The first lady of the United States had her own son commit her to an insane asylum. Mary Lincoln, widow of the murdered president Abraham Lincoln, had spent years descending into paranoia and delusion, and in 1875 her only surviving son, Robert, decided that the woman who had once presided over the White House was no longer fit to govern her own life. The insanity trial that followed made national headlines, and the verdict sent a former first lady to a psychiatric hospital against her will. Mary Todd was born on December 13, 1818, in Lexington, Kentucky, to Robert Smith Todd, a businessman and veteran of the War of 1812, and Elizabeth Todd, who died from complications of childbirth when Mary was six.
Her father remarried the following year, and the large Todd household, with nine children from the second union, lived comfortably in a fourteen-room mansion. Mary received an unusually good education for a girl of her time, with instruction in languages, classics, dancing, music, and social etiquette. But her relationship with her stepmother was strained, and she grew up in a slave-owning household in a frontier state caught in the growing national conflict over slavery. In 1839, Mary moved to Springfield, Illinois, the state capital, where she was regarded as a witty and outgoing young woman.
She was initially courted by Stephen A. Douglas, a rising young lawyer and Democratic politician, but it was another lawyer, a thirty-year-old named Abraham Lincoln, who won her. Their courtship was long and uncertain, with Lincoln at one point calling off the engagement, but they married on November 4, 1842. The marriage proved happy.
They had four sons: Robert, Edward, William, and Thomas. Edward died of tuberculosis before his fourth birthday. Mary was a troubled woman in many ways. She suffered from frequent mood swings, public outbursts, and a fierce temper.
By modern standards she would likely have been treated for depression, delusions, and possibly bipolar disorder. She also had physical ailments, including diabetes and poor vision. Abraham Lincoln began his political career in the Illinois state legislature in the mid-1840s, then stepped back to focus on his law practice. The passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act in 1854, which opened the way for the extension of slavery into western territories, drew him back into politics.
He emerged as a leading figure in the newly formed anti-slavery Republican Party, and in 1860 he was catapulted from relative obscurity to become the Republican presidential candidate. Mary encouraged his political ambitions throughout the 1850s, and she may have played a role in pushing him toward the presidency. When he won the election, he greeted her with the words: “Mary, we are elected. ”
Mary relished the role of first lady, a position that had only entered American public life in the 1830s.
But the Civil War broke out within months of Lincoln’s inauguration. Coming from a slave-owning Kentucky family, Mary had many relatives who fought for the Confederacy, and several of her half-brothers were killed in action. She was vocal in her support for the Union and abolition, but she generated controversy with lavish spending on White House banquets, fine jewelry, and interior decoration while the country suffered under the burden of war. Her erratic behavior and frequent bouts of depression and mania troubled those who saw how the White House operated.
Her mental state deteriorated badly in 1862 after her son William died of typhoid fever. She was so devastated that she was bedbound for around three weeks, did not attend the funeral, and required a nurse for months. Lincoln’s popularity grew over time, and so did Mary’s reputation, in large part due to her charitable work in hospitals around Washington and Maryland. The Union won the war and ended slavery, but on April 14, 1865, John Wilkes Booth, an actor and Confederate supporter, shot President Lincoln in the back of the head as he and Mary watched a play at Ford’s Theatre.
Mary was holding her husband’s hand. Lincoln died the following morning. Mary received considerable sympathy in the aftermath, including a letter from Queen Victoria, who had never fully recovered from the death of her own husband, Prince Albert. But Mary soon found herself in financial difficulty.
Abraham left a sizable estate of well over two million dollars in today’s money, but Mary had always been a spendthrift, and her time as first lady had worsened these instincts. By 1868 she was advertising in the national media that she was broke and needed financial aid as the poor widow of the murdered president. She spent years living on support from family, friends, and former political allies, at one stage moving to Frankfurt with her son Tad. In the early 1870s, Congress granted her an annual pension, but she was never on sound financial footing.
The publication in 1868 of a book by Elizabeth Keckly, a former slave who had become Mary’s dressmaker and close friend, added to her distress. The book, which contained a large number of personal revelations about Mary and her late husband, was viewed by Mary as a serious betrayal. The death of her son Tad in 1871, possibly from tuberculosis or a heart condition, led to a further serious decline in her mental health. She became erratic, paranoid, and prone to delusions.
In 1875, while visiting her only surviving son Robert, she became convinced that he was drastically ill, when the opposite was true. She told him that someone had tried to poison her on the train. She spent large sums on items she never used and walked around the city with tens of thousands of dollars in government bonds sewn into her clothes. Robert decided to have her committed.
An insanity trial followed, generating enormous public attention. Shortly after the court proceedings, Mary went to several pharmacies and ordered enough laudanum to kill herself, but an astute pharmacist gave her a placebo instead. She was committed to Bellevue Asylum in Illinois. Complications in the case soon emerged, notably the fact that Robert controlled his mother’s finances, and many observers, perhaps unfairly, questioned his motives.
In 1876, Mary was declared competent to look after herself and was released. Mary returned to Europe and spent several years traveling in France and elsewhere. Her health declined, in large part due to several falls she suffered. By the early 1880s, still only in her early sixties, she was back in America and confined to her sister’s house in Springfield, Illinois.
She died there on July 16, 1882, after a fall that led quickly to a coma and heart attack. She was sixty-three. One of the few saving graces of her later years was that she and Robert reconciled shortly before her death. Historians have generally judged Mary Lincoln as an average or even poor first lady, and her various difficulties have often been seen as distracting her husband during a national crisis.
In recent times, however, a more sympathetic portrait has emerged, portraying her not simply as a difficult woman but as a deeply troubled one, shaped by tragedy, illness, and loss.