrediting books and articles published about his mother, as well
as trying “to collect and destroy all of his mother’s letters
written during what [he] called her ‘period of mental derangement,’
and also to attempt to block the publication of letters he could
not destroy.”
Perhaps the heaviest part of Robert Lincoln’s burden as guardian
of the family legacy was the continuous care and oversight of his
mother, as she sank from instability into something very much like
insanity, at one point requiring a formal commitment, which proved
temporary, to an asylum. The extended scenes in which the
relationship between mother and son are described are among the
most painful in the book.
BUT MR. EMERSON’S biography is by no means an extended chronicle
of heartbreak and suffering. True, it might seem there’s a string
of bad luck running through the Robert Lincoln story—especially
where presidents are involved. Although not at Ford Theater when
his father was shot, he was nearby at the White House and one of
the first to arrive at the theater.
In 1881, he was with President James A. Garfield, whom he served
as Secretary of War, when Garfield was shot by Charles J. Guiteau;
and in 1901, he was at the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo, New
York, when Leon F. Czolgosz shot President William McKinley.
Apparently this led Lincoln to a number of refusals to attend
events where a sitting president might be present.
At times Mr. Emerson, who shows that in later life Robert
Lincoln adhered to “a Victorian values system,” assumes a
distinctly Victorian style himself. As a young man, he tells us,
Robert Lincoln wasn’t above a certain amount of hell-raising: “As
dutiful and affectionate [a son] as Robert was, it is not incorrect
to reveal his great desire and ability for smoking cigars,
drinking, and carousing, which only increased during his college
years.”
During those years at Harvard, he was also eager to enlist, like
so many of his fellow students, but was prevented from doing so by
his mother, who was growing increasingly unstable. Finally, with
the help of his father, he was able to join the personal staff of
General Grant as a captain in time for the last few battles of the
war, and was at Appomattox to witness General Lee’s surrender.
With the end of the war and the assassination, Lincoln brought
his mother and younger brother to live in Chicago, where he
finished his law degree and eventually helped to establish the
prestigious firm where Andrew Ferguson’s father went to work a
half-century later. It was in Chicago where he made his mark as a
man of accomplishment in his own right, and where he became
president of the Pullman Palace Car Company in 1897.
During those years he also served in prestigious posts in
Republican administrations, among them Secretary of War under
Presidents Garfield and Chester A. Arthur. As his reputation
grew—and of course because of the family name—Lincoln became
increasingly talked of as a presidential or vice presidential
possibility. But he’d have none of it. In 1884, he explicitly
forbade his name to be placed in nomination as vice president at
the Republican convention.
Four years later, he again had strong support at the Republican
convention and, despite not attending, took a significant number of
votes for the top job. “It seemed as certain then as it does now,”
writes Emerson, “that had Robert Lincoln actively sought the
Republican presidential nomination in 1888, he would have won it.”
In the end, the nomination went to former Senator Benjamin
Harrison, who, upon defeating Grover Cleveland and taking office,
nominated Lincoln as America’s Minister to Great Britain.
In all, a distinguished career. As Emerson, very much his
subject’s champion, puts it: “Robert T. Lincoln was an accomplished
man, one of the exemplars of his generation, who, beyond being the
son of Abraham Lincoln, should and must be recognized for his
independent achievement. On top of all that, Robert’s life, from
1843 to 1926, spanned the most innovative, impressive, and dynamic
era in American history.” With much of it, one might add, played
out in Chicago, the most dynamic city of the era.
“Robert’s life is a fantastic journey through a rich period of
American history,” writes Justin Emerson. And it is to his great
credit as a biographer and historian that he so successfully brings
Robert T. Lincoln out of history’s shadows and the times in which
he lived back to vivid life.
