Mary Todd Lincoln once said she wished she could forget herself. She never could. Three of her four children died before reaching adulthood, and she was holding her husband’s hand when an assassin’s bullet destroyed her world. James Cornelius, curator of the Lincoln collection at the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library in Springfield, Illinois, put it plainly: she had the most tragic public life in American history.
She was born Mary Ann Todd on December 13, 1818, in Lexington, Kentucky, the third and youngest daughter of Robert Smith Todd and Eliza Parker Todd. Her parents named her Mary Ann to honor her mother’s only sister. But early loss shaped her. Around the time she turned one, she was abruptly weaned when a baby brother arrived.
Another brother was born when she was four and died soon after. Then a sister, Ann, was born, and at five the girl began to be called Mary Todd to avoid confusion. At six and a half, her mother died. At seven, her father remarried, and Mary Todd lost something else: her father’s attention.
The second marriage produced nine more children, making Mary one of thirteen. Her stepmother was unfriendly, her father was busy, and at nearly nine years old Mary Todd was sent to a female academy for girls. It was an opportunity, but she read it as abandonment. In 1832 the family moved to an elegant fourteen-room house at 578 West Main Street in Lexington, where the Todd family kept one slave per family member.
Then her oldest and closest sister, Elizabeth, married and moved to Illinois. More loss. At school and away from home, Mary felt isolated, and she developed what one observer later described as an insatiable lust for notoriety. The enslaved woman Sally, her most constant adult presence in those years, taught her that the dead could return to comfort those left behind.
As a young woman she was pretty and plump, with ruddy cheeks, blue eyes, and long lashes. She danced well and talked superbly, perhaps too much so for a proper Southern belle. She could be picky, she mimicked others, and that cost her friends. In 1837, at eighteen, she moved to Springfield, Illinois, where two older sisters lived.
The move did not go well, and she went home that fall. She returned to Springfield in June 1839 when another sister married and settled there. Elizabeth took her in, and Mary Todd remained in Springfield for the next twenty-two years. Among the town’s twenty-two hundred residents was a new law partner of her cousin John Todd Stewart, a man who had moved from New Salem in April 1837.
He was lonely. Mary Todd was not, and she was known to be a handful. As one person put it, Mary could make a bishop forget his prayers. The two were aware of one another sometime in 1839, though Mary continued seeing others, including attorney and state legislator Edwin Webb and the five-foot-four, one-hundred-eighty-pound Stephen A.
Douglas. Mary knew what she wanted: a good man with a hand for position, fame, and power, someone who would take her to the theater. In 1840 the friendship between Mary Todd and Abraham Lincoln evolved into courtship, and then two years of wooing. Elizabeth tried to break them up, thinking Lincoln primitive.
The two seemed worlds apart. Mary Todd was aristocratic; Lincoln was plebeian. She was fashionable; he was rustic and scruffy. She was a talker; he listened.
She was a dancer; he wanted to dance with her, and according to Mary Todd, he did it in the worst way. She craved attention; he withdrew. She held grudges and rehearsed her anger; Lincoln was liked by almost everyone. On New Year’s Day 1841, Lincoln was late for a party they were to attend together.
Mary Todd went ahead, and when he arrived he found her flirting with attorney Edwin Webb. Angry, Lincoln ended the relationship. Mary Todd quipped, go and never come back. Lincoln later called it the fatal first.
He was so distraught that he missed six straight days of the Illinois legislature, and a friend removed his razor. He left for Louisville on business, and the absence helped Mary Todd see beyond his roughness. She found she missed him. Advocates brought them back together.
They married one rainy night, November 4, 1842, in the home of Mary Todd’s sister Elizabeth, who had tried so hard to keep them apart. His ring to her was inscribed, love is eternal. About thirty friends and relatives attended; both sets of parents were absent. They began their married life in a boarding house costing eight dollars a week.
Lincoln’s legal duties took him away for weeks at a time on the circuit, but that did not hinder their plans. Mary was immediately in the family way. On August 1, 1843, nine months minus three days after the wedding, Robert Todd Lincoln was born, named for her father. Mary named all their children, and she nursed every one for as long as two years.
In May 1844, the growing family moved to the corner of Eighth and Jackson in Springfield, paying twelve hundred dollars for a one-story, five-room house. A second floor was completed in 1856 for thirteen hundred dollars. From day one, the Lincolns had separate bedrooms, and from day one, Mary Todd ruled the house. In March 1846, Edward Baker Lincoln was born.
Mary was a caring mother, though many thought she and Lincoln were far too lenient with their children, some of whom were called brats. Eddie, as he was known, died on February 1, 1850, after fifty-two days of pulmonary tuberculosis. Only the summer before, Mary Todd had lost her father to cholera. Two deaths made her distraught and angry, and she refused to accept the reality.
But in December 1850, William Wallace Lincoln was born, and he brought her a renewed sense of reality and responsibility. In April 1853, Thomas arrived, called Tad, short for tadpole. At sixteen, Robert left for Harvard, despite having failed fifteen of sixteen entrance exams. Meanwhile, Lincoln rode the Eighth Illinois circuit.
Some six hundred letters between the Lincolns survive, and from them we know she pushed him politically. If someone knocked on the front door, her voice would come from the second floor: business or politics. In 1846, Lincoln was elected as a Whig to Congress, and Mary Todd was intent on going with him. Of 239 congressmen, only 73 wives accompanied their husbands.
Mary Todd Lincoln was going to be one of them. She took all three boys. In Washington, Lincoln drew attention when he opposed the Mexican War, asking for the exact spot where American blood had been shed on American soil. Opponents called him Spotty Lincoln, which contributed to his failure to be reelected.
Mary may have contributed too, by linking her husband’s supporters to friendship: fail at one, fail at the other. In 1856, Lincoln received 110 votes for the vice presidency at the Republican convention, though he was not nominated. In 1858 he ran against Stephen A. Douglas for the United States Senate.
From August 12 to October 30, Lincoln made sixty-three speeches, seven of them during their famous debates. Despite it all, the state senate voted 46 to 52 in favor of Douglas. Exhausted and disappointed, Mary coped as she often did: she shopped. Two years later, Lincoln was nominated for the presidency.
When the Republicans carried Pennsylvania, her elated husband said, Mary, Mary, we are elected. But with the victory she lost something: she no longer held the same preeminence in her husband’s ear. This was a dangerous time, near Civil War. Letters arrived with skulls and crossbones.
Mary Todd Lincoln’s level of participation as first lady was without precedent. Earlier first ladies had resisted the role. Not Mary Todd. It began March 4, 1861, when thirty thousand braved a raw and windy Inauguration Day.
At the ball, she entered on the arm of Stephen A. Douglas, who had lost the presidency to her husband. She planned to be visible, and she needed the trappings to do it in style. She pushed for and received a four-year, twenty-thousand-dollar allowance to refurbish the thirty-one-room Executive Mansion.
Eleven trips were made just to buy furnishings. Chinese and French wallpaper accounted for over half the allotment, and the money ran out in less than a year. Not deterred, she mastered the art of shifting allocations. As first lady she had to dress properly.
She shocked many by choosing dresses that bared her arms and neck, to show off her expensive jewelry. She loved pearls and jasmine, often weaving flowers into her hair. Some thought her a garden in motion. By early 1862 she had sixteen new dresses and hefty bills, and she looked for ways to have somebody else pay for them.
She had an interesting shopping strategy: the more she owed a merchant, the more she shopped with him, to keep the bill from being called in. She refused to wear browns, grays, or black, preferring canary, magenta, and bold blue. Many were appalled. During a time of Civil War, they thought, she should be frugal and understated.
After one gathering, a lady blurted that Mary had her bosom on exhibition and a flower pot on her head. Through it all, Lincoln was well trained, showering her with compliments. She fought to host the first diplomatic dinner, traditionally hosted by the Secretary of State, and won. After the gathering she sent the nine-hundred-dollar bill from a New York caterer to Secretary of State William Seward.
Seward and his staff simply called her the Hellcat. She loved having her image captured, almost all of it by the famous photographer Matthew Brady. She demanded that images she did not select be destroyed. Her vanity made her a perfect accomplice for patronage.
Many gave her gifts hoping for favor with the president, and she tried to sway her husband’s decisions, causing nasty arguments. When she pushed to get a relative a position, no-nonsense Secretary of War Edwin Stanton took her note, tore it up, and marched to the Executive Mansion to berate her. On February 5, 1862, the Lincolns threw a party to restore sagging morale. Five hundred guests were invited, and a lavish meal was served from midnight to 3:00 a.
m. , costing eleven thousand dollars. For Mary it was a success. Yet upstairs, young Willie, age eleven, was running a high fever.
Two weeks later, on February 20, at 5:30 a. m. , he died, likely of typhoid fever. Mary Todd’s favorite son was laid out in the Green Room, a room she refused to enter afterward.
Once again she had been abandoned: mother, brother, father, stepmother, and now a second son. She stayed in bed for three weeks. The story goes that Lincoln finally led her to a window, parted the curtains, and said, Mother, do you see that large white building on the hill yonder? Try and control your grief, or it will drive you mad, and we may have to send you there.
Lincoln was terribly affected too. Every Thursday he locked himself in Willie’s room. Mary Todd went into high mourning for a year, though the social manual called for six months. Black gave way to lavender, gray, then somber purple.
She railed against God’s injustice. She began to see spiritualists, remembering what the enslaved woman Sally had told her: the departed could return. There were as many as eight séances in the Executive Mansion. More grief followed.
Two months after Willie’s death, her Confederate half-brother Sam was killed. Another half-brother, David, was mortally wounded at Vicksburg. Another, Alec, died in the fall of 1863. At Chickamauga, the husband of her younger half-sister, Confederate Brigadier General Benjamin Hardin Helm, was killed.
These losses affected not only Mary’s stability but her marriage. The relationship became more businesslike, less passionate. In 1864, rumors surfaced that the Democrats were going to expose her spending. Despite the threat, Lincoln was reelected.
Mary was elated yet wary, for it always seemed that bad fortune followed good. At the second inaugural ball, she chose Massachusetts Senator Charles Sumner to escort her into the Grand Ballroom and refused to allow Lincoln to have an escort, an example of her monstrous jealousy. On March 24, 1865, at City Point near Petersburg, Virginia, she was late for a military review. When she finally arrived, she saw her husband on horseback conducting the review with Major General E.
O. C. Ord’s wife mounted beside him. Approaching in a rage, she leaped from her ambulance wagon and physically attacked the commander-in-chief in front of the Army of the Potomac’s high command.
It was dreadfully painful to watch. She then demanded that Ord be relieved of command. He was not. To celebrate Lee’s surrender at Appomattox, Mrs.
Lincoln wanted to go to Ford’s Theater, where the one-thousandth presentation of Our American Cousin was featured. The Grants were invited but declined, as did others. Socialite Clara Harris and her fiancé, Major Henry Rathbone, accepted. The party of four had a vantage from boxes 7 and 8.
It was there, around 10:15 on the evening of April 14, 1865, that Mary Todd Lincoln’s fragile world was shattered. After Booth’s fatal shot, she spent nine agonizing hours waiting for her husband to die. Once every hour she left the front parlor of the Petersen House, where the president had been taken, made her way to the small room where he was slipping away, and tried to kiss him into consciousness. The kisses eventually gave way to overpowering emotion.
After one scream, Edwin Stanton stated firmly: keep that woman out of here. When Vice President Andrew Johnson tried to enter the room, he was asked to leave. Mary hated him and made it clear that the sight of him, the new president, disturbed her greatly. She never got over the night of April 14–15.
Over the next seventeen years, she wore anything other than mourning apparel only once, for her son Tad’s birthday. For the next forty days after Lincoln’s death she remained in bed, racked with migraines, suffering from weak limbs, swollen eyes, back pain, and congestion. First Lady Jackie Kennedy remained in the White House for ten days after John F. Kennedy’s assassination.
Mary Todd Lincoln lingered for forty. She left Washington at the very hour of the planned Grand Military Review on May 23, 1865. She argued with the Lincoln Monument Association. Then she moved to Chicago, where she was consumed by the assassination.
Merchants called in her debts, estimated at ten thousand dollars. To meet them, she wrote what one called begging letters and lobbied Congress for her husband’s prorated second-term salary. She received $22,200, but Lincoln had left no will. His lifelong friend David Davis, her personal enemy, handled the estate and decided her share would be one third.
Another of Lincoln’s friends, William Herndon, dropped another bomb in November 1866 when he stated that Ann Rutledge of New Salem was Lincoln’s only love, and that for the last twenty-three years Lincoln had no joy, living in domestic hell. To raise money, in September 1867 Mary Todd traveled to New York City to sell her wardrobe in a public showing. One newspaper called it Mrs. Lincoln’s secondhand clothing sale.
Little was sold, little was pledged. Many thought the clothes tainted. Her critics called her a mercenary prostitute. In November 1867 she received $36,000 from the estate, but the timing doomed any more potential sales.
She believed her oldest son Robert deliberately timed the decision to sabotage her. In the spring of 1868, her seamstress Elizabeth Keckley published a tell-all book, Behind the Scenes: Thirty Years a Slave and Four Years in the White House, writing of behavior most unflattering to the former first lady. Mary renounced their friendship. In October 1869, she left with fifteen-year-old Tad, boarding the City of Baltimore with no one to see them off.
They traveled to Frankfurt, Germany, where the fifty-one-year-old told others she was forty-six. She pushed Charles Sumner back in the States to work on a congressional pension for her. He was successful. In May 1870, the House voted her a three-thousand-dollar annual pension, and on July 14, 1870, the Senate agreed in a strictly partisan vote, giving her the largest individual annuity ever granted to an American citizen.
She longed for home and returned in May 1871, living in Chicago with Tad and son Robert and his wife. The arrangement of two strong-willed women in the same house quickly soured. Then tragedy struck again. Tad, now eighteen, had caught a cold on the trip back.
It worsened. He died of pleurisy at 7:30 in the morning on July 15, 1871, the day after the Senate okayed her pension. To Mary Todd it all made sense again: good fortune, then disaster. On October 8, 1871, the Great Chicago Fire scorched 2,100 acres and killed nearly two hundred, as if her ill-fated fortune infected the city.
Her days were spent with constant trips to spas, encounters with spiritualists, and anniversary panics: the death of her firstborn, the passing of Willie, her husband’s assassination, the death of Tad, and more blows. Lincoln’s former law partner William Herndon published a biography questioning Lincoln’s legitimate birth and religious conviction, portraying Mary as a lying madwoman. On May 19, 1875, she was visited by a party of men, including Leonard Swett, the Chicago lawyer who fifteen years earlier had nominated her husband for president. They took her to the Cook County Courthouse to answer a charge of lunacy.
Her son Robert had sworn out the warrant. Under oath he testified: I have no doubt my mother is insane. She has long been a source of great anxiety to me. She has no home.
An all-male jury took less than ten minutes. The former first lady of the United States was sent to Bellevue Place Sanatorium in Batavia, Illinois, where she was confined on the second floor in a twelve-by-twenty-one-foot room. Three months and three weeks later she was released to the general population of the sanatorium. Her release from confinement angered Robert, who hired people to watch her and, using the courts, gained legal control of her money.
Judge James B. Bradwell and Myra Bradwell came to her assistance. Robert blocked their legal efforts, then left for a summer vacation. The Bradwells threatened a writ of habeas corpus to produce Mrs.
Lincoln, outmaneuvering Robert, and on September 11, 1875, his mother was released. Mary went to her sister Elizabeth’s in Springfield. Robert still wanted another court appearance, and this time Mary did too. On June 15, 1876, the court reversed its stand.
Mary Todd Lincoln was, in their words, restored to reason and capable of managing and controlling her estate. Back in control of her money and life, she wrote her oldest son. There was no dear before his name. She wanted everything she had ever given him returned, and she sent back the gifts he had given her.
He returned some of what she asked. The gift giving and affection had always been one-sided. She never forgave him. Now free, she traveled to Lexington, then Philadelphia for the nation’s Centennial.
On October 1, 1876, she crossed the Atlantic again, returning to southwestern France. Finally back in Lexington, people found her withdrawn. One commented that her will to live came solely from the absolute hate she held for her son. In the autumn of 1880 she went again to Elizabeth’s in Springfield.
The former first lady was feeble, half paralyzed, and suffering from cataracts. Robert relented and paid her one final visit. It was quick. There was no reconciliation.
But an event demonstrated she still had some fire. When Mary learned that Mrs. James Garfield, wife of the gunned-down twentieth president, was to receive a five-thousand-dollar-a-year pension, the feeble sixty-three-year-old asked for $115,000. She never collected a cent.
Six months later, in 1882, on another painful anniversary, the eleventh of Tad’s passing, she collapsed. The next morning, July 16, in the same house in which she was married, a stroke took her. Her tortured existence ended three days later. The mayor of Springfield declared a holiday, stores closed, and thousands lined the streets.
In the obituaries that followed, the phrase respected wife was repeated. She would have liked that. Like her husband, she left no will. The object of her hatred, Robert, inherited her estate.
Two years later, eighty-four trunks, three dollars, and sixty-four cents were found. He had her money and her belongings. But this time she had something far more important, something that could not be measured in dollars and cents. There at Oak Ridge Cemetery, where her loved ones rested, Mary Todd Lincoln, repeatedly abandoned in life, would in death have what she cherished most.
Never again would she be separated, not from her husband, not from three of her four sons. This time, and for all eternity, Mary Ann Todd Lincoln would be surrounded by family.