Robert Lincoln also declares that after his father became President, "any great intimacy between us became impossible. I scarcely had even ten minutes of quiet talk with him during his Presidency on account of his ever-constant devotion to the business of being Commander-in-Chief" (Randall, 183). Not surprisingly, Abraham Lincoln possessed a deep love for his sons and perhaps saw himself as he was as a youth in Illinois, long before he became a lawyer and decided to devote his life to helping the less fortunate. In 1860, Lincoln aide John Hay stated that very often while visiting the White House, he would find William (Willie) and Thomas (Tad) creating an uproar, due to their "independence and enterprise" which their father encouraged. "They drove their tutor wild," says Hays, "with their good-natured disobedience and conducted "lively games and pranks on virtually everyone that happened to pay a visit to the house during the daylight hours" (Burlingame, 197). Exactly how Mrs. Lincoln reacted to these types of shenanigans is not clear, yet biographer David H. Donald relates that Mary Lincoln so loved her husband that she would "put up with almost anything, especially when Mr. Lincoln, who towered over her by more than a foot, would look down with sad eyes and scold her for not having more patience with the children" (212).

In February of 1862, young Willie Lincoln died from complications brought on by typhoid fever. This surely affected Lincoln greatly, for he had lost another son some ten years earlier. Not long after Willie's death, Lincoln was reported to have been in a deep depression, due to loving his son and seeing how hard Mrs. Lincoln had taken the death of their little boy. A newspaper correspondent reported that on the day of Willie's death, Lincoln strolled in his office and said "Well, my boy is gone. He's actually gone!," whereby he "burst into tears and...

For Mrs. Lincoln, this event was a stunning loss and for almost three years after Willie's death, she "lived in virtual seclusion which fated the overburdened President to walk alone, haunted by fear that his beloved wife might go insane" (Burlingame, 234).
The marriage between Abraham Lincoln and Mary Todd Lincoln was at times very stressful and full of uncertainty, yet they seemed to have loved each other very deeply and possessed some type of inner strength to overcome all of the tragedies which befell them as parents. As Ruth Painter Randall points out, Lincoln "was not an easy man to live with. His careless ways and dowdy dress... annoyed his wife to no end but she learned to overlook his shortcomings." Also, in some letters written between them, Mary often "revealed sincere affection for her husband and as an indulgent father, he left the upbringing of his children largely to 'Mother' who was forbearing and over-strict simultaneously" (124). Thus, Abraham Lincoln was undoubtedly a very devoted father and husband despite being President of the United States during a time when the nation itself was being literally torn apart by civil war and the never-ending strife related to slavery and its impact upon the American landscape.

Works Cited

Burlingame, Michael. The Inner World of Abraham Lincoln. Baltimore, MD: University of Illinois Press, 1994.

Donald, David H. Lincoln at Home: Two Glimpses of Abraham Lincoln's Family Life.

Riverside, NJ: Simon & Schuster, 2000.

Lincoln's Sons." Abraham Lincoln Classroom. 2008. Internet. Retrieved October 30, 2008 at http://www.abrahamlincolnsclassroom.org/Library / newsletter.asp?ID=35&CRLI=115.

Randall, Ruth Painter. Abraham Lincoln's Sons. New York: Little, Brown & Company,