Authors: Stephen B. Oates
Perhaps nobody in the Lincoln storyânot even Stantonâhas been more vilified than the President's wife. We are all familiar with the hostile portrait of Mary. She was a shrew who offended Lincoln's friends, seldom invited people to dinner, and drove poor Lincoln out of the house with her hectoring. During the Civil War, she reigned as a kind of First Bitch whose shrieks made the White House tremble. William Herndon, who hated Mary Lincoln, began the vicious characterization of her that infests the Lincoln literature and that many Americans still regard as true. Even the most recent Lincoln biography, by Oscar and Lilian Handlin, presents Mary as a hysteric who raged at everybody except her children.
In the White House, as in Springfield, Mary had her problems, but she was no harridan. Modern studies like Ruth Painter Randall's
Mary Lincoln, Biography of a Marriage
, and Justin and Linda Turner's
Mary Todd Lincoln, Her Life and Letters
, have
given us more sympathetic portraits, helping us to understand the sensitive and troubled woman who stood by Lincoln's side throughout the cataclysm of civil war. As First Lady, Mary functioned in a role for which she was eminently qualified. Visitors at White House functions saw a President's wife who was elegantly fashionable, dressed in elaborate gowns cut low enough to display her ample bosom, tending to her guests with impeccable social grace. Ben: Perley Poore, the prominent journalist and Washington observer, thought her the most charming White House hostess since Dolley Madison.
Yet Mary suffered from the war as much as her husband did. Opposition newspapers smeared the First Lady, too, depicting her as a country hussy who belonged in the barnyard rather than the White House. Worse still was the malicious gossip. Because members of her family sided with the Confederacy, grotesque rumors flew about that the First Lady was a rebel spy who handed over state secrets to the enemy. Of course, Mary did no such thing. She loved the Union and thought all Confederates were traitors, as Lincoln did. Yet the rumors persisted, and they hurt her deeply.
What hurt her most, though, was the death of twelve-year-old Willie Lincoln, in February, 1862. Mary's whole life was her husband and children; she had already lost little Eddie Lincoln before the war; and now Willie too was gone. Mary's grief was so devastating that she suffered a nervous breakdown and lay in her room for three endless months, weeping uncontrollably and crying out for Willie to come back to her. Elizabeth Keckley, Mary's Negro seamstress and confidante, did what she could to ease Mary's anguish. And so did her husband, who feared that she might go insane. With their care and help, Mary recovered enough to leave her bedroom. But she gave away all of Willie's toys and anything else that might remind her of him, and she never again set foot in the room where he died.
To escape her “furnace of affliction,” she took flowers to wounded soldiers in Washington's hospitals and found employment for southern blacks who streamed into the capital. Thanks
partly to Elizabeth's influence, Mary developed a deep compassion for “all the oppressed colored people” and urged her husband to help them.
Yet the war drove the Lincolns apart, creating tensions and distances between them (as it would have done to any first couple). Mary still cared deeply for her husband, worried that he wasn't getting enough to eat, fretted about his health and safetyâ“oh God,” she would say to Elizabeth, what if she lost Lincoln, too? She saw so little of him anymore, and he was usually weary and withdrawn when she did see him. Because he spent almost all his waking hours at his job, she turned to a salon of male friends for companionship. She had long suffered from migraine headaches, and they were worse now, blinding her with pain and causing outbursts of temper that filled her with remorse when they were over. Shopping expeditions to New York proved wonderful therapy for her migraines. But she spent so extravagantly that she plunged into debt. By 1864, she owed some $27,000 and confessed to Elizabeth Keckley how terrified she was that Lincoln might find out.
And then there were her jealousies. She had gone through menopause, and it left her more insecure than ever. She could not bear to let Lincoln out of her sight, or to see pretty young women flirting with him at White House receptions. An ugly incident occurred near the end of the war, when the Lincolns visited the front in Virginia. Another woman rode beside Lincoln during a troop review, and Mary flew into a tirade, giving the woman a tongue-lashing that humiliated her husband and made a spectacle of herself. The entire episode left a deep wound between Lincoln and Mary.
By Good Friday, though, they had made amends and had never during the war felt so close and tender to one another. They shared breakfast, planned their outing to Ford's Theater that evening, and took an intimate carriage ride together. Lincoln was in high spirits because the conflict was almost over, and he talked about what he and Mary would do when his second term ended. “We must both be more cheerful in the future,” he told Mary;
“between the war and the loss of our darling Willie, we have both been very miserable.” She developed a headache later and may have had doubts about attending the theater. But Lincoln wanted to go, and Mary relented because she had never “felt so unwilling to be away from him.” In the state box at Ford's, she sat close to her husband and slipped her hand into his.
Booth's derringer destroyed two lives that night. The sudden gunshot, the shock of Lincoln slumping into her arms, the maelstrom of screams, pressing faces, grabbing arms, hysterical weepingâall shattered Mary beyond repair. “Oh, my God,” she wailed as the doctors led her out of the Petersen House, “and have I given my husband to die?” She was so paralyzed from grief that she could not attend Lincoln's funeral, or accompany the special train that bore him and Willie home together, home to Springfield. For more than a month, she lay in her White House bedroom in wild and desolate despair. She would see no one beyond her sons Robert and Tad, her doctor, Lizzy Keckley, and Secretary of War Stanton. While she wept in her room, cried for Lincoln to take her with him, people roamed through the executive mansion at will, slashing curtains and cushions, cutting away pieces of velvet carpet for souvenirs, carting off china, silverware, and furniture. Mary herself had supervised a complete renovation of the White House in 1861, and now vandals were pillaging it, and she hurt too much to care.
On May 23, clad in black, she descended the White House stairs for the last time and climbed into a waiting carriage with her sons and Lizzy. There were no crowds to see Mary off, no speeches or public farewells. Scarcely even a friend came to say goodbye. Unable to go home to Springfield, unable to face the house on Eighth and Jackson, she headed for Chicago by train, taking along sixty cartons filled with her personal possessions. Already vicious rumors were afloat that it was
Mary
who had looted the White Houseâwhy else would it take sixty cartons to move her out? On the train ride west, Mary hardly spoke, her head aching from migraine.
Immersed in a Chicago hotel room, she wrote tear-stained letters to her friends. “Day by day,” she said to Mary Jane Welles, “I miss, my beloved husband more & more, how I am, to pass through life, without
him
who loved us so dearly, it is impossible to say. This morning, I have been looking over & arranging a large package of
his
dear, loving letters to me, many of them written to me, in the âlong ago,' and quite yellow with age, others, more recent &
one
written from his office,
only
the Wednesday before, a few lines, playfully & tenderly worded, notifying, the hour, of the day,
he
would drive with me! Time, my dear Mrs. Welles, has at
length
taught & convinced me, that the loved & idolized being, comes no more, and I must patiently await, the hour, when âGod's love,' shall place me, by
his
side againâwhere there are
no more
partings & no more tears.”
Without him, she felt she “had nothing,
was
nothing.” While private donors helped settle some of her debts, she still owed thousands of dollars to merchants and bankers in the East. She desperately feared that she would sink into poverty and shame, unable to pay her creditors or care for herself and her sons. Lincoln's estate came to around $85,000, which by law went equally to Mary, Robert, and Tad. Because Mary was a woman and this was the Victorian era, an old male friend of Lincoln's took charge of the estate and invested the principal in lucrative government securities. Mary's share of the interest amounted to $1,500 to $1,800 annuallyâa considerable sum in those days. But to Mary it was “a clerk's salary.” How could she ever solve her money worries on such a pittance? How could she ever buy herself a home? She prevailed on congressional friends like Charles Sumner and Simon Cameron to secure a government pension for her. Too, she insisted that she was entitled to her husband's remaining presidential salary. At last, two weeks before Christmas, 1865, the leaders of this “
grateful
nation,” as she bitterly called them, voted her exactly $25,000âone year of Lincoln's salary.
Always impulsive in financial matters, Mary spent most of the money on an expensive home in Chicago, but later had to give
it up because she could not afford to maintain it. Installed in another Chicago hotel, she became increasingly reclusive, embittered about her circumstances, and profoundly hurt. Life had dealt cruel blows to Mary, and she felt at times as though she were out of control in the deep waters encircling her.
By now, Josiah G. Holland's myth-building life of Lincoln had appeared, and Holland had sent Mary a copy. By now, William Herndon, Lincoln's law partner and Mary's
bête noire
, had denounced Holland's book and vowed to write one of his own about the “real” Lincoln. In November, 1866, in Springfield, Herndon gave a public lecture on Lincoln's romantic life, announcing to the world that his partner had loved “Miss Ann Rutledge with all his soul, mind and strength.” Her tragic death, Herndon theorized, had made Lincoln melancholy and fatalistic, had led him into marriage with a woman he never loved, and yet had taken him to supreme heights in politics.
Mary was mortified. “This is the return for all my husband's kindness to this miserable man!” she wrote a Lincoln friend. “Out of pity he took him into his office, when he was almost a hopeless inebriate andâ¦he was only a drudge, in the place.” Now this ingrate was trying to take away her “last comfort,” and she demanded that he be stopped. She called Herndon a “dirty dog” and vowed that if he ever uttered another word he would find his life “not worth living for.” In retaliation, Herndon later branded Mary as a liar given to mad fits, a “she wolf” whose relationship with Lincoln was “unfortunate.” While Lincoln intimates sided with Mary in this war, millions of Americans came to accept Herndon's opinions. Moreover, his story of Ann Rutledge appealed to Victorian fantasies, giving Lincoln's image a romantic new dimension. Thanks to Herndon's promotional skills, a great many Americans embraced it as one of the world's great love stories.
As Ann's star rose, Mary Lincoln fell deeper into adversity. In 1867, in an effort to solve her financial woes, Mary decided to sell her White House wardrobe and contacted a couple of New York brokers to act in her behalf. She even enlisted Elizabeth Keckley in her plan, which called for the brokers to auction the clothes
without saying they were hers, so as to avoid publicity. It turned into a nightmare. The brokers were unscrupulous Barnums who tried to make a fortune at Mary's expense. First they advertised that it was
her
wardrobe for sale and exhibited it for the public to stare at and pick over. When nobody bought anything, the brokers then dreamed up the ghoulish idea of sending Mary's wardrobeâincluding the blood-stained dress she had on when Lincoln diedâon a tour around the country and maybe even to Europe. The scheme fell through, but not before hostile papers like the New York
World
held Mary up for scathing ridicule.
Mary was scandalized. “I pray for death this morning,” she wrote Elizabeth Keckley. “Only my darling Taddie prevents my taking my life.” But the worst was still to come. In 1868, Elizabeth published her memoir,
Behind the Scenes: Thirty Years a Slave and Four Years in the White House
. Though sympathetic to Mary (it was intended to exculpate the former First Lady), Keckley's frank book reported “the old clothes scandal” in detail, revealed the extent of Mary's wartime debts, and even included personal letters Mary had written her. For Mary, this was an outrageous breach of confidence. How could Lizzy betray her like this? Mary was so angry and hurt that in her correspondence she never again mentioned Elizabeth, except to dismiss her once as “
the colored
historian.”
Mary fled to Europe with Tad, hoping to escape the humiliation of the old-clothes episode, the allegations of Herndon, the betrayal of Lizzy. She was ill, too, referring delicately to her troubles of a “womanly nature”âthe gynecological disorder that had plagued her since Tad's birth. Maybe the soothing mineral waters of Europe's spas would ease her weakness of limb, her chills and migraines. In Germany, she put Tad in a boarding school and rented a room for herself in a Frankfurt hotel. A female friend who visited Mary was appalled to find her living in a “small cheerless desolate looking room” with only one window and a single candle for light.
Mary's letters in this period reveal a woman increasingly alone, increasingly shut off from family and friends. While in Frankfurt,
she learned that Stanton had died and she was overwhelmed with sorrow. Then she discovered that $100,000 had been privately raised for Stanton's survivors and that similar help had gone to the family of a deceased Union general. Such generosity for
them
, yet nothing for the widow of the President of the United States, nothing at all.