Lincoln's Family Tree Sparse But Fascinating To Scholars -- Bloodline Lost With Death Of Great-Grandson

For all the odd fruit borne on family trees - of English royalty or the Kennedys - there is one very sparse tree that has engaged scholars and irritated history buffs for years: Abraham Lincoln's.

Historian Michael Beschloss, author of several books on the presidency, including "The Crisis Years: Kennedy and Khrushchev," recently published a story on the Lincoln family tree in The New Yorker. It detailed how Lincoln's bloodline was forever lost when the last heir, Abe's great-grandson, Robert Todd Lincoln Beckwith, died on Christmas Eve in 1985.

So how did the family of our most revered president manage to disappear within 120 years of Lincoln's death?

It's a story filled with heirs both proud and ashamed of their heritage, with a novel's worth of untimely deaths, insanity, lawsuits, claims of adultery, fake heirs and even a genetic disease.

That a direct descendant would have stood to win a $3 million inheritance - which has since gone to charity - only makes the story that much more the stuff of a made-for-TV movie.

"Researching the Lincolns confirmed two things for me that I had long suspected," Beschloss says from his office in Washington.

"One, that it is very difficult to be the descendant of a great leader - there is just too much extra pressure placed upon them than there is upon the descendants of mere mortals. And two, that America's yearning for a political dynasty within a family is romantic but not rational."

He cites the public's fascination with John F. Kennedy Jr. as one example.

Complicated lineage

In Lincoln's case, however, his progeny was hardly the stuff of which dynasties are made.

The story starts simply enough with the gaunt president, the son of Thomas and Nancy Lincoln. His one brother died in infancy, and his sister died in childbirth. But Lincoln's own lineage is complicated and controversial.

Lincoln's former law partner and biographer, William Herndon, wrote that he was convinced that Lincoln was fathered not by Thomas but possibly by John Calhoun, the champion of states' rights.

Herndon also speculates somewhat wildly in the biography that Lincoln's true father might also have been Samuel Davis, father of Jefferson Davis, president of the Confederacy. Could the two men who would grow up to be warring presidents actually have been half-brothers? It's the sort of twist one might find in John Jakes' novels.

Lincoln and his wife, Mary Todd, had four sons, but three died young - Edward at age 3, Willie at age 11 and Tad at age 18. The youngest son, Robert Todd, lived to 82.

Robert Todd - a Harvard-educated lawyer, banker and president of Pullman Palace Car Co. - married Mary Harlan and had three children, daughters Mary and Jessie and son Abraham II.

Throughout his life, Robert Todd distanced himself from his father's roots, denying that Abe Lincoln ever lived in a log cabin and, in 1875, having his mother, Mary Todd, placed in an insane asylum for charges that boiled down to compulsive shopping.

If Robert Todd thought locking up Grandma might somehow improve the lot of his own descendants, he was wrong. Son Abraham died at age 16 of blood poisoning.

"There is a great overlap of tragedy that played out through the generations of the Lincolns," Beschloss says. "That, coupled with the idea that many people consider Lincoln our greatest president ever and the fact that he was also a man assassinated at the age of 56 and had a widow with mental problems is what makes it all so fascinating."

Daughter Jessie married Warren Wallace Beckwith and bore a daughter, Mary Lincoln Beckwith (nicknamed Peggy), and a son, the aforementioned Robert Todd Lincoln Beckwith.

Robert Todd's other daughter, Mary, bore one child, Lincoln Isham. And with these three children, the bloodline ended.

Lincoln Isham married but never had children. Peggy, who was rumored to be a lesbian because she smoked cigars and wore men's trousers, scoffed at the legend of Lincoln and also never married or gave birth. Robert Todd Lincoln Beckwith married three times but bore no heirs.

Or, at least, that's what Beckwith said. His second wife claimed otherwise.

At the age of 25, Beckwith had married Hazel Holland Wilson, an older widow with two children. Though the couple were married until Hazel's death 35 years later, they had no children together.

Three years after Hazel's death, Beckwith, then 63, married Annemarie Hoffman, a 27-year-old German woman. The next year, she gave birth to a son.

The part that complicates the whole affair, however, is that Beckwith had had a vasectomy with a prostatectomy six years earlier.

Divorce proceedings began, and by the time the boy, Timothy Lincoln Beckwith, turned 7, a court trial had begun to prove or disprove his Lincoln lineage.

The case received widespread publicity in 1976, with talk of the "more than $1 million" the boy stood to inherit.

Annemarie refused to allow blood tests on herself and her son, so Beckwith's lawyers produced doctors to vouch for their patient's sterility.

"Adulterous relationship"

In September 1976, Judge Joseph M.F. Ryan Jr. of the District of Columbia Superior Court granted the divorce and ruled that the child was the product of an "adulterous relationship."

Whether the child could still seek the Lincoln fortune, however, would have to be tried in another case, the judge said.

"I believe that, as Beckwith came to the end of his life, he felt very sorry and depressed that he had no heirs," Beschloss says. "I think he was regretful that the bloodline was coming to an end."

In 1985, when Beckwith died, the three charities that were to inherit the $3 million, the American Red Cross, Iowa Wesleyan College and the First Church of Christ, Scientist, became edgy.

The only thing standing in the way of the money distribution was the order that no one else claim descendancy.

The charities found 17-year-old Timothy Beckwith living in the United States with his remarried mother and made him an offer that Beschloss puts at more than $1 million. The young Beckwith accepted, leaving him an heir to Lincoln's bucks if not his blood.

Even with all chapters supposedly closed and the money dispersed, the speculation continues.

His son Tad did live to be a rowdy 18, after all. Who's to say he didn't meet someone during his last three years of life spent in Europe? The same goes for grandson Abraham II, who also spent his final teen years in Europe.

And, of course, there is Lincoln's son Robert Todd, who lived to be 82. He was married and claimed three children, but it would hardly be shocking to find that a millionaire, aristocratic lawyer might have had affairs, complete with illegitimate children.

In light of that, perhaps the real mystery is why more people haven't come forward claiming to be a chip off the old Lincoln Log.