From “The Human Condition: A User’s Manual,” by Arnold Kunst
29 April
Lincoln’s feet of clay.
Lincoln’s father did not attend his son’s 1842 wedding to
the socially-secure Mary Todd. In fact, Abraham was the only Lincoln who DID
attend that wedding. And 8 years later, when Lincoln received word from his
half-brother John Johnston that their father was close to death, he wrote back
to say he could not come because of “pressing business commitments.” “Tell him,”
he wrote to Johnston, “to remember to call upon, and confide in, our great, and
good, and merciful Maker, Who will not turn away from him in any extremity.”
One marvels at what, on the face of it, sounds like a regurgitated sermon; one
wonders if Lincoln wished for the Lord to do what he, the man’s son, might
rightfully be expected to do. In any event, Lincoln did not attend his father’s
funeral when he died in 1851. I think a case can be argued that the boundless
compassion Lincoln consistently showed to all and sundry had at its core a
bloodless lack of compassion for his own father.
