With the 200th anniversary of Abraham Lincoln’s birth just a few months away, scholars are cranking out Honest Abe books even faster than usual.
You’d think it would be difficult to find anything new to say about the 16th president, but a recent crop of authors has managed to do just that. One new book examines Lincoln’s relationship with his admirals; another re-examines the president’s marriage to Mary Todd. Lincoln is featured in two dual biographies, one pairing him with slave-turned-activist Frederick Douglass, the other looking at connections between Lincoln and Charles Darwin, who also was born on Feb. 12, 1809.
But Charles Lachman may have come up with the most-original idea of the bunch. In Lachman’s new book, Abraham Lincoln is but a shadow – a formidable shadow, but a shadow all the same – in the tragic and often pathetic lives of Abraham’s children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren. His description of one of the president’s three great-grandchildren speaks volumes about the family’s fall: “Bob Beckwith had three great passions in life: fast cars, boats and beautiful women.” He spent his trust fund, Lachman writes, “in pursuit of all three.”
Lachman, a television producer and former Post reporter, does a brilliant job in tracing the heart-breaking decline of the Lincolns, a story that didn’t end until 1985, when Lincoln’s final great-grandchild died, leaving no heirs. He narrates more than a century of tragic deaths, sexual indiscretions, family tensions and – most shocking of all – an astounding lack of interest in the man the rest of the country revered as a martyr, President Lincoln himself.
On Feb 12, 1908, Lachman notes, President Theodore Roosevelt presided over a ceremony at Lincoln’s birthplace in Kentucky. “Shamefully,” he writes, “none of Lincoln’s blood descendants attended the ceremony designating his birthplace as a national historic site.” Lachman reports that Robert Lincoln, the president’s son, was ashamed of the modest cabin.
For the dead president’s three great-grandchildren, Abraham Lincoln was just another white guy in the history books. Lachman himself seems horrified as he describes the cavalier way in which Lincoln’s last remaining heirs treated family artifacts, including a lovely liquor cabinet that Beckwith gave away to somebody who asked for it. Beckwith’s sister, Peggy Beckwith, opposed the Kennedy administration’s efforts to integrate Southern schools in the early 1960s. When she was asked if her famous ancestor would agree with her position, she said, “I can’t say. I’m as far away from him as anybody else.”
Lachman wryly notes that “Lincoln scholars would probably have to agree.”
The Last Lincolns
The Rise & Fall of a Great American Family
by Charles Lachman
Union Square Press