Father Lincoln: The Untold Story of Abraham Lincoln and His Boys-Robert, Eddy, Willie, and Tad
Father Lincoln: The Untold Story of Abraham Lincoln and His Boys-Robert, Eddy, Willie, and Tad - Alan Manning
Non-Fiction
Pages: 288
You'd think there was nothing new left to write about Abraham Lincoln - and in many ways you'd be right. There is little in this book that is utterly revelatory and original - I can't think of anything specifically that was brand new information to me; most of the stories and anecdotes have been rehashed and recounted in numerous Lincoln's biographies, so the 'untold' angle of the title is a bit disingenuous. But the overall focus, of Lincoln as a man and a father, rather than president and statesman, was quite a refreshing angle with which to view him. It serves to humanise a man who history generally remembers as an elevated figure, the Great Emancipator, one of the greatest of presidents.
Lincoln was an indulgent father, perhaps too indulgent if many of his contemporaries are to be believed. He allowed his boys to run riot and rarely disciplined or chastised them, perhaps as an extreme reaction against his own overly-rigid childhood upbringing. Whether he did his boys any favours with this behaviour is hard to judge - Eddy and Willie died in childhood, Tad only reached seventeen, and it was only Robert, who was the least like Lincoln, who reached old age. Robert perhaps experienced his father's parenting the least, growing up before Lincoln was president, when he spent a great deal of time away from home building up his political and legal careers - and as a result, many historians have ascribed the pair a distant and reserved relationship, something Manning is keen to disprove, although I'm not sure entirely successfully.
This was a decent read, refreshing as I mentioned, but there was no great depth to it, nothing new or revelatory, no previously lost sources of information. There was a stab at pop psychology with Lincoln's parenting style, relating it to reaction against his own childhood, but little more than that. And it was very much about Lincoln as a father rather than one of two parents, there was little about how he and Mary raised their children together. So a good book, but a bit of a missed opportunity in some ways.