{"id":39,"date":"2026-05-19T21:07:02","date_gmt":"2026-05-19T21:07:02","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/cityrelocationnews.com\/?p=39"},"modified":"2026-05-19T21:07:02","modified_gmt":"2026-05-19T21:07:02","slug":"mary-todd-lincoln-has-long-been-derided-is-her-reputation-salvageable","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/cityrelocationnews.com\/?p=39","title":{"rendered":"Mary Todd Lincoln Has Long Been Derided. Is Her Reputation Salvageable?"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Elizabeth Hardwick, visiting her home town of Lexington, Kentucky, in the late nineteen-sixties, declared that \u201cthe glory of the place is a certain vault-like solidity.\u201d Even so, she could find in Mary Todd Lincoln, one of the town\u2019s most famous residents, \u201cnothing to be happy about. Neurotic, self-loving, in debt at the White House, a bad wife, a rotten mother.\u201d<\/p>\n

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The first and third items in this indictment are indisputable; the second is a complicated and qualified matter; and the last two are libels, still part of popular legend no matter how often disproved by serious biography. So persistent are the charges against Mrs. Lincoln, even in minds as well informed as Hardwick\u2019s, that Lois Romano, in her new book, \u201cAn Inconvenient Widow: The Torment, Trial, and Triumph of Mary Todd Lincoln,\u201d decides they need refuting once again.<\/p>\n

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The Todd family was so important in Lexington that Abraham Lincoln may (or may not) have remarked, \u201cGod spells his name with one D, but the Todds spell theirs with two.\u201d Romano, who had a long career as a Washington Post<\/em> reporter, explains that Mary\u2019s father, Robert Smith Todd, operated variously as \u201ca lawyer, bank president, successful wholesale merchant, cotton factory owner, and political power broker.\u201d Mary was the sixth child of his first wife, Eliza, who died giving birth to a seventh; Betsy, his second wife, with whom Mary almost never got along, went on to have nine children of her own. During Mary\u2019s adolescence, Mr. Todd moved his family from a house with nine rooms to one with fourteen, on West Main Street.<\/p>\n

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Instructed by a Parisian couple at Mentelle\u2019s for Young Ladies, Mary, as Romano notes, got more schooling than her future husband did. She surely was also exposed to Madame Charlotte Mentelle\u2019s feminist beliefs and abolitionist leanings. Mary\u2019s \u201cdisconcerting volatility, marked by stark highs and lows,\u201d was first noticed at the school and never fully left her. Nor did politics. \u201cA violent little Whig,\u201d according to her family, Mary idolized Henry Clay, that party\u2019s founder and a three-time Presidential nominee. Unlike the young Abraham Lincoln, another passionate if more pacific Whig, she actually knew Clay, a neighbor in Lexington.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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Mary stayed in her home town until she was nearly twenty-one, by which time she could no longer abide her stepmother and the Todds\u2019 overstuffed mansion. In 1839, she went off to live with a married sister, Elizabeth Edwards, in Springfield, Illinois, a more rough-and-tumble place than Lexington but a town soon to be its state\u2019s capital. Witty and flirtatious and socially ambitious, Mary immediately attracted the interest of two state legislators, but Stephen\u00a0A. Douglas was awfully short, and a Democrat besides, whereas the towering Abraham Lincoln, despite a lack of polish, had the sort of politics and personality that drew Mary in. A year later, they agreed to marry.<\/p>\n

Edwards found Lincoln \u201ccold\u201d rather than just ungainly, but Mary, strongly intuitive, sensed that she had found the patient yin to her enlivening yang. She persevered in that belief even when Lincoln broke off their engagement for eighteen months, for reasons that remain the subject of endless biographical speculation and historical fiction. Mary waited out Lincoln\u2019s guilty, perhaps suicidal gloom\u2014knowing, as he probably did, too, that their disparate psychologies could still combine to produce a formidable alternating current. \u201cThey had chosen each other,\u201d Romano writes, settling the matter sensibly without fully unravelling it. The Lincolns wed on November 4, 1842, in the Edwardses\u2019 parlor, where Mary\u2019s corpse would be laid out four tumultuous decades later.<\/p>\n

Between 1843 and 1853, Mary gave birth to four boys. She would bury three of them before they turned eighteen and be left with the eldest and least affectionate, Robert Todd Lincoln, who eventually became her mortal enemy. But, during the pre-Presidential years, the Lincoln household appears to have been as rollicking as it was, occasionally, stormy. Mary pushed her husband, a circuit-riding lawyer, deeper into a political life that would be marked by intermittent success and more frequent failure. She accompanied him to Washington for a portion of the single congressional term that he served, in the late eighteen-forties. Once Mary returned to Springfield, Lincoln wrote to her with a mixture of despondence and detachment, the latter a quality that biographers have always found present in him and absent from his wife: \u201cIn this troublesome world, we are never quite satisfied. When you were here, I thought you hindered me some in attending to business; but now, having nothing but business\u2014no variety\u2014it has grown exceedingly tasteless to me.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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In these early years, Mary helped more often than she hindered, as when she steered Lincoln away from accepting the dead-end territorial governorship of Oregon. Like Nancy Reagan a century later, she carried her husband\u2019s grudges for him, warning him about rivalrous colleagues with whom his own temperament often let him continue to do business. Romano points out that, when Lincoln emerged as a dark horse in the 1860 Presidential race, journalists covering the election sometimes found Mary more impressive than her spouse. That June, one newspaper contrasted her \u201clady-like courtesy and polish\u201d with her husband\u2019s \u201cawkwardness,\u201d noticing how she \u201cconverses with freedom and grace.\u201d<\/p>\n

The two of them were enough of a team that, on the night he won, Lincoln rushed home from the Springfield telegraph office to declare, famously, \u201cMary, Mary! We are elected!\u201d<\/p>\n

Harriet Lane, a niece of the departing bachelor President, James Buchanan, was the first woman routinely called the First Lady, but occupants of the position had long attracted the public\u2019s interest. All the notice that came with the role was, Romano writes, a \u201cdangerous elixir for an insecure woman who thrived on attention.\u201d The scrutiny was unaccompanied by any real support from Washington\u2019s female social \u00e9lite. Elizabeth Blair Lee, a rare sympathetic member of that establishment, wrote to her husband, in 1861, \u201cThe women kind are giving Mrs. Lincoln the cold shoulder in the City.\u201d<\/p>\n

Within six weeks of Lincoln\u2019s Inauguration, the Civil War had broken out and Mary was \u201cdrowning,\u201d according to Romano, surrounded by \u201copportunists and rogues\u201d as numerous as the rats skittering through the Executive Mansion\u2019s walls. The Union\u2019s hastily augmented army couldn\u2019t get to the capital fast enough, and there was no guarantee that Mrs. Jefferson Davis wouldn\u2019t soon be calling the White House home. On April 22, 1861, the National Republican<\/em> reported that \u201cemployees of the General Post Office Department\u00a0.\u00a0.\u00a0. were instructed to hold themselves in readiness to repair to the Department, where arms would be furnished them at a moment\u2019s warning.\u201d Weeks after the 7th New York Regiment arrived to secure the capital, Mary was off to New York and Philadelphia, where she made some morale-boosting public appearances.<\/p>\n

But she had also gone north to shop. She quickly blew through a congressional allowance for the White House\u2019s redecoration, purchasing extravagant wallpaper, chandeliers, and carpets. Between the election and the Inauguration, she had already amassed unsustainable personal debt for new clothes. \u201cCompulsive shopping had not yet been identified as an affliction,\u201d Romano notes, but it \u201cfueled an emotional void\u201d in Mary, even when it was being enabled by public funds. She would engage in dodgy financial behavior for much of her life, but it was more often a result of impulse and panic than the sort of methodical grift practiced, so far without consequence, by the current First Lady.<\/p>\n

The press alternated praise of Mrs. Lincoln\u2019s improvements to the Executive Mansion with scornful doesn\u2019t-she-know-there\u2019s-a-war-on cracks. Mary showed off the renovations at a number of parties, most conspicuously at an enormous ball given on February 5, 1862. Romano surveys the scene: \u201cA Chinese pagoda bubbled with champagne.\u00a0.\u00a0.\u00a0. The tables were decorated like a war-themed child\u2019s birthday party. On display was a large helmet molded of sugar, as well as replicas of Fort Pickens and the frigate Union<\/em>\u00a0.\u00a0.\u00a0. surrounded by sugared guns, sails, flags and cherubs.\u201d Cementing the First Lady\u2019s identification with this excess, the Marine Band struck up the new \u201cMary Lincoln Polka.\u201d<\/p>\n

That night, both the President and his wife periodically fled upstairs to check on their most beloved son, the eleven-year-old Willie, sick with a fever that would kill him two weeks later. His death plunged his parents into prolonged, disabling grief\u2014Mary\u2019s so clamorous that Lincoln had to point through a window toward Washington\u2019s insane asylum, insisting that she try to remain out of it.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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Romano admits to Mary\u2019s long-standing \u201chistrionics,\u201d \u201ceruptions,\u201d \u201ctemper,\u201d \u201cmood swings,\u201d and \u201cemotional immaturity,\u201d but recognizes how Willie\u2019s death started a more serious \u201cmental decline\u201d that today\u2019s medications might have helped forestall. Lincoln himself would likely have benefitted from modern prescription drugs for what was then thought to be his \u201cmelancholia.\u201d On his own, he had learned some useful mood-altering behaviors, such as drafting what he called \u201chot letters\u201d to his foes\u2014and then leaving them unsent. In contrast, Romano skillfully identifies how Mary\u2019s own coping mechanisms, \u201cthe self-centered traits that helped her survive her childhood,\u201d would eventually \u201calienate people.\u201d After Willie died, she grabbed the crutch of Spiritualism, travelling to s\u00e9ances and bringing mediums to the White House, prompting one of Mary\u2019s sisters to dismiss her as \u201cunnatural and abnormal.\u201d<\/p>\n

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Romano\u2019s sturdy book may not stint on examples of Mary\u2019s bad behavior\u2014including a ferociously jealous verbal assault, near the end of the war, on the wife of a prominent Union general\u2014but the biographer keeps tilting against those who slighted Mary in even the most superficial ways. Her too youthful and d\u00e9collet\u00e9 fashions were available for mockery, and, though Napoleon\u2019s Union-supporting nephew remained polite enough during an 1861 visit to the White House, he noted in his private diary that Mary had \u201cthe manner of a petit bourgeois and wears tin jewelry.\u201d A young James Garfield, the future President, disparaged Mary\u2019s looks in a letter home and was scolded for doing so by his wife.<\/p>\n

Much more dangerously, Mary was charged with being a Southern sympathizer or spy. With a host of siblings and in-laws in the Confederate Army, some of them rapidly being promoted, she could not shake these accusations, even after she refused to mourn the death of a half brother, Alexander Todd. Mary made frequent unobtrusive visits to Union hospitals, where, Romano writes, she \u201csat for hours with the men, read to them, fed them, helped dress wounds, and wrote to their families on their behalf when they could not hold a pen.\u201d Her Unionism was, in fact, implacable: when Jefferson Davis\u2019s wife,Varina, learned of Lincoln\u2019s assassination, she wept; when Mary heard of Davis\u2019s capture and imprisonment, a month after her own husband\u2019s killing, she wrote to her abolitionist friend Charles Sumner that her faith in God\u2019s goodness had been restored. Even so, the rumors of treason ground on. Richard Yates, a Republican from Illinois, raised them on the Senate floor in 1870, when he argued against a widow\u2019s pension for Mary.<\/p>\n

Her childhood na\u00efvet\u00e9 about the supposed contentment of the Todd family\u2019s slaves evolved slowly toward an abolitionism more emotive and less tactical than Lincoln\u2019s. One sees this in her letters to Sumner and in an account of her left by Elizabeth Keckly, a once enslaved modiste who became her confidante, her guide to participation in a relief group for formerly enslaved people, and the travel companion of her early widowhood. When the relationship blew up over the publication of Keckly\u2019s empathetic yet candid book, \u201cBehind the Scenes; or, Thirty Years a Slave, and Four Years in the White House,\u201d in 1868, Mary spoke with a disgraceful bitterness about \u201cthe colored historian.\u201d It was the kind of sarcastic insult she had at one time summoned against the Irish and immigrants in general.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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Though prone to guilt (she regarded Willie\u2019s death as punishment for her own failings), Mary did not feel regret for having proceeded with the couple\u2019s plans for Good Friday evening in 1865, even after many invitees declared themselves unavailable to join the Lincolns at Ford\u2019s Theatre. Months later, in a letter to the painter Francis Bicknell Carpenter, she referred to the other attacks conducted or planned for that evening by John Wilkes Booth and his co-conspirators, writing that if Lincoln \u201chad remained at the W.H. on that night of darkness, when the fiends prevailed, he would have been horribly cut to pieces<\/em>\u2014Those fiends, had too long contemplated, this inhuman murder, to have allowed, him<\/em>, to escape.\u201d There is no denying her perceptiveness, and her contemporaneous letters to her husband\u2019s successor, Andrew Johnson\u2014mostly attempts to secure positions for Lincoln loyalists\u2014do not suggest a woman mentally finished off by yet more grief and loss. Anyone seeking a full understanding of Mary will benefit from reading her correspondence, published in 1972; the letters, however peculiar in their observations and punctuation, reveal the intellectual capacities of a woman often seen wholly in terms of her emotions.<\/p>\n

At forty-six, Mary was left to move between Chicago hotels, both fancy and plain, and to wage a long battle for a pension while her husband\u2019s will remained in probate. Newspapers pretended to be scandalized when she sold off the clothes they had criticized her for purchasing a decade earlier. Romano nicely summarizes the \u201cdisordered life\u201d Mary now led: \u201cstrategic and manic, rational and desperate, canny and crass.\u201d Still ahead of her were European wanderings; the death of her youngest son, Tad (from pleurisy, at eighteen); and a brief confinement in an Illinois insane asylum. The judicial proceedings effecting the latter were instigated by Robert and consisted of a three-hour trial with testimony from seven doctors (one of whom was the director of the sanitarium) and \u201ca bizarre parade of store clerks and hotel maids\u201d swearing to Mrs. Lincoln\u2019s odd behavior. Mary was soon released, largely through the efforts of Myra Bradwell, a \u201cself-trained attorney\u201d who later became the Illinois bar\u2019s first female member.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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If \u201cAn Inconvenient Widow\u201d seems to speed through Mary\u2019s last several years\u2014more European exile, cascading physical infirmities, a final return to Springfield\u2014the reader is almost relieved, having come to share her frequently expressed yearning for release into the afterlife.<\/p>\n

Romano puts herself in the curious position of fighting a battle that has already been won on facts but not yet in legend. The cruel cartoon of a constantly shrewish, venal, and disloyal Mary began cementing itself in the public mind when William Herndon, Lincoln\u2019s Springfield law partner, started lecturing about his reminiscences within months of the President\u2019s murder. Having loathed Mary for decades (the feeling was entirely mutual), Herndon moved beyond personal animus into outright fabrication by promoting the fairy tale that the real love of Lincoln\u2019s life had been a young woman named Ann Rutledge, whom he knew in Illinois, in the eighteen-thirties, before her death from typhoid fever. Romano writes that \u201cit would be sixty years\u201d before the story was publicly contested, though attempts at refutation actually began almost immediately.<\/p>\n

Measured rehabilitation of the First Lady\u2019s character has been the dominant mode of Mary Lincoln biography for more than seventy years. Ruth Painter Randall\u2019s 1953 book told (and perhaps overstated) \u201cthe amazing and hitherto neglected story of Mrs. Lincoln as abolitionist.\u201d Twenty years later, Ishbel Ross, assessing Mary\u2019s unruly behavior, wrote that \u201cher attacks were intermittent, and her eccentricities were only a small part of her story.\u201d The nineteen-eighties brought Jean\u00a0H. Baker\u2019s balanced and widely read study, which swept away \u201cclassic instances of a male-ordered history that is no longer acceptable.\u201d And Catherine Clinton\u2019s \u201cMrs. Lincoln: A Life, \u201d from 2009, further extended the well-rounded approach. If there is a recent outlier that is tough on Mary, it would be Michael Burlingame\u2019s \u201cAn American Marriage\u201d (2021). But the prevailing forgiving approach was taken by Elizabeth Keckly as far back as 1868: \u201cMrs. Lincoln may have been imprudent, but since her intentions were good, she should be judged more kindly than she has been.\u201d<\/p>\n

And yet, when it comes to what Romano calls \u201cthe popular imagination,\u201d Mary is perpetually vanquished. There, a mad, out-of-control Mary lives on as tenaciously as George Washington\u2019s inability to tell a lie. She has been sensitively portrayed by any number of actresses\u2014among them Julie Harris, Mary Tyler Moore, and Sally Field\u2014whose performances have somehow never really altered our perception. For the past two years, Cole Escola\u2019s \u201cOh, Mary!,\u201d a play as hilarious as it is sick, has been selling out on Broadway, its title figure a boozy, promiscuous wannabe cabaret singer, a woman so bored by politics that she can\u2019t understand her husband\u2019s objections to her ambition, or even his frame of reference:<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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Abraham<\/em>: No! It\u2019s inappropriate! We\u2019re at war!
Mary<\/em>: With who?
Abraham<\/em>: The South!
Mary<\/em>: Of what?<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/blockquote>\n

\u201cOh, Mary!\u201d was a finalist for the 2025 Pulitzer Prize for drama. Next February, it will come to Washington, D.C., playing the National Theatre, three blocks from the White House, on Lincoln\u2019s birthday.<\/p>\n

One key to Bad Mary\u2019s persistence in the American mind can be found in the temperamental polarity that first drew Mary Todd and Abraham Lincoln to each other. A reader who turns to Keckly\u2019s book will be given a further clue to posterity\u2019s demonization of Mary:<\/p>\n

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Mr. Lincoln\u00a0.\u00a0.\u00a0. was not admired for his graceful figure and finely moulded face, but for the nobility of his soul and the greatness of his heart. His wife was different. He was wholly unselfish in every respect, and I believe that he loved the mother of his children very tenderly. He asked nothing but affection from her, but did not always receive it. When in one of her wayward, impulsive moods, she was apt to say and do things that wounded him deeply.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/blockquote>\n

What counts more here than Keckly\u2019s balanced view of Mary is her paean to Lincoln. Our need to meditate upon Lincoln as a savior and a saint\u2014especially in times as rotten as the present\u2014gives us a motivation, perhaps subconscious, to vilify Mary. If the assassination made the President a Christlike figure, his forbearance in the face of a wife\u2019s unreasonableness provides him with an extra measure of purity. Romano is aware of the thumb on the scale, and she blames \u201cearly historians\u201d for it: \u201cThe more Lincoln\u2019s legend soared, the more Mary\u2019s reputation declined.\u201d But the fault lies more with the citizenry than with scholarship. Each reiteration and exaggeration of Mary\u2019s bad behavior is another civic stroke of the chisel that perfects the monumental Lincoln in our collective imagination. The task is advanced by our malice toward one, and that one is Mary.\u00a0\u2666<\/p>\n

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Thomas Mallon reviews a new biography of Mary Todd Lincoln, \u201cAn Inconvenient Widow,\u201d by Lois Romano.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":38,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-39","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-books"],"yoast_head":"\nMary Todd Lincoln Has Long Been Derided. Is Her Reputation Salvageable? - City Relocation News<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/cityrelocationnews.com\/?p=39\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Mary Todd Lincoln Has Long Been Derided. 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