The afternoon of May 19, 1875, began with a trusted friend arriving at Mary Todd Lincoln’s hotel suite in Chicago. Leonard Swett, a longtime associate of her late husband, told her he had bad news: her friends had decided her troubles had driven her insane. When she asked if he meant she was crazy, he answered yes. Mary, the widow of President Abraham Lincoln, insisted she was perfectly capable of caring for herself and demanded to see her son Robert.
Swett told her she would see Robert at the courthouse. He named the people who had declared her insane: Judge David Davis, her cousin John Todd Stuart, Robert, and Swett himself. He produced letters from doctors, none of whom had ever examined her. Two constables waited downstairs with a court order, prepared to take her by force in handcuffs if necessary.
Mary begged, wept, and called on her dead husband to drive the man away. She asked Swett to leave the room so she could change clothes. He refused, saying she might throw herself from the window. She changed in a closet, having sewn $56,000 in government bonds into the lining of her underskirt.
At the door, Swett offered his arm. She declined: “No, thank you. I can still walk. ”
Within the hour, twelve men in the Cook County Courthouse would decide whether she was sane.
What followed was an asylum called Bellevue Place in Batavia, the intervention of a female newspaper editor, and a box of letters hidden in a lawyer’s attic for over a century. The letters in Swett’s coat had circulated for four days. One survives, written May 18, 1875, by Dr. Richard Patterson.
He admitted he knew nothing of Mrs. Lincoln’s mental state except facts stated to him at a meeting in Robert’s lawyer’s office on May 15. He had never examined her. Based on that meeting alone, he offered the opinion she was insane and a fit subject for a state hospital.
Within 48 hours, Patterson would be responsible for her care. The narrative presented to the doctors began with a telegram from Florida on March 12, 1875. Mary was in Jacksonville, convinced her son was dying. Robert, 31, was a Chicago lawyer with a wife and two young children, the last survivor of her four sons.
She wired his physician, Dr. Ralph Isham: “I think my son is sick. Telegraph. I will start for Chicago tomorrow.
” Isham found Robert in good health. Robert replied that he was fine and she should stay in Florida. Before his reply reached her, she sent a second telegram, this time to Robert himself, begging him to rise and live for his mother. She told him everything she owned from that moment onward was his.
She arrived in Chicago on March 15 and told Robert someone on the train had tried to poison her. She claimed a stranger had taken her purse and would return it later. She refused to stay at his home, so Robert booked her a room at the Grand Pacific Hotel and took the room next door himself. At night she knocked on his door, waking him to report fears that people were trying to harm or rob her.
He hired a hotel employee to sit with her by day and sleep in her room at night. On April 1, she went into the hallway in incomplete dress and entered the elevator. When Robert returned her to her room, she screamed that he would kill her. During the days, she shopped compulsively: watches, perfumes, jewelry, soap, gloves, handkerchiefs, and lace curtains.
Three watches cost $450, intended for Robert. The lace curtains, costing $600, never left their wrapping—she had no home to hang them in. She told people she was poor, but she was not. Her husband’s estate was worth more than $83,000, of which she held a third.
Congress had granted her $22,025 in December 1865, and a $3,000 annual pension in July 1870. Robert had known about her money delusion for eight years. In 1867, he wrote to the woman he would marry that his mother was not mentally responsible on that one subject, insisting she was in real need of money. Nothing he said persuaded her otherwise.
Near the end of April 1875, she showed him $57,000 in government bonds she carried on her person. Robert hired a Pinkerton detective to follow her whenever she left the hotel. He learned Dr. Willis Danforth had been treating her since 1873 for fever and what the doctor called a nervous disorder of the head.
Robert went to Stuart, his mother’s cousin, and Davis, executor of his father’s will. Both told him an insanity trial was the only legal route. He put the question to six physicians, who met in his lawyer’s office on May 15 and agreed she suffered from insanity. On June 1, Robert described their verdict in a letter to a family friend, writing that six physicians in consultation offered him a warning: further delay would make him morally responsible for a tragedy that could occur at any moment.
Swett, managing the case, admitted a problem in a later 23-page letter to Davis. Robert was so anxious to stay truthful that the doctors had doubts the case would convince the public or secure a verdict. Swett’s plan was to wait: Robert would write each physician and collect a written opinion, and they would move when the letters were in hand. The wait ended with a Pinkerton report dated May 17.
The detective wrote that suspicious-looking persons were visiting her, that she had about $1,000 in cash—apparently from selling bonds—and talked of leaving the city for an unknown destination. On the morning of May 19, Robert filed a petition in the Cook County Court to inquire into the soundness of his mother’s mind. The hearing was set for two o’clock that afternoon. No one told Mary.
The court that heard Robert’s case existed only because of a farmer’s wife from Manteeno, Illinois. Her name was Elizabeth Packard. In 1860, the state imprisoned her without trial. Since 1823, Illinois had guaranteed a jury to anyone accused of insanity.
In 1851, the legislature created one exception: a married woman could be committed to a state hospital on her husband’s application alone, without the evidence of insanity required in other cases. Her husband, Theophilus Packard, was a Calvinist minister. Elizabeth had become outspoken on abolition and women’s rights. Worse, in his view, she taught a Bible class ideas that contradicted his pulpit preaching.
He decided she was insane. Under Illinois law, his decision was enough. On June 18, 1860, she was taken from her home at age 43, a mother of six, the youngest eighteen months old. She was committed to the Illinois State Hospital for the Insane in Jacksonville.
No doctor examined her, no judge heard her, and she had no lawyer. Inside, she never agreed she was insane and challenged the superintendent, Dr. Andrew McFarland, to prove it. She recorded what she saw: patients shackled, patients drenched in water.
She made herself a problem for the superintendent for 42 months. Then McFarland declared her incurably insane and discharged her. His testimony was careful: he wrote she was released because she had remained there as long as it was proper to keep such a case, not because she was cured of her condition. Her husband took her home, locked her in an upstairs room, and boarded up the windows.
He arranged to commit her for life to an asylum in Massachusetts. Her friends filed a writ of habeas corpus. In January 1864, the Packards were ordered before Judge Charles Starr in Kankakee. Her husband’s lawyers presented McFarland’s testimony and claimed she was confined only until better arrangements could be made.
Judge Starr looked at her and saw no madwoman. He asked the lawyers to prove their claim, then did something unusual in habeas proceedings: he empaneled a jury. Witnesses against her cited her religious opinions and her refusal to obey her husband, both offered as proof of insanity. Her lawyers submitted an essay she had written for her Bible class in 1860.
The judge allowed her to read it aloud in open court. When she finished, the courtroom applauded. Her final witness was Dr. Alexander Duncan, a physician and theologian who had spent three hours discussing her beliefs with her.
He told the jury he disagreed with her on many things but did not call people insane because they disagreed with him. He declared her a sane woman and wished the nation had more like her. The trial ended January 18, 1864. The jury deliberated only seven minutes, finding Elizabeth Packard sane.
Her husband had already sold the house and left for Massachusetts with the children and her property. She devoted the rest of her life to the law instead. She wrote books about the asylum and testified before state legislatures about what she had seen. In 1867, Illinois passed a law protecting personal liberty: anyone accused of insanity, including married women, would receive a jury trial.
People called it Mrs. Packard’s Personal Liberty Law. She is credited with drafting 34 bills in several state legislatures. McFarland fought the Illinois law publicly, calling it injurious, obnoxious, barbarous, and cursed.
A legislative committee investigated him that year and unanimously recommended his removal. The people of Jacksonville rallied around him. He kept his post until resigning in 1870, then opened a private asylum outside town. He died there in 1891 by suicide.
Packard outlived him by six years and, when her own daughter became mentally ill, cared for her at home. In August 2023, the state mental health center in Springfield, named for McFarland for decades, was renamed for Elizabeth Packard. This was the law Robert Lincoln operated within in May 1875. A patient who consented to go could enter a hospital without any court proceeding.
A patient who objected needed a verdict first. His mother would object, so she received every protection promised by the Personal Liberty Law: a judge, a jury of twelve, a lawyer, and a public hearing with the Chicago press present. The law did not say who would choose her lawyer. Swett walked Mary into the courtroom through a side door.
When she saw the room full of men and strangers, she stepped back. Swett told her Robert was inside, so she entered. Robert came to her, and she greeted him kindly. He sat at one side; on the other sat Isaac Arnold, a former Illinois congressman and friend of her husband who had written about the president.
He was her defense attorney, and Swett had chosen him. Arnold believed she was insane and at the start of proceedings expressed doubts about the fitness of defending her. Swett’s recorded response: if Arnold withdrew, it would suggest she could hire a contentious lawyer to cause trouble. He told Arnold to go and defend her and do his duty.
Judge Marion Wallace presided. Most accounts count seventeen witnesses; one published book about the trial says twelve. Every one was called by Robert’s side: five employees of the Grand Pacific Hotel, five merchants and jewelers, an agent of United States Express, four physicians, and her son. Danforth testified first, describing what she had told him over the past year: an Indian spirit was tampering with her head, pulling bones from her face and wires from her eyes, sometimes lifting her scalp and replacing it.
She told him her dead husband had revealed the day of her death, which would be in September 1874. She heard rappings at the table bearing the same information, sat at the table, asked questions, and repeated the answers aloud. Danforth diagnosed a weak nervous system, not caused by any physical disease. Hotel staff followed.
The housekeeper described her fear of being alone and the servants she paid to sleep in her room. A chambermaid testified Mrs. Lincoln said someone spoke to her through the walls and watched her from the bathroom window. She told the hotel manager part of Chicago was burning—four years earlier, part of Chicago had burned completely.
Then came the merchants with their receipts, describing the watches, curtains, gloves, and handkerchiefs. One clerk told the jury she had bargained with him over $30, and he considered that proof of her insanity. Four physicians took the stand. Dr.
Isham testified she was insane and a fit subject for hospital treatment. None went further than saying he did not think it safe to leave her alone. None of the doctors had ever examined her. Then Robert took the stand.
A reporter noted his face was pale and his eyes red from weeping. He recounted everything from the March telegram onward. When he reached the nights she knocked on his door with her fears, he broke down and sobbed before the court. Spectators wiped their eyes.
Robert testified he had no doubt his mother was insane, that her mind had been deranged since his father’s death, and that she had been irresponsible for ten years. She was difficult and never took his advice, but always treated him with great kindness. Robert described her trunks full of dresses and valuables she never used, no jewelry, and only mourning black. For three hours of testimony, Mary remained motionless, described by one reporter as looking modest and meek.
She was never called to the witness stand. Arnold cross-examined no one, called no witnesses, and offered no defense. The twelve jurors withdrew. The common account says they deliberated ten minutes; some historical accounts say only minutes.
They signed the usual printed form, convinced Mary Lincoln was insane and a fit person to be sent to a state hospital for the insane. Half a century later, one juror was asked about the case. He recalled the jury had no choice but to find the lady guilty as charged. There had been no charge at all; it was a civil hearing.
But he remembered it as a criminal conviction nonetheless. Eleven years earlier in Kankakee, a jury had taken seven minutes to find Elizabeth Packard sane. When the verdict was read, Robert turned to his mother and took her hand. She looked at him and said: “Oh, Robert, to think that my son would ever do this to me.
” He turned his face away so she could not see him. The sentence spread over telegraph wires that evening and appeared in newspapers across the country. Letters began arriving at Robert’s office asking what he had done to his mother. The verdict was in, but Swett still had work.
He wanted the bonds. He asked her to hand them over before she left, saying he could obtain a court order or have the sheriff take them by force, and hoped he would not have to do either. He asked if she would give them to Robert. She said no.
Robert would never have anything of hers. He asked if she would give them to Arnold, who stood beside her. She said she could not—they were hidden in her underclothes, and she would not be improper with him before all those people. She begged Swett to take her back to her room.
The three left the courtroom through a tunnel and returned to the Grand Pacific Hotel. In her room, he asked again. Tears streaming down her face, she told him he had not been content to confine her to an insane asylum; now he wanted to strip her of everything she owned. Her husband was dead, her children were dead, and she had saved these bonds for her old age.
Then she yielded, as Swett put it, because she had to submit to force. She handed $56,000 in government bonds to Arnold. She had shown Robert $57,000 in April; in those three weeks, she had sold one. Swett ended his letter to Davis with a paragraph about her: from beginning to end, she behaved like a lady in every sense of the word.
She believed she was sane, and she believed the men who should have been her friends were conspiring with Robert and Davis to confine her and take her money. That evening, she slipped past the three people Robert had posted to watch her. She went to pharmacies and asked for a mixture of camphor and laudanum for shoulder pain, as she said. The pharmacists were wary; one clerk had been warned about her.
He prepared what she asked but omitted the laudanum. She drank it in the street, believing it would end her life. Robert was summoned and stayed with her through her last hours in Chicago. She had never attempted to harm herself until the day her son took her to court.
The next morning, May 20, she was placed on a train heading west, 35 miles to Batavia in the Fox River valley. Bellevue Place stood on the southwestern edge of town on 16 acres: a three-and-a-half-story limestone building erected in 1854 as a private school called the Batavia Institute. Patterson bought the property in 1867 and renamed it. Before that, he had run state hospitals for the insane in Indiana and Iowa.
He cared for about twenty female patients at a time. His advertisements sought a select class of quiet, respectable lady patients. His wife handled the housekeeping; his son, also a physician, served as assistant. There were twelve nurses and attendants.
Behind the building stood a stable with horses, two small carriages, two sleighs, and a horse-drawn wagon. A greenhouse was being built that summer to hold 6,000 plants and 1,000 winter roses beginning to bloom. There was a croquet ground, rustic chairs, and paths cut through flower beds. The bedrooms had barred windows and wide views of the countryside.
Patterson’s method was the modern one: rest, diet, baths, fresh air, occupation, amusement, change of scene, medicines only from necessity, and as little restraint as possible. Mary received two rooms on the second floor near the family wing, with a private bath and her own attendant who slept next door and kept the key at night. No other patient at Bellevue received such treatment. Robert told his mother’s critics that nothing about the house suggested an asylum except white wire netting outside the windows, the kind that keeps children from falling.
At his request, the netting was removed. Someone at Bellevue kept a daily patient log, a bound volume titled “Reports of the Condition of Patients at Bellevue Place. ” Most entries are in a single hand, likely a nurse or attendant. Mary Lincoln’s pages survived.
The first entry, dated May 20, 1875, records: “Mrs. Mary Lincoln, admitted today from Chicago, age 56, widow of former President Lincoln, declared insane by the Cook County Court May 19, 1875. ” The report gives the asylum diagnosis in one line: mental derangement, possibly dating from President Lincoln’s assassination, aggravated after the death of her son Tad, especially severe during the past two months. That sentence ignores most of what had happened to her.
Born in Lexington, Kentucky, in December 1818, she lost her mother at age six. She married in Springfield in November 1842 and bore four sons. Edward died at age three. Willie, named for her husband, died of typhoid fever in the White House in February 1862 at age eleven.
She held no receptions for a year after, never entered the room where Willie died again, and wore mourning the rest of her life. She invited spiritualists into the Red Room of the White House to communicate with him. In 1863, a carriage accident threw her and struck her head. Robert later pointed to that injury and the assassination as causes of everything that followed.
On the night of April 14, 1865, she sat beside her husband at Ford’s Theatre when he was shot. In 1867, convinced she was destitute, she went to New York under an assumed name and tried to sell her White House wardrobe through a broker. Newspapers discovered it. She got very little money and much ridicule.
In July 1871, her youngest son, Tad, died in Chicago of a lung disease at age eighteen. By 1875, she feared fire, poison, being alone in a room, and running out of money. That was the woman living in the two second-floor rooms. The log continued.
May 21: slept well last night, pulse 100, no fever. May 22: cheerful and apparently content, took a long walk this morning, sleeps well at night. May 26: Mr. Lincoln came to see his mother; she was comparatively cheerful and went out in the evening for a drive to Geneva.
May 30: rode out today, was very gloomy. June 4: keeps closely to her room and refuses to ride out. June 10: trying to pack a box of things to send to her son, fails to complete it. June 17: Robert came again; thought her manner toward him was not as cordial as on previous visits.
He insisted on taking the box, and she ended up packing it, so he took it. June 22: rode out, went to the dressmaker’s, ordered a calico dress, said she would like to ride out every morning. July 2: habitually appoints a morning ride, postpones it to evening, then to the next morning, and so on. July 3: woke four or five times during the night.
July 5: had a crying spell today, rode out in the afternoon, there were many people about, insisted on returning home quickly. July 7: came down and sat on the front steps for a while this morning, visited Mrs. Patterson and said “good morning” two or three times in five minutes, stayed in her room the rest of the day, complained of nothing except slight annoyance from the carpenters working in the building. July 13: she promised Mrs.
Wilmarth’s little boy some stockings she says she bought especially for him. The writer adds in parentheses: she bought those stockings in Chicago before she had ever seen Mrs. Wilmarth or her son. July 22: came to the office this morning and made quite a long call, talked in a better manner and with more mental force than at any time since she has been here.
Robert came from Chicago most weeks. He wrote to a family friend that his mother was as happy as possible under the circumstances, very much pleased with the Pattersons, happier in every way, freed from anxiety and care, than she had been for ten years. In his words, she had no idea of her position at all. On July 15, Robert brought his young daughter, named Mary for her grandmother.
The log says she was much pleased to see the child. After they left, she had a long conversation with Patterson. For the first time, she said she wished to go live with her sister, Elizabeth Edwards, in Springfield. She told him: “It is a very natural thing in this world that I should wish to live with my sister.
She brought me up and I look upon her as my mother. ” The log records the places she went and what she said, but not what she wrote. On July 28, Robert and his daughter came again. After they left, Mary asked to go to the post office to mail a letter to her sister, written at Robert’s suggestion.
She mailed more than one letter. The next day, General John Franklin Farnsworth, a former congressman from the district, arrived at Bellevue. He told Patterson that Mrs. Lincoln had written to him the day before asking him to come.
She wanted her freedom, she wanted his help. She made no complaints, said she felt somewhat restrained. He did not think she talked like a sane woman, but he told his physician that few who had known her previously would call her insane. That evening at half past seven, two more visitors arrived from Chicago.
Myra Bradwell had passed the Illinois bar examination with honors in 1869. The state refused her a license to practice because she was a married woman. The Illinois Supreme Court upheld the refusal, and so did the United States Supreme Court. Instead, she founded and edited the Chicago Legal News, the city’s leading legal paper.
Her husband, James Bradwell, was a former county judge and state legislator. After the assassination, Mary bought a house in Chicago near them on their advice and lived in it for several years. A letter in the travel box explains how that visit was arranged. Mary wrote to James Bradwell herself, asking him to come as soon as he received the letter, to bring his wife, and to telegraph Farnsworth to meet them there.
She wrote: “Come to the house. ” She asked him to bring another man, W. F. Storey, editor of the Chicago Times, whose motto was “to print the news and raise hell.
” Storey did not come; he sent a reporter instead. Myra Bradwell said one thing to the physician and another to the press. On August 6, she told Patterson she had no doubt Mrs. Lincoln had been insane for some time, only doubting whether the asylum was the right place for her.
To the Chicago Times, she said: “She is no more insane than I am. ”
She stayed the night of August 6. The next morning she went to town around ten. At one in the afternoon she returned with a man introduced as Mr.
Wilkie of Chicago, the senior physician of the city that day. Mary came down, met them, took them to her rooms, and they remained in conference for two hours. Frank Wilkie was a Chicago Times editorial writer. He had been introduced to her, as he later stated, not as a newspaperman, but as a gentleman sincerely interested in her welfare.
He found no sign of weakness or unnatural appearance in her mind and described her physical condition as excellent. Two days later, Bellevue wrote to Myra Bradwell objecting to the introduction of strangers in the absence of the senior physician. On August 13, Robert came and told Patterson that Mrs. Bradwell was a nuisance and that her introduction of Wilkie was an outrage.
James Bradwell wrote to Patterson that confinement was injuring his client and would drive her mad; if the doctor did not send her to her sister, he would see whether habeas corpus could open Mrs. Lincoln’s prison door. Patterson replied in writing that discussing removal with the patient only disturbed her mind and that she should be left alone. On August 16, Patterson asked whether she expected Judge Bradwell that day.
She said not at all. He reminded her she had shown him a letter saying the judge was coming. The day’s log ends with a line of diagnosis: her lying and deception should be attributed to her insanity. Then came a letter from Springfield no one expected.
Elizabeth Edwards wrote to Myra Bradwell that her sister should never have been placed in Bellevue at all; she should have had care and companionship. If consulted, Elizabeth wrote, she would have strongly opposed the step that was taken. The letter ran about 200 words. She later apologized to Robert for writing it.
She had already invited Mary for a short visit with a professional nurse, with Mary to return to Bellevue afterward. When she realized the visit was intended to be permanent, she withdrew the invitation, citing her health. Myra Bradwell went to Springfield and persuaded her to reverse course, noting that the home, with its gardens and flowers, was the ideal place for a grief-stricken heart to find rest. On August 21, the Chicago Post and Mail published an article ending with the announcement that Mrs.
Lincoln had so far recovered as to leave Bellevue and visit her sister. The next day the news appeared on the front page of the New York Times. On August 24, the Chicago Times printed a full interview under a headline saying her physicians had pronounced her perfectly sane. The article was unsigned, and no one said who had admitted the interviewer to Bellevue.
Patterson wrote to the Chicago Tribune denying he had issued any statement that she had recovered. The Tribune, which supported Robert, called the whole affair a scandal promoted by meddlesome troublemakers. Other papers sided with Patterson; one called Judge Bradwell “Mr. Paul Pry,” who interfered too much in others’ affairs.
Myra Bradwell continued talking to reporters, saying her friend was held behind bars and fences. Robert gave in. Between September 6 and 9, he consulted several physicians about whether the visit was safe. On the morning of September 10, 1875, he personally escorted his mother out of Batavia and transferred her to Springfield.
She had been at Bellevue just under four months. She was out, but in the eyes of the Cook County Court she was still an insane person. She had exchanged one guardian for another. She lived at her sister’s home in Springfield for nine months.
Robert sent fifteen checks to Ninian Edwards for her expenses totaling $4,599. 28. In December, he asked Judge Wallace for permission to send her nine of her trunks. In November, he wrote to Davis about a bonnet.
His mother had bought a new one, which disturbed him. There were four others in her trunk at the Edwards house, never worn. For Robert, that meant nothing had changed. He also complained that she thought of almost nothing but spiritualism, and that most of her companions were spiritualists.
Wallace told him the law allowed no petition for relief before a year had passed from the date of the guardianship appointment. Both Robert and Swett still considered her mentally unsound and untrustworthy with her fortune. They also wanted family quiet and the newspapers silent. On the afternoon of June 15, 1876, she filed a petition to regain her property.
The matter came before the same judge in the same court. Her lawyer this time was Leonard Swett. Ninian Edwards was the only witness. He testified she was a fit person to manage her own affairs.
Robert did not appear and offered no objection. The jury took only as long as needed to sign the verdict: they found Mary Lincoln had recovered her reason and was capable of managing and controlling her property. No one had expected the jury to go that far. Robert blamed his uncle for not saying she remained irrational about money.
Edwards blamed the jury for deciding a question that had not been before them. The law had decided it: a guardianship could not be lifted unless the insane person was proved to have recovered her mind. To get her money back, she had to be adjudged sane—and she was. Headlines on June 16 called it a happy ending.
Three days after the hearing, she wrote to Myra Bradwell, a 700-word letter. She called her son a thief who brought false charges against her for her money, writing that he would never be permitted near his father in heaven. She encouraged the Bradwells and Wilkie to write articles denouncing what he had done. She wrote she was a deeply wronged woman, by one for whom she had been willing to sacrifice her life.
Her hair had whitened during the insanity episode, and she blamed him for that too. The next day she wrote to Robert demanding the return of her paintings, silver, and other possessions she said his wife had taken, without delay. She told him two lawyers had prepared a list matching hers and it would be published within days. Two prominent clergymen, she wrote, thought it advisable to pray for him in church because of his wickedness toward her and toward heaven above.
The letter demanded, “Send me all I have asked for in writing. You have carried this game of robbery far enough. ” It ended: “You have injured yourself, not me, by your wicked conduct. ” She signed it “Mrs.
A. Lincoln. ”
His accounts told another story. Her property earned more than $4,000 in interest during his management, and he took no compensation for the guardianship though he was entitled to it.
That fall, she left the country. She spent the next four years on the continent, from Le Havre to Marseille, from Naples to Sorrento, returning repeatedly to Pau in southern France, below the Pyrenees. About 100 letters from those years survive, most addressed to her banker and concerned with money. Ten letters in the travel box date to this period.
They are calm, rational, and persuasive, full of descriptions of places she visited and questions about people at home. In December 1876, she explained why: “I am enjoying the quiet here and am not persecuted by a devil. ” Writing from Sorrento in April 1878, she said April was her season of mourning. She was revisiting places first seen in the 1860s amid her grief, writing that her return to them was only by a strong act of will.
She and her husband had sat for hours planning the quiet travels they would take after his official duties ended. She mentioned boils under her left arm and pains all over her body. The waters of Vichy had not helped. She did not write to Robert at all.
Robert spent much of the rest of his life making sure letters like these were never read. He admitted attempting to destroy all his mother’s correspondence from her period of insanity. Historians searched for the Bradwell letters for eighty years. In 1932, a biographer lamented that nothing of the Bradwell correspondence remained but tradition.
In 1953, the most respected Mary biographer of the time devoted one sentence to them: “Her letters to the Bradwells have disappeared. ” In 1972, editors of her collected letters wrote that none remained. There was reason to believe Robert had destroyed the other side of the correspondence, since it condemned him so severely. The letters had not disappeared.
They had been purchased. In October 1927, a year and a half after Robert’s death, Myra Pritchard, granddaughter of the Bradwell family, visited a house in Manchester, Vermont, out of courtesy. The woman she visited was Mary Harlan Lincoln, Robert’s widow. Pritchard’s mother had given her 37 letters from or about Mary Lincoln, on one condition: they could be published only after both her mother and Robert had died.
Her mother felt Mrs. Abraham Lincoln had been wronged and that the letters would reveal much of the truth about her to the world. Pritchard wrote a book about them—111 pages titled “The Dark Days of Abraham Lincoln’s Widow as Revealed by Her Own Letters. ” It was to be serialized in a magazine and then published as a book in 1928.
Robert’s widow was agreeable and even offered material from her own files. Then her lawyers read the manuscript. They told Pritchard three letters were unacceptable to Mrs. Lincoln.
When she refused to exclude them, she found herself facing a lawsuit. The law was against her: similar cases had established that a letter belongs to the writer and heirs, not the recipient. She sold the letters and manuscript to the Lincoln family for $22,500. The contract required her to deliver every copy in her possession, affirm no others existed, and surrender anything she later obtained.
She kept silent for the next twenty years. She also kept typewritten copies of every letter. When Pritchard died in February 1947, her sister burned the manuscript as she had asked. The copies were another matter; she took them to Oliver Barrett, a Chicago lawyer and one of the nation’s leading Lincoln collectors.
Barrett told her it would not be morally right to publish them. Robert had fought to keep the letters private and his family had paid for them. Those copies were burned too. She kept every document relating to the sale, and her relatives still own them.
The originals were never destroyed. Mary Harlan Lincoln left them with her lawyer, Frederick Towers. When Towers retired, he put them in a metal box with other Lincoln family papers and carried the box to his attic. In 2005, after a five-month search, historian Jason Emerson found them there.
The box contained 25 unpublished letters and Pritchard’s manuscript, the one her sister-in-law had burned a copy of in 1947. Before that discovery, only eleven letters by Mary Lincoln were known for all of 1874 and 1875. Eleven of the new letters were written at Bellevue. “God does not seem to be merciful to my situation here,” she wrote in August 1875.
“I try to read my Bible and offer up my prayers three times a day, but my stricken heart fails me and my voice often trembles while praying. ” “I have worshipped my son and no improper word has ever passed between us, and yet I cannot understand why I was brought here. ” In another letter she wrote that she slept well, being perfectly sane, and had no desire to become insane. God, she wrote, would not forget to reward those who did not forget to visit Abraham Lincoln’s widow in her solitude.
In the same letters to the same friends, she asked Myra Bradwell to bring her samples of black alpaca and heavier black woolen fabric. In the next letter she asked her to tell no one about that request. Then she asked for two boxes of her clothing and a lost key to a third. For 130 years, people had hoped these letters would prove she had been forcibly committed to an asylum.
Emerson’s conclusion was that they show something else: Mary believed she was being robbed. In his view, and that of psychiatrists he consulted, that belief was one of her delusions. It was not only about Robert; she believed everyone was trying to steal her money. One psychiatrist told him that today she might have been held involuntarily for about seven days, treated, and sent home.
Other readers of her life reached different conclusions. Biographer Jean Baker described her behavior as eccentric rather than insane, pointing to migraines mistaken for hallucinations and to the chloral hydrate Mary took for sleep. Norbert Hirschhorn and Robert Feldman, both physicians, argued in a medical journal that the symptoms classified as insanity at her trial resulted from an organic disease of the spinal cord. Her behavior in 1875 resembled a trauma response on the tenth anniversary of the assassination.
Mark Neely, who published Robert’s insanity file in 1986, concluded something darker about the law: the history of insanity in American law, he wrote, offers no real evidence her fate would have differed in the modern era. The records do not settle which diagnosis is correct. What they settle is how May 19 unfolded. Every protection Elizabeth Packard had spent her life seeking was present in that courtroom.
The party that wanted Mary committed arranged everything in advance, including the man sitting beside her. Those ten minutes were only the last, smallest part of the matter. The door that let her out of Bellevue was opened by Myra Bradwell, who had been denied a license to practice law in Illinois in 1875. Mary returned to America in October 1880 on the same ship as actress Sarah Bernhardt.
A month before sailing, she had fallen from a chair while hanging a picture, injuring her back; walking was now difficult, and her eyesight was failing. She returned to her sister’s home in Springfield, spending most of her time in one room with the curtains drawn and one candle burning. She had 64 trunks of clothing and constantly packed and unpacked them. She slept on one side of the bed; the other was the President’s place, and she left it untouched.
In May 1881, weeks after President Garfield appointed him Secretary of War, Robert came to Springfield to see her, bringing his daughter. His mother forgave him. He went on to serve two presidents and represent the United States in London. He died in 1926 at age 82, rarely speaking of his mother afterward.
Writing about that summer years later, Mary credited the Bradwells with her freedom. Everyone, she wrote, had failed her in the bitterest hours of her life, “including her husband’s supposed friends. ” Those two faithful hearts, Myra and James Bradwell, came to her rescue, saving her with the greatest difficulty from confinement in an insane asylum. Mary Lincoln died at her sister’s home in Springfield on July 16, 1882.
Born in December 1818, she was 63. Emerson believed the likely cause was complications of diabetes. Hirschhorn and Feldman blamed the disease they believed she had suffered for a decade. She was buried in the Lincoln tomb in Springfield beside her husband and three of their four sons.
The Bellevue Place building still stands at 333 South Jefferson Street in Batavia. It has changed hands several times and now houses apartments; it is not open to visitors. The bed she slept in and the wardrobe she used have been preserved, and are on display a mile away at the Depot museum on the Fox River on Houston Street.
Anyone can walk in and stand beside them.