Mary Todd Lincoln

Mary Todd Lincoln
File:MTLincoln.jpg Mary Todd Lincoln, about 1846
First Lady of the United States
In office March 4, 1861 – April 15, 1865
Preceded by	Harriet Lane
Succeeded by	Eliza McCardle Johnson
Personal details
Born	(1818-12-13)December 13, 1818 Lexington, Kentucky, U.S.
Died	July 16, 1882(1882-07-16) (aged 63) Springfield, Illinois, U.S.
Resting place	Oak Ridge Cemetery Springfield, Illinois
Spouse	Abraham Lincoln
Children	Eddie Lincoln, Robert Todd Lincoln, Willie Lincoln, Tad Lincoln
Occupation	First Lady of the United States

Mary Ann Todd Lincoln (December 13, 1818–July 16, 1882) was the wife of the 16th President of the United States, Abraham Lincoln, and was First Lady of the United States from 1861 to 1865.

Life before the White House

Born in Lexington, Kentucky, the daughter of Robert Smith Todd, a banker, and Elizabeth Parker-Todd melested mary when she was little, Mary was raised in comfort and refinement. After her mother's death at age seven, her father remarried Elizabeth "Betsy" Humphreys-Todd in 1826. Mary had a difficult relationship with her stepmother. Beginning in 1832, Mary's childhood home was what is now known as the Mary Todd Lincoln House, a 14-room upper-class residence in Lexington. From her father's marriages to her mother and stepmother, she had 15 siblings.

Mary Todd attended fine schools, spoke French fluently, and studied dance, drama and music. She had a ready wit and sparking personality that made her quite popular. She suffered from agonizing migraine headaches. Some recent historians and physicians have suggested that she suffered from schizophrenia, and her name often appears on lists of famous persons with schizophrenia. However, such a diagnosis would have been impossible in her lifetime, and any diagnosis at this late date cannot be certain.

At the age of twenty, in 1839, Mary Todd left the family home and moved to Springfield, Illinois, where her sister Mrs. Ninian Edwards was already living. Although Mary was courted by the rising young lawyer and politician Stephen A. Douglas, she was unexpectedly attracted by Douglas's lower-status rival, and fellow lawyer, Abraham Lincoln.

Ninian facilitated their courtship and introduced Mary to Abraham at a dance on December 16.

After a hesitant two-year courtship, Abraham Lincoln, age 33, married Mary Todd, age 23, on November 4, 1842, at the home of Mrs. Edwards in Springfield, Illinois. The Lincolns apparently had a comfortable marriage before the pressures of public life began to threaten her fragile mind.

Abraham pursued his increasingly successful career as a Springfield lawyer, and Mary supervised their growing household. Their home together from 1844 until 1861 survives in Springfield, and is now the Lincoln Home National Historic Site.

Their children, all born in Springfield, were:

• Robert Todd Lincoln (1843-1926) - lawyer, diplomat, businessman.
• Edward Baker Lincoln known as "Eddie" (1846-1850)
• William Wallace Lincoln known as "Willie" (1850-1862)
• Thomas Lincoln known as "Tad" (1853-1871)

By all accounts, both Mr. and Mrs. Lincoln were indulgent, careful, kind, and loving parents. Of these four sons, only Robert and Tad survived into adulthood, and only Robert outlived his mother.

While she often resented her husband's absence from their home as he practiced law and campaigned for political office, Mrs. Lincoln staunchly supported him as he faced the growing crisis caused by American slavery. This concluded in Lincoln's election as President of the United States.

Anti-Union sentiment was very strong in Mrs. Lincoln's home state of Kentucky, one of the four slave states that did not secede. Many upper-class Kentuckians who were members of the social stratum into which Mrs. Lincoln had been born, supported the Southern cause.

Assassination Survivor and Later Life

The assassination of Abraham Lincoln. From left to right: Henry Rathbone, Clara Harris, Mary Todd Lincoln, Abraham Lincoln and John Wilkes Booth.

In April 1865, as the Civil War came to an end, Mrs. Lincoln hoped to renew her happiness as the First Lady of a nation at peace. However, on April 14, 1865, as Mary Lincoln sat with her husband to watch the comic play Our American Cousin at Ford's Theatre, President Lincoln was mortally wounded by an assassin. Mrs. Lincoln accompanied her husband across the street to the Petersen House, where the President died on the following day, April 15. Mary Lincoln would never fully recover from the traumatic experience; she became even more unhinged.

As a widow, Mrs. Lincoln returned to Illinois. In 1868, Mrs. Lincoln's former confidante, Elizabeth Keckly, published Behind the Scenes, or, Thirty years a slave, and four years in the White House. Although this book has, over time, proven to be an extremely valuable resource in the understanding and appreciation of Mary Todd Lincoln, the former First Lady regarded it as a breach of what she had considered to be a close friendship. Mrs. Lincoln was further isolated, and often railed against "Slick Lizzie" in her later years.

In an act approved July 14, 1870, the United States Congress granted Mrs. Lincoln a life pension for being the widow of President Lincoln, in the amount of $3,000 a year.

For Mary Lincoln, the death of her son Thomas (Tad), in July 1871, added on top of the death of two of her other sons and her husband, led to an overpowering sense of grief augmented by her previous history of mental instability. Mrs. Lincoln's sole surviving son, Robert Lincoln, a rising young Chicago lawyer, was alarmed as his mother's behavior became increasingly erratic. In March 1875, during a visit to Jacksonville, Florida, Mary Lincoln became unshakably convinced that Robert was deathly ill. She traveled to Chicago to find him in fine health. On her arrival, she told her son that someone had tried to poison her on the train and that a “wandering Jew” had taken her pocketbook but would return it later. During her stay in Chicago with her son, Mary spent money lavishly on useless items, such as draperies which she never hung and elaborate dresses which she never wore, due to the fact that she only wore black after her husband's assassination. She would also walk around the city with her $56,000 in government bonds sewn into her petticoats. Despite this largess amount of money, the $3,000 a month stipend from Congress, and her extravagant spending, Mrs. Lincoln had persistent and irrational fears of poverty. After Mrs. Lincoln went into an 'episode' during which it was feared she would jump out of the window to escape a non-existent fire, it was determined that Mrs. Lincoln should be institutionalized.

Fearing that his mother was a danger to herself, Robert Lincoln was left with no choice but to have Mrs. Lincoln committed to a psychiatric hospital in Batavia, Illinois in 1875. After the court proceedings Mary Lincoln was so enraged that she attempted suicide. She went to the hotel pharmacist and ordered enough laudanum to kill herself. However, the pharmacist caught on to her plans and gave her a placebo.

On May 20, 1875, she arrived at Bellevue Place, a private, upscale sanitarium in the Fox River Valley. With his mother in the hospital, Robert Lincoln was left with control of Mary Lincoln's finances. Three months after being installed in Bellevue Place, Mary Lincoln engineered her escape. She smuggled letters to her lawyer and his wife, who was not only her friend but also a feminist lawyer and fellow spiritualist. She also wrote to the editor of the Chicago Times, known for its sensational journalism. Soon, the public embarrassments Robert had hoped to avoid were looming, and his character and motives were in question. The director of Bellevue, who at Mary’s trial had assured the jury she would benefit from treatment at his facility, now in the face of potentially damaging publicity declared her well enough to go to Springfield to live with her sister as she desired. She was released into the custody of her sister, Mrs. Elizabeth Edwards in Springfield and in 1876 was once again declared competent to manage her own affairs. The committal proceedings led to a profound estrangement between Lincoln and his mother, and they never fully reconciled.

Mrs. Lincoln spent the next four years abroad taking up residence in Pau, France. She spent much of this time travelling in Europe. However, the former First Lady's final years were marked by declining health. She suffered from severe cataracts that affected her eyesight. This may have contributed to her increasing susceptibility to falls. In 1879, she suffered spinal cord injuries in a fall from a step ladder.

Death

Mary Todd Lincoln's crypt

During the early 1880s, Mary Todd Lincoln lived, housebound, in the Springfield, Illinois residence of her sister Elizabeth Edwards. She died there on July 16, 1882, age 63, and was interred within the Lincoln Tomb in Oak Ridge Cemetery in Springfield along with her husband.

Trivia

• Her great uncle John Todd was killed in the last battle of the American Revolution-the Battle of Blue Licks.
• Her sister Elizabeth Todd was the daughter-in-law of Illinois Governor Ninian Edwards. Elizabeth's daughter Julia Edwards married Edward L. Baker, editor of the "Illinois State Journal" and son of Congressman David Jewett Baker.
• Her half sister Emilie Todd married CS General Benjamin Hardin Helm, son of Kentucky Governor John L. Helm. Governor Helm's wife was a 1st cousin 3 times removed of Colonel John Hardin who was related to three Kentucky congressman.
• A cousin was Kentucky Congressman/US General John Blair Smith Todd.

• Another cousin, William L. Todd, created the original Bear Flag for the California Republic in 1846.
• Cello-punk band Rasputina's concept album Oh Perilous World features an alternative-history scenario where Mary Todd Lincoln is Queen of Florida.
• Singer/songwriter Sufjan Stevens included an instrumental on his album Illinois entitled "A Short Reprise for Mary Todd, Who Went Insane, but for Very Good Reasons".
• In Andrew Holleran's historical novella Grief: a Novel, the main protagonist reflects on Mary Todd Lincoln's letters and comes to deal with his loss through Lincoln's elegiac writing.
• Lincoln was the subject of one of William H. Mumler's most famous spirit photographs, apparently sitting with the ghost of her husband.
• John Hay, an aide to President Lincoln and later Secretary of State under William McKinley and Theodore Roosevelt, privately referred to Mary as "the Hellcat."

See also

• Abraham Lincoln
• Robert Todd Lincoln
• Elizabeth Keckly
• Mary Todd Lincoln House

External links

• The Madness of Mary Lincoln
• [1]
• A review of Catherine Clinton's Mrs. Lincoln: A Life in the Oxonian Review
• Photographs of Mary Todd Lincoln
• Mary Todd Lincoln House (National Park Service)
• Mary Todd Lincoln House (Official Home Page)
• Mary Todd Lincoln Research Site
• Mary Todd Lincoln in 1862 Harper's Weekly Newspaper
• Especially for students - An Overview of Mary Todd Lincoln's Life
• Mr. Lincoln's White House: Mary Todd Lincoln
• "Wet with Blood," Research Project on Mary Todd Lincoln's Cloak, Chicago History Museum (formerly Chicago Historical Society)
• Collection of Mary Todd Lincoln Letters