A Treasury of Great American Scandals (3 page)

George, desperate to make his own way in the world, failed miserably at almost everything he tried, from various business endeavors to a stint in the Massachusetts legislature. If the seriously depressed man hadn't fully grasped that he was a failure, his dad was always there to remind him. John Quincy badgered George constantly with threats and even public humiliation. He threw in a little guilt, too. Did George not know, his father inquired once in a letter, “how much of the comfort of my future life depends upon your conduct?”

Embarking on an all-out effort to steer George in the direction he wanted, John Quincy announced he would be returning to Massachusetts at the end of his presidential term in 1829 to take total control over his lost son's life. George, dreading the prospect, particularly as he realized that his parents would discover and condemn the illegitimate child he had conceived with a servant, flung himself into Long Island Sound and drowned.

I Now Pronounce You Miserable

 

 

 

Sam Houston, the hero of San Jacinto, was already a well-respected statesman when he married beautiful Eliza Allen in 1829. The marriage was not a good one. It lasted only eleven weeks, and its collapse nearly destroyed his career.

Raised on the Tennessee frontier, Houston was inspired early by the epic tales of
The Iliad.
He quit school at age sixteen and went to live for years among the Cherokee Indians. He fought the Creeks with distinction during the War of 1812, sustaining severe wounds, then became a major general in the Tennessee militia. He also served two terms in Congress and was elected governor. Despite all this, Houston's hero and mentor, Andrew Jackson—soon to become the seventh president—felt Sam's future career would be impeded if he remained a hard-livin' bachelor. Plain folks did not care much for playboys. Something of a matchmaker, Old Hickory insisted that his protégé settle down to the steadying influence of a wife and family.

Governor Houston obediently set his sights on Eliza, twenty, daughter of a Tennessee aristocrat. The two were married in a candlelight ceremony at the Allens' home on January 22, 1829. The public loved this marriage; it was proof at last that their fiery governor was a civilized man. The guests marveled at the beautiful bride, who gazed lovingly upon the handsome groom sixteen years her senior. The newlyweds then spent the night in a specially prepared honeymoon suite. What exactly happened that night is unknown. But it was not good, not good at all. The next day Eliza dutifully accompanied her husband to Nashville as Tennessee's new First Lady. Traveling on horseback, the couple stopped for the night at the home of Martha Martin. The next morning Eliza stood at a window watching her new husband in a snowball fight with the Martin children. Martha Martin remarked jovially that Eliza should go out and help the governor, as the children seemed to be getting the best of him. She later recalled Eliza's reaction. “Looking seriously at me, Mrs. Houston said: ‘I wish they would kill him.' I looked up, astonished to hear such a remark from a bride of not yet forty-eight hours, when she repeated in the same voice, ‘Yes, I wish from the bottom of my heart that they would kill him.' ”

What had happened? Theories abound. One rumor handed down over the years has it that the worldly and promiscuous Houston tried to persuade the sheltered and virginal Eliza to participate in some of the exotic sexual positions he had picked up from the Cherokee and at various New Orleans bordellos. But biographer Marshall De Bruhl offers the most plausible explanation: Eliza was most likely revolted by the sight of her new husband's body, which was marred by the festering wounds he had suffered fighting the Creek Indians. An arrow had pierced his upper thigh, causing enormous damage, while two lead rifle balls had become embedded in his shoulder. The gunshot wounds never healed properly, covering his shoulder with great purple and red scars. Contemporary biographer C. Edwards Lester noted that “no surgical skill has ever been able to close up [the thigh] wound. It has discharged every day for thirty years.”

In less than three months, Eliza left Nashville and went home. Houston was faced with total ruin. The public saw this sudden breakup as a betrayal. Was their governor some beast whose appetites drove a chaste young woman from his bed? Was he a debaucher? In several Tennessee towns, he was burned in effigy. Determined to reason with his wife, Houston rode to the Allen plantation and demanded to see her. An aunt of Eliza's witnessed him on his knees and in tears, begging “with all his dramatic force” for her to come back to him. Eliza refused, and the dejected man returned to Nashville.

The failed marriage forced his resignation as governor, after which he spiraled into an exile of hard drinking and aimless wandering. Some reported seeing him reeling through the streets, dressed only in a calfskin. In 1832, though, he wandered into the republic of Texas, where he went on to become its first president, a renowned patriot, a military hero, and defender of the Union. Twice more he married, with substantially greater success: He fathered eight children. But to his dying day, he never disclosed what terrible thing had happened on his first wedding night. Nor did Eliza.

Dishonor Thy Mother

 

 

 

 

Few who have studied the life of Mary Todd Lincoln would dispute that she could be, at times, a roaring pain in the rear. Haughty and high-strung, this nineteenth-century First Lady alienated half the people she encountered. “This woman was to me a terror,” said William H. Herndon, describing Mrs. Lincoln as “imperious, proud, aristocratic . . . and bitter.”

Abraham Lincoln himself recognized that some people had a strong aversion to his wife. In one letter he wrote her while he was serving in Washington as a congressman from Illinois and living in a local boardinghouse, he sent “the love in the house with whom you were on decided good terms—the others say nothing.” And though Honest Abe was devoted to his wife, she sometimes drove him nuts as well. Her lavish tastes and obsessive spending were always unpleasant issues between them, as were her occasional fits of fury. During one such episode early in their marriage, Mary Lincoln was seen chasing her husband down the street with a butcher knife. On another occasion, an officer recorded her rage when she was inadvertently left out of a military review toward the end of the Civil War: “Mrs. Lincoln repeatedly attacked her husband in the presence of officers. . . . He bore it as Christ might have done with an expression of pain and sadness that cut one to the heart, but with supreme calmness and dignity. He called her mother, with his old-time plainness. He pleaded with eyes and tones, till she turned on him like a tigress and then he walked away hiding that noble ugly face so that we might not catch the full expression of its misery.”

Mary Lincoln's histrionic tendencies grew more pronounced as she aged, but considering the horrors she faced in her life—the assassination of her husband and the untimely deaths of three children among them—her sometimes bizarre behavior was understandable. It certainly did not merit the cruel fate to which her only surviving son consigned her.

Rigid and uptight, Robert Lincoln was nothing like his more homespun dad, especially when it came to Mary Lincoln. While the president had indulged her many quirks, including her attempts to commune with her dead children through mediums, Robert was appalled by his mom. It wasn't so much that she smothered him or fought with his wife. It wasn't even her sometimes embarrassing eccentricities, though they did mortify him. It was her spending. Mary Lincoln was extravagant to the extreme, and Robert did not like that at all. Judging by the way he went about having her committed, a cynic might say he feared for his inheritance.

It was an ambush. On the morning of May 19, 1875, three men arrived unexpectedly at the Chicago hotel where Mrs. Lincoln had taken a room. They told her that she would have to accompany them immediately to the local courthouse, where a jury was waiting to judge her sanity. One of the men was Leonard Swett, a Chicago lawyer who had nominated her husband for president in 1860. Now he was representing her son, who had charged her with lunacy. The two other men were uniformed officers, there to use force if necessary.

“Your friends, with great unanimity, have come to the conclusion that the troubles you have been called to pass through have been too much and have produced mental illness,” Swett told her. Astonished, Mrs. Lincoln replied, “If you mean to say I am crazy—I am much obliged to you but I am absolutely able to take care of myself. Where is my son Robert?” At this point the poor woman had no idea that her son Robert had orchestrated the ordeal she was now facing. She would find out soon enough when he was presented as the star witness against her.

Swett informed Mrs. Lincoln that six doctors had already diagnosed insanity, and that it would be best if she came along quietly. Of course, not having been personally examined by any of these doctors, she protested. “They know nothing of me,” she said. “What does this mean?” It meant that Robert Lincoln had hired the doctors to testify against his mother. They were part of a long roster of witnesses he had assembled and paid off to help make his case, and they were now waiting at the courthouse to pass judgment on the famous widow.

Realizing that Mrs. Lincoln would not easily be coaxed out of her room, Swett grew firmer. “I told her there were two carriages downstairs,” he recounted, “one of them was mine and the other belonged to the officers, and unless she yielded to me I either had to seize her forcibly myself or turn her over to the officers, who might handcuff her if necessary and certainly would take her to court.” Upset and frightened, Mary Lincoln lashed out at Swett, advising him that he ought to attend to his own wife, a longtime invalid, and leave her alone. “I have heard some stories on that subject about [your wife],” she snapped, “and you my husband's friend, you would take me and lock me up in an asylum.” Then, according to Swett, she threw up her hands and tearfully “prayed to the Lord and called upon her husband to release her and drive me away.” Finally, Mrs. Lincoln yielded and agreed to accompany Swett peacefully. She did, however, refuse any of his assistance in getting into the carriage. “I ride with you from compulsion,” she said, “but I beg you not to touch me.”

Arriving at the courthouse a few moments later, the former First Lady was ushered into a courtroom packed with people eager to witness the unfolding spectacle. But the proceedings were briefly delayed when Isaac Arnold, another Chicago lawyer and friend of Lincoln's, suddenly declined to serve as Mrs. Lincoln's defense attorney. He had been retained by Robert's camp as a reliable old boy who would not thwart their weak case by mounting an effective defense of the client they had assigned to him. Outraged by his defection, Swett confronted Arnold. “You will put into her head that she can get some mischievous lawyer to make and defend her,” he hissed. “Do your duty.” Although the reason for Arnold's decision to withdraw from the case remains clouded—perhaps a pang of conscience?—he eventually came around, and the case against Mary Lincoln proceeded in this kangaroo court.

Seventeen witnesses were produced by the prosecution, including the expert doctors who had never examined Mrs. Lincoln, but who had concluded she was fit for the asylum after hearing her symptoms described to them by Robert Lincoln and his lawyers. The court also heard from various hotel employees, including one housekeeper who proffered the damning testimony that “Mrs. Lincoln's manner was nervous and excitable,” and a waiter who testified that she appeared “carelessly dressed and repeated ‘I am afraid, I am afraid.' ” A number of salesclerks also were produced to show how dangerously extravagant she was. One of them described her efforts to “beat down” the price he was charging for gloves and handkerchiefs, and concluded she was “crazy.” Finally there was Robert Lincoln himself. “I have no doubt my mother is insane,” he told the court. “She has long been a source of great anxiety to me. She has no home and no reason to make those purchases.”

The defense rested without ever raising an objection or offering a witness of its own. Robert Lincoln would not have stood for that. While the jury retired to consider the evidence, he approached his mother and tried to take her hand. Rejecting the transparent gesture, Mary Lincoln made her only statement of the day: “Oh, Robert, to think that my son would do this to me.” Ten minutes later, the all-male jury was back to deliver their verdict: insane.

The day after her trial, Mary Lincoln was sent to Bellevue Place, a private asylum outside Chicago. She would spend all her time there trying to get out, while Robert worked every bit as hard to keep her in. He was furious when his maternal aunt Elizabeth offered Mary sanctuary in her Springfield home. He also complained loudly of “an extraordinary interference” by Mrs. Lincoln's two greatest advocates, Judge James B. Bradwell and his wife, Myra. The couple, whom Robert condemned as “pests and nuisances,” engineered her release through a public campaign and the threat of an open hearing that would show the world just how sane she really was.

Three months after entering Bellevue Place, Mary Lincoln was released. But by order of the court that had convicted her, Robert still had control over her movements and possessions for at least one year, a fact that rankled his mother no end. “To her proud spirit it is very galling awaiting the time when right of person and property will be restored to her,” Robert's aunt Elizabeth wrote to him. The son had no intention of allowing more spending sprees, however, and kept a tight grip on his mother's purse. It was only after she successfully petitioned the court that her money was released to her. In a letter to her “monster of mankind son,” brimming with resentment and lacking even a cordial salutation, Mary Lincoln demanded the return of everything she had ever given him: