Mary Lincoln’s mostly tragic life
It is not easy being First Lady, as Mary Todd Lincoln could attest. The job – and that’s what it is – demands fortitude and grace because of the living-in-a-fishbowl life and the white-hot spotlight of expectations. Unfortunately, Mary Lincoln possessed, as her most generous critics put it, an “excitable nature.”
On the one hand, she did revel in the high social position that being First Lady afforded her. Born to an aristocratic Kentucky family, she was fond of entertaining, she was an excellent dancer and a witty and intelligent conversationalist. But as a southerner whose husband was leading the effort to defeat the Confederate South, she was caught between two worlds. Southerners considered her a traitor, while northerners never trusted her.
She was also a wild spendthrift – she owed thousands of dollars to creditors for her extravagant shopping sprees, to decorate both the White House and herself. Indeed, her worry that her husband might not be re-elected in 1864 had as much to do with her fear that her creditors would quickly call in the debts of a former First Lady as it did with the nation’s uncertain future. And, again, she felt caught. When she hosted White House dinners and receptions, as she was expected to do, she was often accused of unpatriotic extravagance in the midst of a costly war. Yet when she cut back on entertain- ing, as she did in grief over her son Willie’s death, she was accused of neglecting her social duties.
She never recovered from the death of her “darling Willie,” and her husband’s necessary focus on the war, at the expense of family life, left her feeling abandoned and resentful. As a result, her “excitable nature” increasingly turned to depression.
That depression became manic after her husband’s assassination in 1865. She spoke of “the utter impossibility of living another day,” and she managed to carry on only because her devoted son Tad accompanied her as she searched for a place that might restore her physical and mental health.
She never found it, and when Tad died in 1871, she lost touch with reality. So erratic was her behavior that her only remaining son, Robert, had her committed to a mental institution, which led to her and Robert’s complete estrangement. Utterly abandoned, Mary was finally rescued by her sister Elizabeth, who brought Mary to live with her in her home in Springfield, Illinois.
Mary finally died, tragically, in her sister’s home this week (July 16) in 1882. In a sad irony, 40 years earlier she had walked out of that very same home, her whole life before her, as the blushing bride of Abraham Lincoln. BRUCE G. KAUFFMANN
Emailauthor BruceG. Kauffmann atbruce@ history lessons.net