Christmas for Tad: A Story of Mary and Abraham Lincoln

The package was very tightly sealed.

There was a heavy cord around it fastened with thick blobs of wax and Tad Lincoln, who had been christened Thomas, stood fidgeting while his father worked at it patiently, with the old horn-handled knife that opened and shut with a sharp click.

Outside was the gloom of late December. That December of 1863, when the fortunes of the Federal armies had taken a little swing upward, but when war still lay like a poisonous, tragic, and heartbreaking shadow over a whole country. But to Tad Lincoln December meant Christmas, and packages meant surprises, important to a ten-year-old boy.

Tad stood first on one foot, then the other, impatiently, because Papa was so slow in opening this package. A round-faced boy, with his mother’s brown eyes and hair, he was a sturdy figure in the miniature uniform of a Union colonel that his father had had made for him. The coat fitted him jauntily, all the brass buttons fastened up in regulation fashion; there were epaulets and braid and long trousers lying properly over his toes, so that the copper toes of his boots showed. He had a belt and a sword, but he was not wearing them now. Swords were for engagements, reviews, and parades, the officers of Company K had instructed him. Among friends indoors an officer took off his belt and hung it in a safe place.

His father’s fingers were mighty long and bony, Tad was thinking, and awkward, too. One thumbnail was thicker and darker than the other nails and Tad touched it gently with his forefinger.

“What makes your thumb like that, Papa?” he asked.

The long yellowed hand put down the knife and the deep-set, steel-gray eyes of Abraham Lincoln studied the thumb intently as though he had never seen it before.

“Once there was an ax, Tad,” he drawled, his heavy eyebrows flicking up and down, his long mouth quirked up at one corner. “It didn’t want to go where I aimed it, so I said, says I, now who is boss here, Mister Ax, you or Abe Lincoln? You chop where I aim for you to chop, Mister Ax. So I made it hit where I wanted it to hit but it jumped back and took a whack at me just to show me that it could be the boss if it wanted to.”

“It might have cut your hand off,” worried Tad, still rubbing the dark nail.

“It might—but it didn’t. It was a well-meaning ax. Just independent, like a lot of people.”

“People take whacks at you, don’t they? I hear about it,” Tad said.

“Yes, some of ’em do.” Lincoln picked up the knife again, poked at the stubborn seals. “But mostly afterwards they cooperate.”

“Those people in New York didn’t,” insisted Tad. “Mother was scared to death when those draft riots were on and people yelled at her in that store. The police had to stand all around us with guns and you know something? Bob was scared but I wasn’t. Ole Bob was plumb scared green.”

“That was a bad time, son.” A seal came loose at last and fell in scarlet fragments to the rug. He attacked a second one, gripping the knife, the skin stretched tight over his fleshless knuckles. “It was bad because people weren’t mad at you. They were mad at me, not at Bob or your mother. They didn’t want to be drafted to fight in this war and I said they had to be drafted.”

“Well, golly, you’ve got to have soldiers! General Grant and General Rosecrans and everybody are yelling for more troops. You have to get ’em, you can’t make ’em out of air. Hurry and open it, Papa. Don’t you want to see what’s in it?”

“I think I know what’s in it. Yes, Tad,” he went on musingly, as though he talked to himself. “I’m supposed to make soldiers out of air; anyway the New York newspapers seemed to think so. Make ’em out of air and feed ’em on air and give ’em air to shoot with.”

“And then if General Lee licks us you’re to blame!” cried Tad. “Oh, I know, John Hay and Mr. Nicolay hide the papers but I find ’em. Papa, I read where one New York paper called you a gorilla.”

“What do you think, Tad? Don’t I look like one a little?” Lincoln dropped the knife, shambled bent across the room, his long arms dangling, his hands almost touching the floor. As the boy drew back aghast he bared his long teeth and snarled and Tad began to cry suddenly.

“No—no! Don’t do it!”

Lincoln laughed loudly, lifted him, setting the lad on his knee, holding him close. “For a man wearing the Union uniform, you scare easy, Colonel,” he teased. “Remember this, Tad. Names never hurt anybody. And the gorilla is one beast that’s never been tamed and only a heavy chain can master him.”

“Open the box,” gulped Tad, scrubbing his eyes with the cuff of his blue Union coat. “If anybody sent me a Christmas present, I’d want to know what it was.”

Lincoln dug the last seal away, cut the cord, and tore off the heavy paper. “Now, John Hay would say I’m a fool to open this,” he remarked. “He’ll say there could be something in it to blind or cripple me.”

“Maybe you’d better not, Papa,” Tad cried anxiously. “Let me call somebody.”

“No, Tad. I trust the man who brought it and I know what’s in it. It isn’t a Christmas present exactly. I earned it in a kind of a way. Look!” He opened the heavy box and the smaller one inside that was covered with gold-colored plush.

“A watch!” exclaimed the boy.

“A solid gold watch.” Lincoln held it out carefully on his big palm. “From Mr. James Hoes, Esquire, of Chicago. I won it, Tad. Mr. Hoes offered the watch as a prize for the one making the biggest contribution of funds to their Sanitary Commission fair. I sent them a copy of the Emancipation Proclamation and they auctioned it off for three thousand dollars, so I won the watch.”

“You’ve already got a watch, Papa, but I haven’t got one,” said Tad eagerly.

Lincoln drew his old watch from his pocket, loosed it from the chain and seals. “I don’t have a solid gold watch. This old turnip is sort of worn. I guess I timed too many speeches and juries with it. But you’re not big enough for a watch, Tad. Not till you can wear a vest and have enough stomach to hold up a chain.”

“Willie had a vest and he wasn’t so very much bigger than me,” argued Tad.

A shadow of pain ran over his father’s gaunt face and the tears, always quick when any emotion stirred him, were bright in his sunken eyes. The agony of Willie’s untimely death was still raw and aching in his heart.

“Willie was twelve years old, Tad. When you are twelve you can have a vest.”

“And a watch?”

“And a watch. Not this one.” Lincoln clicked the fastening of the bright new timepiece and dropped it into his pocket, along with the key that wound it. “I guess Bob will have to have this old one. Bob’s a man now and a man needs a watch.”

“He thinks he’s a man just because he can shave,” Tad scoffed. He studied his father’s face for a moment. “Why did you grow a beard, Papa? You didn’t have a beard when I was a little boy.”

“You’re still a little boy, fellow.” Lincoln gave him a poke in ribs. “Maybe I raised these whiskers because a little girl in New York asked me to. Maybe I just did it to keep my chin warm.”

“All Bob has is little patches in front of his ears. They look silly.”

Lincoln lifted his long body erect and walked to the window.

“You’d better be respectful to your big brother, Tad,” he said dryly. “Some of the newspapers that don’t like me are printing that Bob Lincoln has made a million dollars out of this war. For a young fellow still in Harvard only twenty years old, I’d say he had uncanny perspicacity.”

Tad frowned thoughtfully. “It’s a lie, ain’t it, Papa?” In his agitation the boy’s tricky palate betrayed him as it often did. “It’s big, dirty rie!”

Lincoln’s bony shoulders twitched upward, sagged with resignation. “Son, if all the lies that have been printed about the Lincolns were piled up in a heap, they’d reach near to the top of that monument out yonder.”