Lincoln, the unknown

LINCOLN THE UNKNOWN • 243friends or relatives, and settled down to teaching Tad to spell.Tad had been his father's favorite. His real name wasThomas, but Lincoln had nicknamed him "Tad" or "Tadpole"because as a baby he had had an abnormally large head.Tad usually slept with his father. The child would he aroundthe office in the White House until he fell asleep, and then thePresident would shoulder him and carry him off to bed. Tadhad always suffered from a slight impediment in his speech,and his father humored him; and, so with the ingenuity of abright boy, he used his handicap as a foil to ward off attemptsto educate him. He was now twelve years old, but he couldneither read nor write.Mrs. Keckley records that during his first spelling lesson,Tad spent ten minutes arguing that "a-p-e" spelled monkey.The word was illustrated with a small woodcut of what he believedto be a monkey, and it required the combined efforts ofthree people to convince him that he was wrong.Mrs. Lincoln used every means in her power to persuadeCongress to give her the hundred thousand dollars that Lincolnwould have been paid had he lived out his second term. WhenCongress refused she was vitriolic in her denunciation of the"fiends" who had blocked her plans with "their infamous andvillainous falsehoods.""The father of wickedness and lies," she said, "will get thesehoary-headed sinners when they pass away."Congress did finally give her twenty-two thousand—approximatelythe amount that would have been due Lincoln had heserved the rest of that year. With this she bought and furnisheda marble-front house in Chicago.Two years elapsed, however, before Lincoln's estate was settled;and, during that time, her expenses mounted and hercreditors howled. Presently she had to take in roomers; thenboarders; and at last she was obliged to give up her home andmove into a boarding-house, herself.Her exchequer became more and more depleted, until, inSeptember, 1867, she was, as she phrased it, "pressed in a moststartling manner for means of subsistence."So she packed up a lot of her old clothes and laces andjewelry, and, with her face hidden under a heavy crepe veil, sherushed to New York incognita, registered as a "Mrs. Clark,"met Mrs. Keckley there, gathered up an armful of worn dresses,