Mary Todd Lincoln

Mary Todd Lincoln, First Lady

December 13, 1818–July 16, 1882

HIGHEST RANK:

American First Lady

ASTROLOGICAL SIGN:

Sagittarius

NICKNAMES:

Molly, Mother, the Hellcat, Her Satanic Majesty, La Reine

WORDS TO REMEMBER:

“My husband—became distinguished above all. And yet owing to that fact, I firmly believe he lost his life and I am bowed to the earth with sorrow.”

“Get down, you fool!” cried a young Captain Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. to the commander in chief. It was July 1864, and Holmes was accompanying the president and his wife on a tour of the defenses of Washington. Jubal Early’s Confederate army had made its surprising appearance outside the capital, and Mr. Lincoln, wanting to get a good view of the action, had peered out from the earthworks of Fort Stevens, presenting Rebel sharpshooters with a conspicuous target in the shape of a stovepipe hat. Allegedly, Captain Holmes’s impertinent command did the trick, and a chastened Lincoln ducked for cover. His wife, standing nearby on safer ground, noted the episode with some alarm: The following day, while her husband was laughing about poor Holmes and his embarrassment over the incident, a stern-faced Mrs. Lincoln was telling Secretary of War Edwin Stanton that Washington’s defenses were totally unsatisfactory.

Giving direct opinions to the secretary of war on matters of military engineering was definitely not your typical errand for a first lady. But Mary Lincoln was hardly typical. She was born in Lexington, Kentucky, to Eliza and Robert Smith Todd, head of one of the state’s leading families. It was also one of the biggest—by the time Robert stopped breeding, he had blessed some sixteen children with life: seven with Eliza, his first wife and Mary’s mother, and nine with his second wife, Elizabeth Humphreys. Often called “Molly,” Mary Todd lived in a world of western American aristocracy that expected little more from its women than humility, poise, piety, constraint, some knowledge of books, and dancing. She learned a lot about these things at Shelby Female Academy in Lexington and Madame Mentelle’s, acquiring from an early age an appreciation for refinement that distinguished her class.

Mary Todd Lincoln claimed that she was frequently visited by ghosts while living in the White House; on several occasions, these spectral visitors even delivered top secret Confederate military plans.

She stood out as a young lady, but not always flatteringly. Mary had a couple of things she did quite naturally: engage in debate, a habit that proper belles were not supposed to cultivate, being the province of men; and mimicry, which most people thought was entertaining until they were the one being mimicked. Both were a sign of keen intelligence, however, as were her mastery of French, her ready wit, and her desire to plumb the depths of the era’s toughest issues. Considered quite pretty in an unusual way, she had no shortage of beaux and found that she liked playing them off each other. But she ended up giving her heart to only one.

His name, of course, was Abraham Lincoln. Mary met him after moving in with her sister’s family in Springfield, Illinois, and saw in the self-taught lawyer a man who was charming, eloquent, goofy, and careless by turns. He was clearly brilliant, however, and this was crucial; Mary had decided she needed a mate to match her own cerebral energies, one who could take her far. Lincoln had great expectations, even if he did look like an orangutan that had been kidnapped from Borneo, shaved, and dressed for display in P. T. Barnum’s freak show. By 1840, they were engaged.

It nearly didn’t come off, owing to miscommunication by both parties. “Old Abe,” as he was familiarly known to everyone but Mary (who never called him Abe), wasn’t exactly smooth. He scratched, quipped, hooted, and guffawed when he wasn’t really supposed to, which grated on her polished sensibilities. Unimpressed with his attentions (he was also notoriously aloof and unobservant), Mary allowed the impression that other courtiers were still in the picture, and Lincoln oafishly replied with abject depression. It all got sorted out in time with the help of mutual friends, but clearly these two had some issues.

After marrying in 1842, the couple settled in Springfield, holing up at the Globe Tavern until 1844, when Abraham bought a handsome, spacious house at the corner of Eighth and Jackson Streets for them and their new son, Robert. The new Mrs. Lincoln looked forward to having a family—she would bear three more sons—but she looked forward to her husband’s success just as much. After his public career stalled following his stint in the U.S. House of Representatives, nobody wanted him back in the thick of things more than she did. Lincoln was more than just an admirable figure and the love of her life; he was also equitable and self-confident enough to rely on her in ways that many nineteenth-century men would not have. He welcomed her opinion and wisdom, grew from her education, and relied on her support. She became an invaluable asset in his career, and she came to know it. A pleasant bonus came when Stephen Douglas, once a competitor for Mary’s affections, emerged as Lincoln’s principal antagonist. Though Douglas won the Senate contest in 1858, Honest Abe had secured his place on the national stage. Great things beckoned, and Mary was loving it.

Lincoln’s presidential victory in 1860 was bittersweet, and not only because South Carolina led a parade of states out of the Union as a result. Having been surrounded by supporters for so long through the campaign, Mary was stunned in 1861 to discover crowds of angry protesters in Maryland who wanted nothing so much as to get their hands on her husband’s neck before it arrived at the White House. Security considerations required that the president-elect sneak into Washington on a stealth train, while Mary covered the last leg of the trip without him. It wasn’t how she’d dreamt of entering the capital as the president’s spouse.

While pro-South agitators wanted to kill the president, the Unionists of Washington didn’t exactly welcome his wife with open arms. Their complaints were many and varied. To begin with, her reputation as a smart-aleck woman who meddled in politics preceded her to the nation’s capital. In another age, Mrs. Lincoln would’ve been considered an experienced advisor to her husband, but not by most ordinary folks in 1861. Then there was the fact that Mary Lincoln was a true Kentucky belle, complete with western mannerisms and a drawl—qualities that endeared her to the crowds of people that came out to welcome the Lincolns on the electoral train, but that Washington’s pro-North sophisticates dismissed as simple and a little irritating. Stuff like this could be written off as the usual chatter of small-minded mouths. Much harder to ignore, on the other hand, was the fact that the new first lady’s relations were unabashed, Lincoln-hating secessionists—hardly a small matter for the wife of a commander in chief whose young countrymen would soon be called upon to wade into sheets of Confederate fire. Indeed, Mary was the very personification of the war’s conflicted tragedy. Ultimately she would have nothing less than one full brother, three half brothers, and three brothers-in-law fighting against her husband’s armies. Such facts help to explain why so many loyal Unionists had a habit of cursing the White House after reading casualty lists that grew longer with every month.

Mary set about trying to win over some supporters with the usual tactics. She reviewed the troops in Washington along with her husband, making herself a noted fan of the military pageantry that gripped the city. And she visited local hospitals, where she brought food to wounded soldiers and wrote letters home for them. But her principal project involved the refurbishing of her new digs. The White House immediately became the project on which, she decided, her first ladyship would be either made or broken. Having Abraham elected president was like being given the key to the candy store, and Mary wasted no time gobbling up the goodies that awaited her.

And they awaited her principally in New York and Philadelphia. From celebrated merchants like E. V. Haughwout and Alexander Stewart, she purchased the finest porcelain, damask curtains and carpets, and wallpaper from France that cost nearly $7,000. Her buying habits were marked and voracious—accompanied by William Wood, commissioner of public buildings, she sometimes left her favorite emporiums carrying the goods herself like an addict who couldn’t wait to get her fix. The president signed off on everything, his mind too busy with martial difficulties to keep a tally of his wife’s reckless expenditures. She had always kept house back in Illinois, why should things be different in Washington?

Because she was out of control, that’s why. In very little time at all, the first lady made the $20,000 congressional appropriation for White House refurbishing magically go away—a sum that was supposed to cover the entire four-year term. Even a $6,000 repair appropriation had been … uh, appropriated. So serious was the situation that the secretary of the interior bothered to pay the president a visit in person to find out what in God’s name was going on. Lincoln, feeling as if he’d been taken advantage of, lost his temper and laid into Mary like he wished his generals would lay into the Confederates. To help pay off the debts, Mrs. Lincoln did everything from sell off White House furniture to fire the mansion’s steward. But it fell on someone else’s shoulders to really sort it all out. His name was Benjamin French, and he was the new commissioner of public buildings (William Wood’s appointment was never approved by the Senate). Playing a sort of shell game with government funds (as if nobody had ever done that before), French ended up paying for the first lady’s new “flubdubs,” as the president called them, with money slated for other public projects. Such was the state of bureaucratic cynicism in Washington at the time that nobody really gave a damn.

As for Mary, she never learned. Determined to plan and host the administration’s first state dinner for the diplomatic corps, an honor traditionally given to the secretary of state, Mary went head-to-head with Secretary Seward to co-opt the occasion. In the end she won, and hired one of the most expensive caterers in the country to make sure everything was right. She promptly sent the bill right over to Seward.

It was as if the dream that this well-bred woman had longed for her whole life had turned out to be harder—much harder—than she had anticipated. She had no idea. Willie, her third and, most agreed, favorite son died on February 20, 1862. Though no one could truly know it at the time, the eleven-year-old was a casualty of war as surely as any soldier at the front. With the influx of troops from all over the North turning the capital into a giant military camp, the Potomac—from which the first family drew its water—had become contaminated with filth. Willie’s typhoid was a direct result.

Though she had lost a son before (four-year-old Edward died in 1850), Mary was undone by Willie’s death and entered a new stage of her life: one shaped by death and a preoccupation with its ramifications. She was in good company—after all, she was first lady through the four bloodiest years of the nation’s history, stumbling like everyone else through a fugue of casualty lists, military hospitals, and photographs of mutilated men. It was a propitious time for mourning. And nobody did it as well as Mrs. Lincoln. Irritable and paranoid, she wore her heart on her sleeve, drove everyone in the household a little batty with bursts of incendiary anger, and turned to spiritualist séances to reach Willie’s soul.

Apparently, she succeeded. Willie even appeared to her in the first lady’s bedroom on occasion. Such visits went a long way toward assuaging Mary’s grief, but they didn’t prepare her for the horror of 1865. Not that she didn’t see it coming: not long after Lincoln’s reelection, she bought hundreds of dollars worth of mourning clothes, just in case her premonitions were true.

They were. Her husband’s assassination sent Mary Lincoln into a pit of ungovernable despair, complete with moaning, hysterics, and physical illness that laid her up for weeks. Indeed, so impenetrable and ruinous was her writhing grief that people began to worry that she might soon join Abraham. If Mary, volatile and wronged, ever had a chance of living out a healthy life, it went away with her husband’s corpse. Never again would she wear anything but black—an epic mourning jag that lasted seventeen years. She spent much of that time traveling in Europe and Canada, easing her ills at spa towns and trying to purge her memory of the past. Her frequent traveling companion was Tad, youngest of the Lincoln children. He died in Chicago in 1871, giving Mary a genuine complex. Her life had become as black as her clothes.

Incredibly, it would get worse. Stalked by death, adrift in financially chaotic circumstances that were a far cry from the comforts of Springfield and Washington, Mary fell into a spiral of erratic behavior, from selling her husband’s purported possessions to taking large doses of sedatives to raving about a fear of being alone to buying things she neither needed nor could afford. Her eldest and only surviving son, Robert, increasingly estranged, finally acted by having her taken to court to defend her own sanity. In a trial atmosphere that didn’t really give her a chance, a slew of witnesses—including Robert—convinced a jury that she was not fit to be left to her own devices. She was committed to an institution called Bellevue Place in Batavia, Illinois.

With some very good legal help, Mary ultimately got the decision reversed in another trial, then ran off to Europe a scorned, emotionally bashed-up woman. By 1882 she was suffering from near blindness, diabetes, spinal trouble, and a few other unpleasant things. She died in her sister’s house, in a darkened room she had been living (dying?) in for months.

It’s unfortunate that Mary Todd Lincoln has become one of the tragicomic witches of American history. Though neurotic (at least) and emotionally fragile, she was a remarkable person in her own right, with an expansive and sophisticated personality. Her great doom was to fall for a man who became the nation’s savior and sacrifice, a job that would’ve tested the hardiest of women. Withering under the intense light of public scrutiny and the loss of those dear to her, she succumbed to her weaknesses and became almost a parody of herself—a casualty of the war that stole from her the only source of love and stability she had ever known. Who wouldn’t go a little crazy after that?

SPOOKED

Mary Lincoln’s dear friend Elizabeth Keckley, former slave and seamstress par excellence, is supposed to have introduced the first lady to the world of spiritualism. Mrs. Lincoln responded to the occult as if it were the answer to her prayers—which it was. Not long after Willie’s death, she began hanging out at the home of the Lauries, Georgetown’s most celebrated spiritualists. There she met and befriended Nettie Colburn, the medium who became Mary’s primary conduit to her son’s ghost. Colburn’s skills were allegedly once put to the test in the White House when she was asked to identify a man who walked into the room disguised by a mask and heavy cloak. Assuming the identity of “Pinkie,” a Native American spirit who supposedly inhabited Nettie on occasion, she answered “Crooked Knife.” When the man turned out to be familiar Lincoln friend General Daniel Sickles, everyone agreed that Nettie (and Pinkie) had scored, as a “sickle” could be construed as a sort of crooked knife. (OK, it’s a stretch. But these folks were open to suggestion anyway.)

The president, a skeptic, indulged his wife’s eccentric beliefs for the obvious reason that they gave her emotional relief. But contacting Willie was one thing; bringing scandal into the White House was quite another. On those occasions when her son wasn’t … er, picking up the spiritual phone, as it were, Mary and her fellow séance-sitters had no problem establishing contact with whomever was feeling chatty that day in the beyond. Mary often charged into her husband’s office with Confederate military plans that had been provided by sources that were, to say the least, extraordinary. Not surprisingly, stuff like this began to wear on Old Abe’s patience. But it was nothing compared with the time Mary invited Charles Colchester, an English noble (not really) and medium of great renown, to come ply his creepy trade in the Executive Mansion. There, in the stygian gloom of the heavily draped Red Room, the “lord” summoned a spirit through the veil that began making quite a noise. Refusing to be fooled, one of the sitters broke the circle to reach for the source of the sound and discovered the very corporeal hand of Colchester himself shamelessly beating a drum. Journalist Noah Brooks, a friend of the Lincolns’, persuaded the humiliated Colchester to get the hell out of town. The charlatan soon pulled off a disappearing act that put his spirit shtick to shame.

BLUE BY YOU

Mrs. Lincoln took all kinds of guff during her stint as first lady. She was railed as extravagant, insensitive, erratic, superstitious, reckless. Interestingly, she was also criticized for being unfaithful to her belabored husband. One of Mary’s greatest challenges upon entering the White House was coping with the fact that her husband, whose career she had actively helped to shape, was no longer unconditionally available to her. As president, he was constantly surrounded by officious, unsmiling men with business and bad news to heap on his shoulders. She felt (as so many in her select sorority would feel through the years) as if she’d been abandoned. Craving intellectual stimulation and ingratiating company, she ended up creating her very own salon in the mansion’s Blue Room. There, Mrs. Lincoln held after-dinner court with her favorite sycophants, nearly all of whom were men—and men considered socially dangerous by Washington’s priggish elite. This, as well as the fact that wives were rarely included, led a few interested parties to send warnings to Mary to stop her scandalous meetings. She disregarded them, reveling in her arranged conversations about literature, war, romance, history, and other heady topics.

Among the esteemed regulars were Oliver Halsted, scion of a prominent New Jersey family and unscrupulous arms dealer, and Dan Sickles, corrupt political general and killer of his wife’s lover. But the most famous of Mary’s “beau monde friends” may have been Henry Wikoff, whose arrival in America had been preceded by a stint as an English spy. A worldly and mysterious figure, he had spent time in an Italian prison for seducing and kidnapping his fiancée. Though welcomed into the first lady’s circle, Mr. Wikoff had other things in mind besides Mary’s company—specifically, the president’s 1861 message to Congress, which he stole for printing by his employer, the New York Herald. Briefly imprisoned for his crime, the “Chevalier” Wikoff ultimately made his way back to Europe, where he offered his services to the French emperor.

DYSFUNCTIONAL FAMILY

It wasn’t easy for Mary Lincoln to have three half brothers die for the Rebel cause. Indeed, one of them, David Todd, was purported to have tortured Yankee prisoners of war before being wounded at Vicksburg. As wife of Abraham Lincoln, this was the stuff of nightmares. But as difficult as her brothers were, Mary seems to have suffered more at the hands of her half sisters. Martha Todd White, who had married an Alabama man, appealed to Mary’s sense of family to give her a White House pass with which she could travel north for valuable supplies. President Lincoln, stupidly generous, obliged. Martha soon appeared in Washington with trunks that everyone assumed were going to be filled with goods for the Confederate black market. A disgraced Mary Lincoln did what she could to distance herself from her pro-secessionist half sister, but Martha loved to blather on and on about her blood ties to the White House before returning to the South. Then there was Emilie Todd Helm, whose husband was killed at Chickamauga. By the winter of 1863, Emilie was living temporarily in the Executive Mansion, having been given a pass to do so by Lincoln despite her adamant refusal to take an oath of allegiance to the United States government. What ensued was one of the strangest episodes in the annals of presidential history: the half sister of the president’s wife, widow of a man who’d given his life for the cause Lincoln was sworn to destroy, did her mourning in the Union capital—indeed, she ate nightly with the president and his family. Abraham called her “little sister” and allowed her and Mary to immerse themselves in the business of missing their dead while he went about his official duties. Hatefully, Emilie wrote a letter to the president after she’d returned to the Confederacy, forgetting his hospitality and reminding him of the crimes he was perpetrating on the South. Mary was incensed and never spoke to Emilie again.

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