Tad Lincoln’s Pet Turkey

Abraham Lincoln’s youngest son had a kind heart

It wasn’t until President Truman that turkey growers started to regularly donate birds to the White House for Thanksgiving, and it wasn’t until modern times, starting with Reagan, that every year they were routinely pardoned. Yet the first turkey to receive a stay of execution was the one that belonged to Araham Lincoln’s youngest son.

Thomas “Tad” Lincoln was a mischievous child who was allowed to wander about the White House as he liked. He would interrupt Presidential receptions and meetings and at one point charged admission to meet his father.

He was 10 years old when the turkey his pet. It was 1863, during the Civil War.

President Lincoln had declared a national Thanksgiving that year. It was a solemn occassion, during which Lincoln confessed his sins, asked for divine mercy for the nation, and asked people to help widows and orphans created by the war.

It was also the first time an American President pardoned a turkey. However, this event at Christmas, not Thanksgiving.

The bird in question was given late in the year in anticipation of being eaten for the Lincoln family’s Christmas dinner.

Young Tad Lincoln named the bird Jack and the two became inseparable friends. It followed him around the White House grounds both on and off a leash.

When Christmas Eve came and Tad found out that Jack was to be killed, he became very upset. He managed to get the cooks to hold off the turkey’s execution until he’d talked to his father. He interrupted a Cabinet meeting to do so.

Apparently he told the President, “He’s a good turkey and I don’t want him killed.” His father reasoned with him that the bird had been given so that it could be eaten. However, Tad was having none of that.

He argued that the bird had the right to live. Persuaded, Lincoln wrote a reprieve for the turkey.

An elated Tad ran back to the kitchen and presented the “stay of execution” for Jack.

This was not the only time the boy’s kindness became apparent. Another incident occured when a woman whose husband was in prison went up to him crying because her children were hungry. Moved, the boy ran to his father for help. Lincoln pardoned the man. When Tad told the woman, they both apparently cried with joy.

Later, when Lincoln died, one of his friends, an attorney from Illinois came to visit the family to pay his respects. According to the man’s daughter, her father, John Albert Jones, encountered Tad, who ran up to him and asked if he would like something of his father’s.

“Yes Tad, but of no value,” Jones apparently said.

So Tad gave him the last two pens Lincoln had used.

These episodes show Tad Lincoln’s kindness as well as his strong convictions. If he decided to do something, he was unstoppable. If he had grown to maturity, who knows what he might have achieved.

Unfortunately, he died in 1875, when he was only 18 years old.

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