What led you to believe that what the world needs now is a biography of Mary Todd Lincoln?
I didn't decide that recently, even though it seems I did because we're all talking about the play Oh, Mary! I became interested in her a number of years ago after covering first ladies. In doing research on different first ladies, it struck me that here was a man—Abraham Lincoln—who was one of the most consequential presidents in history, and I believe we got his wife wrong. She was portrayed as a burden, and I believe she was a partner, and I thought that she deserved a fair shake.
The one-line description of her is that she was a difficult person, hypochondriac, hyperbolic, and, as you said, a burden. As I read the book, I felt sympathy for her but also did not find her likable. She did seem to have a few bad qualities. It’s confusing.
Here's what I like to say: Her picture wasn't complete. She was vilified, but there was a whole other side of her, and I believe with all my heart he would have not been president without her. He was a depressive personality. He would go into long funks. Now, the scholars like to use the word melancholy. But melancholy is a very deep form of depression. She also had some mental illness, but hers was more manic. So she was able to lift him up. She was an engine, and he would not have made it to the White House were it not for her engine. He might not have pushed himself far enough, even though he was brilliant and ambitious.
What did Abe see in her, and what did she see in him? She came from a rather cultured and refined family in Lexington, Kentucky, a very metropolitan city at the time, and he was a bit of a country hick.
I can see what he saw in her. He was a Whig, and she was a Whig, and she was very political. Her father was close to Henry Clay. He was a regular guest at the dinner table. He was secretary of state, speaker of the House. He ran for president several times. He was a big deal, and he was part of their family. So you could see how Lincoln would be intrigued by her.
What was more curious was that she found something in him. She had a rough childhood. Her mother died when she was 6 years old, and her father remarried someone who she did not get along with, and who then had nine more children. She's in the middle of 14, 15 children. She described her childhood as desolate. Lincoln had a lot of empathy. He was kind, he was intuitive, and I think she saw in him somebody who might take care of her. I tend to think that Lincoln liked the idea of taking care of somebody. There was something in him that was attracted to her neediness. Regardless of what some people have written—some men—they had a real partnership and shared a singular goal: getting him to the White House.
Your book shows us they each had their own set of troubles. He was exceedingly patient with her. He loved her for all these difficulties. When he was president, people around him were always badmouthing her, and he stood by her. What does that tell us about him?
What does it tell us about him because she was flawed? Let’s look at it a different way. He was no prize to live with. The second she marries him, he goes on the road, as a traveling lawyer, for months at a time. She’s in Springfield—which was no Lexington with its paved roads—and she's raising their kids by herself. She's had enormous anxiety. Then he comes home, and he's not really there. He goes into these trances. It was not Ozzie and Harriet. He was not this great, incredible catch at first. She endured quite a lot in those first 20 years, and he wasn't making a lot of money.
After Lincoln was shot, the political world seems to have wanted Mary to disappear. She was treated in a shockingly horrendous manner. She wasn’t provided financial support. There was an outright smear campaign mounted against her. She was harshly and cruelly criticized. Why was that?
As we started this conversation, you said she wasn't likable. That’s part of it. She liked who she liked. There were some people who thought she was wonderful, generous, and kind. But she antagonized a lot of people, and she was needy and demanding, and they just wanted her to go away. It would never happen now because today's politicians understand that the legacy of a president is tied to the first lady. But they thought she would just go away. It was reprehensible. Lincoln’s friends and allies—such as Supreme Court Justice David Davis and Leonard Swett—had the resources to help her buy a house, but they didn't. Davis, the executor of Lincoln’s estate, decided that she needed to move back to Springfield into the house the Lincolns owned. She didn't want to. But if she wasn't going to do that, he wasn't going to free up the money. It was cruel.
After Lincoln’s death, his former law partner, William Herndon, was giving lectures saying Lincoln never loved her.
Mary did not like Herndon for a number of reasons. He was smart but a loudmouth, indiscreet, and a drunk. Mary thought he was beneath Lincoln. He was also a very loud abolitionist. Even though Lincoln is credited with ending slavery, we all know that he was slow on emancipation, and Mary, as a political matter, knew that he could not be an abolitionist in the 1850s. He had to be a little bit more delicate as he was moving up the political ladder. One time, Lincoln had to bail Herndon out of jail because he went on a bender and broke a store window. So she held him in great disdain and didn't hide it. She would never invite him to her house for dinner. If you read Herndon's letters, I swear it's all about the dinner.
He claims Lincoln was never comfortable with Mary and would leave the house to get away from Mary yelling at him. In his lectures, he said that Lincoln never loved her, that he loved some other woman. He was making up stuff. He had a real ax to grind. Davis was more the problem. He couldn’t stand the fact Mary was trying to raise money for herself because he wouldn't settle Lincoln’s estate and provide her funds.
She could be her own worst enemy, right? She engaged in several schemes to sell her clothing—
Why was that bad?
But there was some shiftiness, right?
She believed there was nothing wrong with selling her clothes to raise money, but the way she went about doing it did cause a problem. She believed the Republican Party should have bailed her out of her debts because her husband gave his life for the country. But the sympathy for him didn’t transfer to her. She didn't have quite enough money to buy and sustain a house, and she thought these people should take care of her. So she goes to New York to sell the clothes, and she falls in with a hustler. He has her write letters to him, dating them from Chicago when she was in New York, saying, “I'm so poor, and I have no money, and I need to sell my clothes, and all of these Republicans won't help me.” And he tries to peddle these clothes to these people she references in the letter. It doesn’t work. He gives the letters to the New York World, and she’s humiliated nationally because it looked like she was trying to shake down these politicians.
Her life is full of tragedies, not just the assassination of her husband. She loses three sons to disease. And one of the saddest parts of the book comes later in her life when her son Robert Lincoln in 1875, 10 years after Lincoln’s assassination, gets her declared insane and committed. There was a trial in which she was railroaded in the most unfair way.
It was unbelievable. At this point, she and Robert are both in Chicago, and for some reason, she drives Robert crazy, even though they're not living together. She’s shopping all the time. But she’s never going to run out of money, because she’s just spending the interest from the bonds she has. But he gets it in his head that she’s buying stuff she doesn't need. I think he was worried that she would spend all her money and then he’d have to take care of her. And she was creating controversy by fighting for a pension from Congress. That was embarrassing and played out in the newspapers. He felt all this was a poor reflection on him.
So how did Robert Lincoln gin up a trial to label her insane?
Five years prior, any husband in Illinois could commit his wife for any reason. If you disagree with him at the dinner table, if you wouldn't conform to his religious beliefs, the woman could be confined. A woman named Elizabeth Packard mounted a campaign and got legislation passed saying there had to be a jury trial to commit a woman. That brings us to Mary. She was supposed to be given notice of the trial, and she wasn't. She was supposed to have been assigned an attorney, and all they did was bring an attorney to the courtroom the day of the trial.
One day, a friend of her husband shows up and says, “You should come with me or they’ll arrest you.” He takes her to this courtroom for a trial, and it's packed. The jurors are there, the witnesses. All the shopkeepers are there to testify. People from the hotel where she lived were there to say she was a little wacky. And the media was there. It was completely rigged by Robert and his father's friends. She gets convicted in 10 minutes. Later a juror was quoted saying that he really didn't think she was crazy. He said that he thought she had some episodic issues but the jurors were given instructions that boxed them in and had to find her insane.
Her reputation was also shaped by her interest in the spirit world, seances, and mediums, right?
The money issue drove Robert crazy. The second thing that drove him crazy was her interest in spiritualists, trying to get in touch with her deceased husband and sons. He was embarrassed by it. But having that interest was common during the Civil War. Seven hundred thousand soldiers had died. Many people were into spiritualism. If she could have been on antidepressants, she would have been, but they didn't have them. Instead, she was finding anything she could for solace.
She over-grieved. She had lost three sons by the time Robert committed her, and her husband was killed in front of her. She was looking for lifelines, and the two she found was shopping and spiritualists. She would find these people, and she was so gullible. Robert was worried they were going to fleece her. Another thing: She was carrying around the equivalent of close to a million dollars in bearer bonds sewed into her dress. When Robert realized that he was apoplectic. He, too, was depressive, and he’s a wreck about all this and goes to his father's friends and says we have to get her off the street.
It’s such a sad story. She gave the country one of its best presidents, suffered a tremendous loss, and was treated so shabbily. But she won her release from the mental institution four months later. She went on to live in Europe for four years before returning to Springfield and dying of a stroke in 1882 at the age of 63. An estimated 15,000 to 18,000 books on Abraham Lincoln have been publish—.
Only Jesus has more books.
I know our subject here is Mary, but what does your book tell us about Abe? Anything we didn’t already know?
You're not going to get me to say anything bad about Abraham Lincoln.
I'm not asking you to say anything bad about Abraham Lincoln.
My takeaway is that he was an incredibly good man, and he really loved her. But he was a difficult husband. Not that he mistreated her. He was absent—physically and mentally. That was hard. She was alone a lot. He was a moral authority, but I never saw him before from the perspective that he was an absentee husband. She gave up everything for him, and she had a troubled personality. I think getting through life every day was hard for her. He knew how to manage her and her anxiety, and part of the problem was that when he died, there was nobody there to give her solace. That was something very big she lost when he died.
