Mary Lincoln

First Lady

• Born: December 13, 1818
• Birthplace: Lexington, Kentucky
• Died: July 16, 1882
• Place of death: Springfield, Illinois

President:Abraham Lincoln 1861-1865

Overview

Mary Lincoln continues to be one of the most controversial First Ladies in U.S. history. As the wife of Abraham Lincoln, the most admired of American presidents, Mary Lincoln serves as a tempestuous counterpoint to his depressed personality. Full of verve, wit, and high temper, she was as ambitious as Lincoln was for his political success. She redecorated the public rooms of the White House and, in the process, overspent the budget for its repair. As First Lady, she was admired as an elegant social hostess. A devoted mother, she outlived three of her four children. After her husband’s assassination, her surviving son, Robert Todd Lincoln, had her institutionalized for behavior that most historians believe displayed nervousness and instability but not insanity.

Early Life

Mary Todd was born on December 13, 1818, in Lexington, Kentucky, into a distinguished Kentucky family. Her grandfather Levi Todd had been one of the founders of Lexington, and among her uncles and earlier relatives were generals, planters, and political leaders. Her father, Robert Smith Todd, was a successful slave-owning cotton manufacturer and banker as well as an aspiring Whig politician who served in the Kentucky legislature. Her mother’s family, the Parkers, were equally distinguished and affluent. Both sides of the family had been among those ambitious settlers who flooded into Kentucky in the 1790’s in order to take advantage of the state’s fertile land and the commercial opportunities that arose in its leading city, Lexington.

Mary was the third daughter of Robert Smith Todd and Elizabeth Parker Todd’s seven children. When Mary was six years old, her mother died of puerperal sepsis, the post-birth bacterial fever feared by nineteenth century women and called childbed fever.

The loss of her mother was the beginning of a series of tragic losses for Mary. She and her older sisters disliked her new stepmother, whom her father had married in 1828. A diligent and intelligent student, Mary excelled at both John Ward’s local seminary and later at a boarding school in Lexington. There she learned French, as well as the school’s curriculum of every branch of “good education,” which included rigorous training in the traditional studies of reading, writing, and arithmetic as well as the home arts of embroidery and sewing. After twelve years of schooling, she was eager to leave Lexington, mostly because of her hostility to her stepmother. While she enjoyed the social life in town, where women dressed formally to pay afternoon calls, she sought associations with those who were interested in politics and literature. Even in these early years of her life in Kentucky, neighbors and friends remembered this energetic, vivacious young woman’s interest in politics.

In 1838 Mary traveled to Springfield, Illinois, to live with her older sister Elizabeth, who had married Ninian Edwards, an aspiring Whig politician and a political ally and friend of Abraham Lincoln. Like Mary Todd, Abraham was a newcomer to Springfield. While her sisters had encouraged her to come, Abraham had settled in the prairie town on his own because it was the new capital of Illinois. As a lawyer and ambitious Whig assemblyman, he benefitted from his associations with clients and politicians there. Soon Mary and Abraham were courting. Physically, they were very different. Mary was five feet, four inches tall, plump, brown-haired, and graced with an appealing, round face. Abraham was six feet, four inches tall, with black hair and a long, narrow face. No doubt Abraham was attracted by Mary’s wit and lively conversation, as were several other leading politicians, including Stephen A. Douglas.

Abraham also appreciated her interest in politics, which was unusual among women of this time. She found in him a man who would treat her with tolerance and understanding, and she certainly sensed in him the ambition that would lead him to the White House. Her family, the Edwardses, and Mary’s sister Frances Wallace, who also lived in Springfield, objected to the match, believing Abraham Lincoln was not as wellborn as their sister. Despite the family’s objections, a disruption in their courtship—occasioned by Mary’s anger at Abraham’s tardy arrival for a dance—and Abraham’s own hesitations, twenty-four-year-old Mary Todd married thirty-three-year-old Abraham Lincoln on November 4, 1842. He gave her a ring inscribed Love Is Eternal.

Marriage and Family

Like most nineteenth century American women, after marriage Mary was soon absorbed in childbearing and raising and caring for her home and husband. Mary Todd Lincoln became pregnant almost immediately with her first son. Named after her father, he was born in August, 1843. Soon her second son, Edward Baker Lincoln, followed, but Eddie suffered from tuberculosis and died in 1850. In a pattern that suggests the Lincolns controlled their fertility, only after Eddie’s death did Mary become pregnant again. William Wallace Lincoln was born in 1850, and because, as his mother said, he needed a playmate, Thomas Lincoln, called Tad, was born in 1853.

As the family grew, and with the financial help of Mary’s father, the Lincolns moved from the boardinghouse they first inhabited to a small cottage and finally to their famous Springfield home on Eighth and Jackson Streets. Because Lincoln’s law practice took him to the courtrooms in counties throughout the Eighth Judicial District in central Illinois, Mary was responsible for running the house. In the nearly twenty years in which the Lincolns lived as a married couple in Springfield, Mary was well-known as an energetic housekeeper who worked hard to keep a clean, well managed home. Like other middle-class women in Springfield, at various times she employed domestic servants to help with the endless tasks of cooking, cleaning, sewing, and the dreaded Monday chores of washing and ironing. Yet Mary did most of the domestic labor in her household.

Like her husband, she was a permissive parent who was very much engaged with her children and who was ambitious for their success. Rarely did the sons of even Illinois’s wealthiest families venture across the prairies to eastern universities, but both Abraham and Mary Lincoln wanted their sons to attend the best schools in the United States. Accordingly, in 1859, Robert left for Harvard University, where he failed his entrance exams and spent a postgraduate year at Phillips Exeter Academy before his admission to Harvard in 1860.

By the 1850’s Abraham Lincoln’s political ambitions focused on a United States Senate seat. Earlier he had been elected as a Whig to Congress, where he served from 1847 to 1848. In an unusual decision that attests to her interest in politics, Mary and the boys accompanied him and lived in a Washington, D.C., boardinghouse. In 1855 and again in 1859, Lincoln was defeated for election to the Senate. During this dry spell in his political career, Mary played a supporting role in his efforts. She entertained important state officials, wrote patronage letters, and perhaps most important, bolstered the spirits of her husband.

In May, 1860, Lincoln became the presidential nominee of the Republican Party. When delegates and reporters traveled to Springfield to inform him of his nomination, they found a talkative, intelligent informant in his wife. They also complimented her home as tasteful and graceful. In an age in which Americans were beginning to foster a celebrity culture, Mary Lincoln became public property subject to praise and blame from the press in her new role as First Lady.

Presidency and First Ladyship

In February, 1861, the Lincoln family traveled to Washington to take up residence in the White House. By this time, seven southern states had seceded from the Union, and the future of the republic was in doubt. In these turbulent times, as the train carrying the new president moved through the Midwest into New England and the Middle Atlantic states, crowds flocked to the stations in order to hear him and to see his family, in an age before photographs introduced the people to their leader. Everywhere Mary Lincoln appeared, cheers were heard from a crowd that sometimes saluted “Mrs. Abe.” In Baltimore, however, the triumphant journey turned sour when rumors reached the presidential party of an assassination plot in that city. Within five weeks of their moving into the Executive Mansion, the Civil War began.

Once settled in the White House, Mary began to redecorate—a task that she believed necessary and important as a statement of the power of the Union. In previous administrations the White House had been neglected; its furniture and upholstery were dingy. The atmosphere of the White House became important during the Civil War, when the mansion played an essential role as a symbol of a powerful Union.

Mary, with the characteristic personal bravery that kept her in Washington even as other political wives returned home to safer sanctuaries, soon undertook her own campaign to improve the interior of the White House. She traveled to Philadelphia and New York in the spring of 1861 to choose new fabrics for the public rooms, and she ordered fancy wallpaper from a Paris house. She replaced the dusty rugs and hired Washington cabinetmakers to revarnish and fix the broken furniture that she, Willie, and Tad found in the attic. She also ordered a new, 190-piece set of Limoges china.

In the process she overspent the budget granted by Congress to the commissioner of public buildings. She also irritated her husband, who was furious at what he called her flub-a-dubs. Moreover, some newspapers accused her of trying to behave in the manner of a European queen. Unfairly and incorrectly, she was also accused of supporting the Confederacy, even of being a spy, because of her Kentucky heritage and the fact that her half brothers were fighting in the Confederate army.

Eventually, even her enemies had to agree that the restored public rooms of the White House were elegant. It was in the East Room and the Blue Room that Mary Lincoln presided over her receptions and soirees. Handsomely gowned in dresses and shawls which were often lent by shops that wanted advertisement of their wares, she was widely acknowledged as poised and sociable. According to servants, the White House was opened during the Lincoln years more often and to more Americans than in any previous administration. In March, 1865, more than two thousand Americans pushed into the White House to enjoy what became the last Lincoln reception.

Intensely interested in politics, Mary sometimes interceded with her husband’s cabinet officers in order to gain various civilian and military posts for her family and friends. Once Secretary of State William H. Seward encouraged her to mind domestic affairs, but this First Lady believed that an interest in public issues was, in fact, her business. Her interest in matters beyond the usual fare of women is documented in the telegrams that Abraham sent her while she was away. They frequently mentioned military news which the president knew she would be interested in reading.

In the summers the Lincolns moved to the Old Soldiers Home outside Washington, where the air was considered cleaner and fresher. Mary, who traveled more than any other First Lady up to this time, also visited New England. When in Washington, she was, like many other women, a frequent visitor to the Army hospitals, and she helped raise money to aid newly freed slaves who moved into Washington during the Civil War.

The White House was also home to a family with young children. In this era, with her husband’s office on the second floor, Mary and the children had to step over the patronage seekers lining the halls in order to get to the seven rooms of the family quarters in the West Wing. With maternal sensitivity, Mary understood that Willie and Tad were isolated from other children and so she worked hard to find playmates for them. She was also concerned about her husband as he struggled to find a general and strategy. For the most part, recreation outside the White House took the form of visits to the theater or afternoon carriage rides around Washington.

The White House, for all its glories as a center of power during four years of war, soon brought sorrow to Mary Lincoln. In February, 1862, eleven-year-old Willie died of typhoid fever. Both his parents were desolate. While the president could absorb Willie’s death into a larger perspective of the sorrows of the time, his wife was unable to do so. Mary’s fierce mourning rendered her incapacitated for months. Then in 1865, shortly after Lincoln’s second inaugural and just as the war was ending, she saw her husband murdered as they watched the playOur American Cousin in Ford’s Theatre.

Legacy

Again devastated by the abrupt loss of a loved one, Mary moved to Chicago with Tad. Later she traveled to Europe with Tad, who, after their return from Germany in 1871, died an agonizing death from pleurisy, the third of her sons to die before her. In 1875 Robert Lincoln had his mother committed to an insane asylum, and after her successful battle to be released, she moved to France. She returned the year before her death in 1882 to live with her sister Elizabeth Edwards in Springfield.

Her legacy as a First Lady involved her commitment to making the White House a statement of power and glory during a threatening period of American history. Ahead of her time, she turned the president’s home as well as his public entertainments into symbolic statements of his authority and, through him, the power of the nation. It was a role that would bring future First Ladies acclaim, but in Mary’s time it was an unusual obligation for First Ladies, who usually stayed out of the limelight. No one since Dolley Madison had taken such pains to fix up the White House and turn it into a place where the American people—soldiers, politicians, and others—could meet the leader of the nation. Given her interest in public affairs, Mary Lincoln also represented a new kind of First Lady—one who was concerned with affairs beyond domestic life.

Bibliography

Baker, Jean H. Mary Todd Lincoln: A Biography. New York: W. W. Norton, 1986. A largely sympathetic biography that looks at Mary Lincoln’s life from her perspective.

Brooks, Noah. Washington, D.C., in Lincoln’s Time. 1895. Reprint. Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1971. Edited revision with new commentary by Lincoln biographer Herman Mitgang.

Helm, Katherine. Mary, Wife of Lincoln. New York: Harpers, 1928. An engaging biography that includes family perspectives on Mary Lincoln.

Randall, Ruth Painter. Mary Lincoln: Biography of a Marriage. Boston: Little, Brown, 1953. Based on excellent research, Randall’s book discusses the Lincoln marriage with sympathy and understanding.

Schreiner, Samuel A., Jr. The Trials of Mrs. Lincoln. New York: Donald A. Fine, 1987. An account of Mary Lincoln’s later years. With an index.

Turner, Justin, and Linda Leavitt. Mary Lincoln: Her Life and Letters. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1972. Although Mary Lincoln’s letters continue to surface, this compendium serves as an excellent introduction to her life.