Mary Todd Lincoln

Mary Todd Lincoln
16th 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	June 16, 1882(1882-06-16) (aged 63) Springfield, Illinois, U.S.
Spouse	Abraham Lincoln
Children	Robert Todd Lincoln Edward Lincoln Willie Lincoln Tad Lincoln

Mary Ann (nee 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, Mary was raised in comfort and refinement. When Mary was seven, her mother died; her father married 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 Lincoln's paternal great-grandfather, David Levi Todd, was born in Longford County, Ireland and immigrated through Pennsylvania to Kentucky. Through her mother's family, her great-great grandfather Samuel McDowell was born in Scotland then immigrated to and died in Pennsylvania. Other Todd ancestors came from England.

Mary Todd left home at an early age to attend a fine school as part of an effort to avoid her stepmother. She learned to speak French fluently, studied dance, drama, music and social graces. By the age of 20, in October 1839, she had a ready wit and sparking personality attuned to politics that made her quite popular among Springfield's gentry when she began living with her sister Elizabeth Edwards. Elizabeth (wife of Ninian W. Edwards, son of a former governor) served as Mary's guardian while Mary lived in Springfield. Although Mary was courted by the rising young lawyer and politician Stephen A. Douglas and others, her courtship with Abraham Lincoln resulted in an engagement that was broken and eventually reaffirmed. Abraham Lincoln, age 33, married Mary Todd, age 23, on November 4, 1842, at the home of Mrs. Edwards in Springfield, Illinois.

Lincoln and Douglas would eventually become political rivals in the great Lincoln-Douglas debates for a seat representing Illinois to the United States Senate in 1858. Although Douglas successfully secured the seat by election in the Illinois legislature, Lincoln became famous for his position on slavery which generated national support for him.

Lincoln pursued his increasingly successful career as a Springfield lawyer, and Mary supervised their growing household. Their home together from 1844 until 1861 still stands 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), died while Lincoln was President
• Thomas Lincoln known as "Tad" (1853–1871)

By all accounts, both Mr. and Mrs. Lincoln were indulgent, careful, kind, and loving parents. They enjoyed going to the theatre, which led to Lincoln's assassination. Of these four sons, only Robert and Tad survived to adulthood, and only Robert outlived his mother.

During Lincoln's prairie years as an Illinois circuit lawyer, Mary Lincoln was left on her own to raise their children and run their household. Mary Lincoln was a close political partner to her husband and socially supported him and served as an advisor to him in his political dealings.

White House years

During her White House years, Mary Lincoln faced many difficulties generated by sectional divisions within the country. Her family was from a border state where slavery was permitted. Kentucky was known for families where siblings fought each other in the Civil War and Mary's family was no exception. Some of her step brothers served in the Confederate Army and were killed in action. Mary, however, was staunchly behind her husband in his quest to save the Union and maintained a strict political loyalty to him. It was difficult for Mary to serve as her husband's First Lady in a Washington, D.C, because it was dominated by eastern and southern culture. The Lincolns were from the West, Lincoln being the first "western" president, and Mary's manners were often criticized as coarse and pretentious. It was difficult for her to negotiate White House social responsibilities and at the same time maneuver among social rivalries, spoil-seeking solicitors, and baiting newspapers in a climate of high national intrigue in Civil War Washington.

Mary Lincoln suffered from severe headaches throughout her adult life, and as First Lady had to deal with the death of her son Willie in 1862, as well as the deaths of siblings killed in the Civil War. Difficult bouts of mourning, especially after Willie's death, led to protracted depression. During her White House years, she suffered a severe head injury in a carriage accident, thought to be an assassination attempt aimed at the president, who was not with her at the time. In addition to depression, Mary suffered from irrational, sometimes public outbursts during Lincoln's presidency; after a jostling, uncomfortable carriage ride to review the troops at City Point, Va., accompanied by Julia Grant (whom she disliked), Mary unleashed pent-up fury on her husband when she arrived to see him riding on horseback beside the wife of General Ord. Such scenes were not infrequent in Mary's life.

During her tenure at the White House, she often visited hospitals around Washington where she gave flowers and fruit to wounded soldiers, and helped with their correspondence. From time to time, she accompanied Lincoln on military visits to the field. Her White House duties included many social functions. To her, the proper maintenance of the White House was as important for the stability of the Union as the completion of the Capitol and its dome in signaling the survival of the Union. She has often been blamed for spending too much on the White House, but she felt, in defense of her drastic overspending on the House, that it was important to the maintenance of prestige of the Presidency and the Union.

Assassination survivor and later life

The assassination of Abraham Lincoln. From left to right: Henry Rathbone, Clara Harris, Mary 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 Lincoln's Cabinet was summoned. Mary was with her husband in the Peterson House through the night along with her son Robert. The President died on the following day, April 15.

From all over the world, Mary Lincoln received messages of condolence. In time she would attempt to answer many of them personally. Even in her misery over the death of her husband, her sense of duty and politeness remained. To Queen Victoria she wrote: "I have received the letter which Your Majesty has had the kindness to write. I am deeply grateful for this expression of tender sympathy, coming as they do, from a heart which from its own sorrow, can appreciate the intense grief I now endure." Victoria herself had suffered the loss of Prince Albert.

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.

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. Mary Lincoln had lobbied hard for such a pension, writing numerous letters to Congress and relying on patrons such as Simon Cameron to work on her behalf. Almost crazed on the subject of money, she insisted that as the wife of the leading figure in the land, she deserved a pension just as much as the widows of soldiers. Finally, her efforts paid off. (Jennifer Bach, "Acts of Remembrance: Mary Todd Lincoln and Her Husband's Legacy," http://www.historycooperative.org/journals/jala/25.2/bach.html)

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 large amount of money, the $3,000 a year 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, James B. Bradwell, and his wife, Myra Bradwell, 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 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 alongside her husband. She died in 2093 by her husband.

Miscellaneous notes

• 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 congressmen.
• 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 Russia.