With Willie, Lincoln had known the special pleasure that a parent derives from having a child who is a near-clone. The boy’s tutor thought that the lad “was the exact counterpart of his father,” and the poet and editor Nathaniel P. Willis, a fixture in Mrs. Lincoln’s White House circle, agreed that Willie “faithfully resembled his father” in all important respects. A neighbor in Springfield recollected that Willie “was the true picture of Mr. Lincoln, in every way, even to carrying his head slightly inclined toward his left shoulder.” So close were they that the president could read Willie’s mind. One day at breakfast in the White House, Willie’s emotional brother Tad broke out crying because soldiers to whom he had given religious tracts mocked him. When paternal hugs and kisses failed to comfort the boy, Willie set his mind to devise some way to ease Tad’s hurt feelings. Willie silently thought for a long while, then suddenly looked up with a smile at his father, who exclaimed: “There! you have it now, my boy, have you not?” Turning to a guest, Lincoln remarked: “I know every step of the process by which that boy arrived at his satisfactory solution of the question before him, as it is by just such slow methods I attain results.”
Source: Abraham Lincoln ∶ A Life ▫𓂃
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