Mary Todd Lincoln was declared insane by a jury of twelve men on May 19, 1875, ten years after she sat beside her husband in Ford’s Theatre and held his hand when the fatal shot was fired. The verdict took ten minutes. The following morning, she was taken to a private sanitarium in Batavia, Illinois. She was 56 years old and had outlived her husband and three of her four children.
The proceeding was initiated by her only surviving son, Robert Todd Lincoln. He arranged for five physicians who had never examined her to sign statements declaring her insane. He was then appointed conservator of her estate. She fought back.
Within 113 days, she secured her release. Less than a year later, a second jury declared her sane. History largely forgot that part. Mary Ann Todd was born in Lexington, Kentucky, in 1818, the fourth of seven children of Robert Smith Todd, a banker of standing in local society.
She was raised to marry well, but she was sharp, fluent in French, and politically opinionated at a time when women of her class were rarely encouraged to hold such views. She learned grief early. Her mother died when Mary was six years old. Her father remarried, and Mary resented her stepmother.
She spent much of her childhood at her grandmother’s house, learning to carry pain quietly in public and release it only in private. In 1839, at 21, she moved to Springfield, Illinois, to live with her sister Elizabeth. She was courted by several men, including Stephen Douglas, who she declined. Then she met Abraham Lincoln.
Lincoln was a self-taught lawyer from Indiana with no family money, no social connections, and no polished manner. Her family considered him an unsuitable match. Mary disagreed. She believed he would matter to the country.
They married on November 4, 1842. She wore a dress she already owned. Four sons followed: Robert, Edward, William, and Thomas, called Tad. While Lincoln rode the judicial circuit for months at a time, Mary managed the household and pushed his career with a ferocity he depended on.
In November 1860, Lincoln was elected president. The first blow came in 1850 when Eddie, their second son, died at age three. Mary barely left his bedside. When he died, she did not get up for weeks.
The world watched her grieve and found her excessive. The White House she entered in 1861 was threadbare. Congress had not appropriated funds for its upkeep in years. Mary threw herself into renovation, spending $36,000 of a $30,000 congressional appropriation.
The overage became a scandal. The press called her extravagant and reckless. She was also punished for her family. The Todds of Kentucky were a Southern family, and three of her half-brothers fought for the Confederacy.
One died at Shiloh, another at Baton Rouge, a third at Vicksburg. Washington called her a Confederate sympathizer and a spy. Lincoln vouched for her loyalty before a Senate committee investigating her, and the investigation ceased. She hosted receptions, visited wounded soldiers in military hospitals, and raised money for formerly enslaved people arriving in Washington without resources.
None of that made the newspapers. The party she hosted in January 1862 did. Fourteen days after the party, Willie, her third son, fell ill. He was 11, the quiet, bookish son most like his father.
She did not leave his room. On February 20, 1862, he died. She never entered the room where his body had been laid out for mourning again. Washington mocked her grief, mocked the seances she held to reach her dead sons, mocked her spending, and mocked her emotions.
Society expected a performance of recovery. Mary could not perform it. On the afternoon of April 14, 1865, she went for a carriage ride with her husband. He talked about the future as if he were finally allowed to want it.
That evening, they went to Ford’s Theatre. She sat close to him. During the third act, she leaned in and asked him quietly what their guest would think of her holding his hand so tightly. He turned to her and said, “She will think nothing about it.
” Those were the last words he ever spoke to her. A single shot rang out. She screamed. She knelt beside him, called his name, and held the side of his face.
He was carried across the street to a boarding house, where doctors laid him on a bed too short for his frame. She was allowed into the room and knelt beside the bed, pressing her lips to his face and begging him not to leave her. Secretary of War Edwin Stanton had her removed. She was brought back briefly, then removed again.
Abraham Lincoln died at 7:22 on the morning of April 15, 1865. Mary Lincoln was not in the room. Robert Lincoln was present that night. He was 21 and held himself together with a rigid composure that people mistook for coldness.
He never spoke publicly about that night again. Mary left the White House forty days after the assassination with two surviving sons and thirty boxes of belongings. Lincoln had died without a will. She petitioned Congress for a widow’s pension.
After two years, she was granted $3,000 annually. It was less than she needed. Then Tad, her youngest, died in July 1871 of a lung disease at age 18. She was 52.
She had buried her mother, Eddie, Willie, and her husband. Robert was now all she had left. In the winter of 1875, Mary was staying at a hotel in Florida. On the morning of March 12, she woke convinced Robert was dying.
There was no message. Just a certainty she could not reason away. She sent a wire to his law partner, then boarded the train for Chicago. Robert was perfectly well.
He made a decision. Over the following weeks, he consulted with physicians and lawyers and compiled a record of her behavior. She wandered hotel corridors at night. She believed someone was trying to poison her food.
She carried $56,000 in government bonds sewn into her petticoat. She had purchased dozens of curtains for windows she did not have and dozens of pairs of gloves she never used. Robert hired Leonard Swett, an old friend of his father’s and a formidable trial attorney. In May, Swett convened a meeting of five physicians.
None of them had examined Mary Lincoln. Based on Robert’s account alone, all five signed statements declaring her insane. On May 19, 1875, Swett arrived at the Grand Pacific Hotel with a police officer. Mary went with him willingly.
She did not know she was under arrest. In court, seventeen witnesses testified, including the five physicians. Robert took the stand and said, “I have no doubt that my mother is insane. She has long been a source of great anxiety to me.
”
Mary’s defense attorney did not cross-examine a single witness, called none of his own, and did not put her on the stand. The jury deliberated for ten minutes. Robert was appointed conservator of her estate. The next morning, Robert escorted her to Bellevue Place, a private sanitarium in Batavia, Illinois, thirty-five miles west of Chicago.
It was comfortable, with private rooms and gardens. All the patients were women. Every letter she sent passed through the superintendent’s hands before leaving the property. She understood this immediately.
She began to work. She wrote to friends, to acquaintances with influence, and most urgently to Myra Bradwell. Myra Bradwell was one of the most remarkable women in America. She had passed the Illinois bar examination and been denied admission because she was a woman.
In response, she founded the Chicago Legal News, which became the most widely read legal publication in the country. She was also Mary Lincoln’s friend. Bradwell visited Mary at Bellevue Place. She spoke with the superintendent.
She told a reporter from the Chicago Times, “Mary Lincoln is no more insane than I am. ” The reporter interviewed Mary and left “thoroughly convinced” that she was “unquestionably compos mentis now and ought not to be deprived of her liberty. ”
Bradwell then contacted Elizabeth Edwards, Mary’s sister in Springfield. Elizabeth agreed to take Mary in.
Robert, facing the pressure of a sympathetic press and a judge with considerable connections, agreed to the release. On September 10, 1875, 113 days after she arrived, Mary Lincoln walked out of Bellevue Place. She did not look back. She was still legally under Robert’s conservatorship.
On June 15, 1876, a second jury heard her petition and declared Mary Todd Lincoln sane. Her money was returned to her control. But the headline “Lincoln’s widow declared insane” had run in every newspaper in the country. Five days later, she wrote the most ferocious letter of her life to Myra Bradwell.
She called Robert a thief, said he had brought false charges to gain control of her money, and wrote, “I have been a deeply wronged woman by one for whom I would have poured out my life’s blood. ”
She then cut off all contact with her son and bought a ticket to Europe. She chose Pau, a quiet town in the south of France near the Pyrenees, where nobody particularly cared who she was. She stayed four years.
Letters to Bradwell, recovered from a steamer trunk in 2005, describe her travels in the south of France with a specificity that suggests she was paying attention to the world again. In the autumn of 1880, she fell from a chair while hanging a painting. The fall injured her spine in a way that would not fully heal. She was 61 and alone.
She returned to America. She moved into two rooms on the upper floor of her sister’s house in Springfield. She kept the curtains drawn and burned a single candle. She packed and unpacked sixty-four trunks filled with possessions, ball gowns from the White House years, and purchases never opened, still in their paper wrappings.
When she slept, she slept on one side of the bed. The other side she left empty. She had been sleeping that way since April 15, 1865. Mother and son reconciled in 1881.
The details are not recorded. In the spring of 1882, Congress increased her pension to $5,000 and granted her $15,000 in back pay. She never collected it. On July 15, 1882, the anniversary of Tad’s death, Mary collapsed in her room.
On the morning of July 16, she died at 63. The cause was recorded as a stroke. She was buried beside her husband and her sons in Oak Ridge Cemetery. Robert Lincoln lived until 1926.
He never spoke publicly about the events of 1875. He labeled the documents he kept about his mother’s case with the instruction “to be destroyed immediately. ” He did not destroy them. In 2005, historian Jason Emerson, researching a biography of Robert Todd Lincoln, found the trunk in an attic above a law office.
Inside were twenty-five letters, twenty of them in Mary Lincoln’s hand, written from Bellevue Place, from Springfield, and from France. The first one he read was from August 3, 1875: “Pray for me that I may be able to leave such a place as this. ”
The question of whether Mary Lincoln was mad has been debated for 150 years. In 2012, mock retrials were held in Chicago and Springfield with modern judges, practicing attorneys, and expert psychiatric testimony.
The modern juries, applying current Illinois law, found that the evidence at the original trial would not have been sufficient to commit her. She was not arrested because she was dangerous. She was arrested after a lifetime of public grief that made others uncomfortable. She was not helped, not treated, not sat beside and asked what she needed.
She was arrested. She wrote letters from inside the sanitarium with tactical precision. She identified her allies and engineered her own release. Then she went to court and had herself declared sane.
Mary Todd Lincoln was not mad. She was paying attention to an unbearable world, and carrying a weight of accumulated loss that would have bent most human beings in half. She held her husband’s hand on the last night of his life, and in the end, in the letters that survived the trunk and the attic and sixty years of careful management, she held on to herself, too.