He was the son Abraham Lincoln loved with the least guard and the most tenderness—a boy who collected entry fees from visitors who wanted to see the president, blasted a fire hose at dignitaries, and drove his pet goats through the White House halls. Born with a cleft palate, he struggled to speak clearly and could not read until after his father was assassinated. He died at just 18, in a Chicago hotel room, spending his final weeks sleeping upright in a chair because his lungs would not let him lie down. His name was Thomas Lincoln, but everyone called him Tad.
Lincoln gave him the nickname after his birth in Springfield, Illinois, on April 4, 1853, saying the baby with the large head and small body reminded him of a tadpole. The name stayed with him for the rest of his short life. Tad arrived in the White House in 1861 as a seven-year-old whirlwind. Along with his older brother Willie, he dismantled the formality of the executive mansion.
The boys rang servants’ bells without purpose, set up a food shop in the lobby, and hauled a makeshift cannon to the roof, aiming it in the direction of the South. Secretary of War Edwin Stanton gave Tad an honorary military commission, which the boy interpreted with absolute authority, drilling servants and interrupting cabinet meetings. John Hay, Lincoln’s young personal secretary, later wrote that Tad’s tutors usually quit in frustration. The boy had what Hay called “a very bad opinion of books and no opinion whatsoever of discipline.
” Lincoln did not share the frustration. He had made a private pact with Tad: three quick knocks followed by two slow ones would gain entry to the president’s office, and Lincoln never broke the code. When those knocks came, meetings paused and documents were set aside. What Lincoln understood, and what those around him witnessed, was that in Tad’s company he rested.
Tad asked nothing of him that required him to be the president of the United States. He brought no dispatches or casualty figures. He brought himself, entirely and without reserve, and Lincoln accepted it with what observers described as unmixed gratitude. In January 1862, both boys fell ill.
Willie grew sicker and died on February 20, 1862, at the age of 11. Tad survived. The house went quiet in a way it had never been quiet before, and the eight-year-old who had lost his brother pressed himself closer to his father. Lincoln, by multiple accounts, was undone by Willie’s death, weeping in his office and visiting the crypt where his son’s body was held.
He turned toward Tad with a more deliberate love. He took Tad on military reviews and visits to the troops, where the boy inspected regiments in his small officer’s uniform. Tad would lie on the floor beneath his father’s desk while Lincoln read, sometimes falling asleep on the carpet. Lincoln would gather him in his arms and carry him to bed.
John Hay wrote that after Willie’s death, Tad installed himself as the absolute tyrant of the executive mansion. It was not tyranny exactly; it was a child responding to loss by staying as close as possible to the one person who made the world feel navigable. Lincoln allowed it, once remarking that he was not sure he could govern a nation, but he was certain he could not govern his own household. By April 1865, the war was ending.
On the evening of April 14, Lincoln went to Ford’s Theater. Tad went to Grover’s Theater nearby to see a children’s production of Aladdin and the Wonderful Lamp, accompanied by a White House staff member. During the performance, the theater manager stepped onto the stage and announced that President Lincoln had been shot. Tad ran.
He ran out of the theater and through the streets of Washington to the White House, where he grabbed the doorkeeper, Thomas Pendel. “Oh, Tom Pen, Tom Pen, they have killed papa dead. ” Pendel sat with the 12-year-old for hours, through the evening and into the small hours of the morning, until sleep came sometime after midnight. Lincoln died at 7:22 the next morning.
When Mary Todd Lincoln returned to the White House, Tad put his arms around her neck. “Don’t cry so, Mama,” he said. “Don’t cry, or you will make me cry, too. You will break my heart.
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In the days that followed, Tad told a servant that he could hardly believe he would never see his father again. “I must learn to take care of myself now,” he said. “I am not a president’s son now. I won’t have many presents anymore.
Well, I will try and be a good boy and will hope to go someday to Pa and brother Willie in heaven. ” He also told a visitor that he was glad his father was gone, “for he never was happy after he came here. This was not a good place for him. ”
Mary Lincoln did not leave the White House for five weeks.
Tad stayed with her. In late May, they left for Chicago, a widow of 46 and a boy of 12 who could not yet read. In Chicago, Tad went to school. His speech was still difficult, and classmates called him “stuttering Tad.
” He went back anyway and learned to read, a task most children begin at six. By the time he was 15, he could read fluently, and his speech had begun to smooth. In October 1868, Mary and Tad sailed for Europe. They settled in Frankfurt, Germany, where Tad enrolled in a boarding school run by Dr.
Johann Heinrich Hohagen. He applied himself, and Mary wrote with relief about his progress. In December 1869, she wrote to a friend: “Tad is like some old woman with regards to his care of me. His dark, loving eyes watching over me, remind me so much of his dearly beloved father’s.
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In 1870, with the Franco-Prussian War approaching, they moved to England, where Tad studied with a private tutor. John Hay, seeing Tad in Europe during those years, described him as “a cordial, frank, warm-hearted boy. ”
In the spring of 1871, Mary decided to return home. They sailed from Liverpool, arriving in New York on May 11, and reached Chicago on May 18.
On the crossing, Tad had developed a cough. By late May, he could not lie down to sleep, as fluid filled his lungs when he tried to rest flat. He slept sitting upright in a chair each night. In June, he was dangerously ill.
Doctors used words like pleurisy and said there was reason to be watchful but not yet reason to be afraid. Mary sat beside him. He continued to sleep upright in the chair, growing thinner as the weeks passed. Tad Lincoln died on July 15, 1871, at the Clifton House Hotel in Chicago.
He was 18 years old. The cause of death has been recorded variously as tuberculosis, pleurisy, pneumonia, and congestive heart failure, and the medical language of the time has left the technical matter open. Mary Lincoln was in the room. When it was over, she fell apart.
The funeral arrangements fell to Robert, then 27, who accompanied the casket by train to Springfield. Mary was too devastated to make the trip. At Oak Ridge Cemetery, Tad was placed in the Lincoln Tomb beside his father and beside Willie, who had died at 11, and Eddie, who had died in Springfield at age three before Tad was born. John Hay wrote the obituary, calling him “Little Tad.
” He remembered him as “so full of life and vigor, so bubbling over with health and high spirits, that he kept the house alive with his pranks and his fantastic enterprises. ”
Mary Lincoln wrote to a friend in the weeks after the funeral that there was no life for her without her “idolized Taddie. ” She was 52 years old, with one surviving child. She lived another 11 years.
On July 16, 1882, she died at her sister’s house in Springfield, in a room above the parlor where she had married Abraham Lincoln in 1842. It was one day after the 11th anniversary of Tad’s death, a date she had never forgotten. She was buried in the Lincoln Tomb, the last one in, beside Abraham, Eddie, Willie, and Tad. Tad Lincoln is interred there still, the Lincoln that history spends the least time on.
He was not a man who died in a theater or delivered a speech that hung on classroom walls. He was a boy who was loved enormously and completely, who spent the six years after that love was taken from him working quietly to become someone. He learned to read. He learned to speak clearly.
He learned to care for his mother across two continents. He was in the middle of building a life when the illness that began on the ship decided otherwise. He was 18 years old. He is buried beside his father.
The code of three quick knocks and two slow ones does not open anything anymore, but the record of his short life preserves what it meant to be the child Lincoln loved most.