“I Am Now a Vermont Farmer”: Robert Lincoln, Labor, and the Practice of Empathy

“I am now a Vermont farmer! and beginning to enjoy life.”

Robert Todd Lincoln wrote these words with a lightness that is easy to love. After a life marked by war, grief, public responsibility, professional success, and the extraordinary burden of being Abraham Lincoln’s son, he found pleasure in the rhythms of Vermont: animals, gardens, seasons, and land.

There is something almost poignant in the sentence. Robert had spent much of his life in in positions he had not entirely chosen--as the son of a president, a witness to war and assassination, Secretary of War, diplomat, lawyer, and eventually president of the Pullman Company. Perhaps “I am now a Vermont farmer” was, in part, a sigh of relief—a declaration that, finally, he could live at a more human scale.

Labor Day invites us to consider the complexity of Robert’s life and labor and the ways they intersected with the lives and labor of others. It is an especially rich consideration given that Robert—the son of the Great Emancipator—served as chief legal counsel to the Pullman Company during the violent Pullman Strike of 1894, the very conflict that helped prompt President Grover Cleveland to establish Labor Day as a national holiday.

The strike began when Pullman workers, facing wage reductions during a severe depression while rents in the company town remained high, walked off the job. The boycott spread across the country. Federal troops were sent to Chicago. The strike ended in defeat for the workers, accompanied by violence, deaths, and enormous disruption.

The Pullman story and its relationship to Robert Lincoln becomes still more complicated when we consider the porters themselves.

After the Civil War, George Pullman recruited formerly enslaved Black men, offering employment that provided many with one of the few avenues available to steady work, travel, and a measure of economic independence. Yet the work came with profound inequities: extraordinarily long hours, low wages, dependence on tips, and persistent racism.

In 1925, A. Philip Randolph helped organize the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters. After twelve years of struggle, the union was recognized by the Pullman Company in 1937. The porters’ fight for dignity and collective power became an important chapter in both the history of organized labor and the long African American struggle for equality.

The stories of Robert Lincoln and the Pullman porters remind us of something larger:

History is populated not by symbols, but by people.

Robert was not simply the president of Pullman. He was a son who lost his brothers and father, a public servant, a husband and father who lost a son. His privilege was real; he inherited a complicated world and made consequential choices within it. Yet the burdens he carried were also real. To recognize one is not to diminish the other. 

The porters were not simply workers. They were fathers and sons, husbands and neighbors, men seeking opportunity in a society that sharply restricted their choices. They endured poverty and indignity, but they also organized. They were constrained by history, but they helped change it.

To see people in their fullness is not to excuse injustice. It is to understand it more completely.

People can be privileged and burdened. Systems can offer opportunity while perpetuating inequality. Individuals can inherit circumstances they did not create and still bear responsibility for what they do within them.

Complexity does not diminish moral judgment. It makes moral judgment more serious. And empathy does not require absolution. It requires that we see the whole human being.

At Hildene, this history is not abstract. It sits on rails beside the main drive.

Our Pullman car is easy to experience as a beautiful artifact—a reminder of an age of elegant travel and of Robert Lincoln's remarkable life. But perhaps we should resist seeing it merely as a relic. We might instead see it as an invitation.

A railroad car can carry us somewhere.

This one can carry us into questions of labor, race, wealth, privilege, grief, responsibility, and aspiration. But perhaps its most important invitation is simpler:

Can we learn to see one another in our fullness?

Can we hold Robert’s privilege, suffering, and choices in the same frame? Can we acknowledge the opportunities Pullman employment offered Black men while confronting the racism they endured? Can we recognize that the people who shaped our institutions were, like us, complicated mixtures of circumstance and character, limitation and courage, fear, ambition, and hope?

On Labor Day, we honor work and the people who do it. We can also honor the more difficult work of seeing the humanity of people whose lives are different from our own.

All deserve to be seen not simply as symbols, but as human beings.

If we can learn to see the fullness in them, perhaps we can become more capable of seeing it in ourselves—and in one another—a critical means of growth.

And if, for that matter, we can learn to better understand the complexities of the past, perhaps we will be better equipped to navigate complexity in our own lives and communities, and thus, make wiser choices as we strive, in Abraham Lincoln's words, toward a more perfect union.

The past, at its best, does not simply tell us who to admire or condemn.

It teaches us how to look more carefully, how to understand one another with a little more empathy, and, ultimately, how to shape the choices before us.