ROBERT TODD LINCOLN
~ DIDN’T RAISE HIS DAUGHTER TO MARRY A BASEBALL “FREAK”.
Back in the late 1890s, a young struggling and poor “ballplayer” named Warren Beckwith managed to marry into the descendant family of Abraham Lincoln by capturing the heart of the late president’s granddaughter and son Robert Todd Lincoln’s daughter, Jessie – and apparently over the strong objections of the girl’s parents, and reported by the “shocked” media of the time without the use of her first name in published accounts. It was the Victorian era – and class snobbishness dictated the feelings of some American news writers and, by conjecture, the parents of the girl that she deserved a more “prominent” life partner.
Interesting point of view, isn’t it, that it only took one generation and an incredible change in the status of the Lincoln family apparently to elevate Honest Abe’s family from “log cabin humility” to lofty self-aggrandizement in American society in their everyday views of the everyday ordinary man.
Or, perhaps, it was not really all that simple. It seems that young Beckwith, who was age 24 in early 1898, decided to seize upon his notoriety and advertise himself as a “freak” for the sake of making his place on the roster of his prospective Class D ball club in Ottumwa, Iowa more attractive to his potential employer’s designs on attracting crowds to their games.
“Freak”? – We weren’t able to find among any of the handful of stories from those times that there was any other basis for the claim offered by Beckwith at the time – and there was no reference to any two-headed or four-armed players in the game during that era. We only know that even Beckwith’s mother came forth in embarrassment to persuade the Ottumwa club to release her son for all the shame her son’s behavior was bringing to both the Lincoln and Beckwith families. It was the Victorian Era, remember, and some things were not even talked about, let alone put into news print back in that day, so we may never know the whole truth – unless someone among our readership knows more about the situation that we can discern in a morning of Internet research. – And, thanks again, to friend Darrell Pittman for alerting us to this strange case.
As Baseball Reference.com shows, Ma Beckwith’s objections and her son’s apparent lack of playing ability seemed to have proved more than enough to block Warren Beckwith from playing for Ottumwa in 1898, but he did end up on the roster of Sacramento in 1899. In fact, for the entire time that Baseball.Reference gives Warren Beckwith credit for roster status on five teams between 1895-1899, he is only shown as playing in 8 games for Sacramento in 1899 – but with no reportable field results for that year – or any other in his intriguing brief run at professional baseball.
Here are two references to the Beckwith case:
http://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn86071197/1898-04-03/ed-1/seq-11/
Here’s all that Baseball Reference has on the baseball career of Warren Beckwith:
http://www.baseball-reference.com/minors/player.cgi?id=beckwi001war
With no further information available to us on short search notice, we may only assume that his marriage to the partially anonymous granddaughter of Abraham Lincoln came to no long-term good end, but that’s nothing more than prejudicial assumption, based upon what is reported in the newspapers about how the couple started out – and we may be dead wrong to jump to that conclusion. Warren Beckwith lived to age 81 before dying in La Jolla, California in 1955. Maybe he and the former “Miss Lincoln” found a way to beat the odds and “lived happily ever after”.
Here’s a passage from Robert Todd Lincoln’s Wikipedia biography that suggests that there was some continuity in the marriage of his daughter “Jessie” to Warren Beckwith:
Of Robert’s children, Jessie Harlan Lincoln Beckwith (1875–1948) had two children, Mary Lincoln Beckwith (“Peggy” 1898–1975) and Robert (“Bud”) Todd Lincoln Beckwith (1904–1985), neither of whom had children of their own. Robert’s other daughter, Mary Todd Lincoln (“Mamie”) (1869–1938) married Charles Bradley Isham in 1891. They had one son, Lincoln Isham (1892–1971). Lincoln Isham married Leahalma Correa in 1919, but died without children.
The last person known to be of direct Lincoln lineage, Robert’s grandson “Bud” Beckwith, died in 1985.[54]
The link to that entire entry is as follows:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Todd_Lincoln
Have a great Wednesday, everybody and remember this happy thought – this time next week, we will be two days deep into the official Major League Baseball season!
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Thursday, 04/02/15, Update from Darrell Pittman:
Houston Post
April 5, 1898
Houston, Baseball, & Other Musings.
The Pecan Park Eagle 