Mary Todd Lincoln Has Long Been Derided. Is Her Reputation Salvageable?
Elizabeth Hardwick, visiting her home town of Lexington, Kentucky, in the late nineteen-sixties, declared that “the glory of the place is a certain vault-like solidity.” Even so, she could find in Mary Todd Lincoln, one of the town’s most famous residents, “nothing to be happy about. Neurotic, self-loving, in debt at the White House, a bad wife, a rotten mother.”
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’s, that Lois Romano, in her new book, “An Inconvenient Widow: The Torment, Trial, and Triumph of Mary Todd Lincoln,” decides they need refuting once again.
The Todd family was so important in Lexington that Abraham Lincoln may (or may not) have remarked, “God spells his name with one D, but the Todds spell theirs with two.” Romano, who had a long career as a Washington Post reporter, explains that Mary’s father, Robert Smith Todd, operated variously as “a lawyer, bank president, successful wholesale merchant, cotton factory owner, and political power broker.” 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’s adolescence, Mr. Todd moved his family from a house with nine rooms to one with fourteen, on West Main Street.
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Instructed by a Parisian couple at Mentelle’s for Young Ladies, Mary, as Romano notes, got more schooling than her future husband did. She surely was also exposed to Madame Charlotte Mentelle’s feminist beliefs and abolitionist leanings. Mary’s “disconcerting volatility, marked by stark highs and lows,” was first noticed at the school and never fully left her. Nor did politics. “A violent little Whig,” according to her family, Mary idolized Henry Clay, that party’s 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.
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’ 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’s capital. Witty and flirtatious and socially ambitious, Mary immediately attracted the interest of two state legislators, but Stephen A. 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.
Edwards found Lincoln “cold” 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’s guilty, perhaps suicidal gloom—knowing, as he probably did, too, that their disparate psychologies could still combine to produce a formidable alternating current. “They had chosen each other,” Romano writes, settling the matter sensibly without fully unravelling it. The Lincolns wed on November 4, 1842, in the Edwardses’ parlor, where Mary’s corpse would be laid out four tumultuous decades later.
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: “In 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—no variety—it has grown exceedingly tasteless to me.”
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’s 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 “lady-like courtesy and polish” with her husband’s “awkwardness,” noticing how she “converses with freedom and grace.”
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, “Mary, Mary! We are elected!”
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’s interest. All the notice that came with the role was, Romano writes, a “dangerous elixir for an insecure woman who thrived on attention.” The scrutiny was unaccompanied by any real support from Washington’s female social élite. Elizabeth Blair Lee, a rare sympathetic member of that establishment, wrote to her husband, in 1861, “The women kind are giving Mrs. Lincoln the cold shoulder in the City.”
Within six weeks of Lincoln’s Inauguration, the Civil War had broken out and Mary was “drowning,” according to Romano, surrounded by “opportunists and rogues” as numerous as the rats skittering through the Executive Mansion’s walls. The Union’s hastily augmented army couldn’t get to the capital fast enough, and there was no guarantee that Mrs. Jefferson Davis wouldn’t soon be calling the White House home. On April 22, 1861, the National Republican reported that “employees of the General Post Office Department . . . were instructed to hold themselves in readiness to repair to the Department, where arms would be furnished them at a moment’s warning.” 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.
But she had also gone north to shop. She quickly blew through a congressional allowance for the White House’s redecoration, purchasing extravagant wallpaper, chandeliers, and carpets. Between the election and the Inauguration, she had already amassed unsustainable personal debt for new clothes. “Compulsive shopping had not yet been identified as an affliction,” Romano notes, but it “fueled an emotional void” 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.
The press alternated praise of Mrs. Lincoln’s improvements to the Executive Mansion with scornful doesn’t-she-know-there’s-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: “A Chinese pagoda bubbled with champagne. . . . The tables were decorated like a war-themed child’s birthday party. On display was a large helmet molded of sugar, as well as replicas of Fort Pickens and the frigate Union . . . surrounded by sugared guns, sails, flags and cherubs.” Cementing the First Lady’s identification with this excess, the Marine Band struck up the new “Mary Lincoln Polka.”
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—Mary’s so clamorous that Lincoln had to point through a window toward Washington’s insane asylum, insisting that she try to remain out of it.
Romano admits to Mary’s long-standing “histrionics,” “eruptions,” “temper,” “mood swings,” and “emotional immaturity,” but recognizes how Willie’s death started a more serious “mental decline” that today’s medications might have helped forestall. Lincoln himself would likely have benefitted from modern prescription drugs for what was then thought to be his “melancholia.” On his own, he had learned some useful mood-altering behaviors, such as drafting what he called “hot letters” to his foes—and then leaving them unsent. In contrast, Romano skillfully identifies how Mary’s own coping mechanisms, “the self-centered traits that helped her survive her childhood,” would eventually “alienate people.” After Willie died, she grabbed the crutch of Spiritualism, travelling to séances and bringing mediums to the White House, prompting one of Mary’s sisters to dismiss her as “unnatural and abnormal.”
Romano’s sturdy book may not stint on examples of Mary’s bad behavior—including a ferociously jealous verbal assault, near the end of the war, on the wife of a prominent Union general—but the biographer keeps tilting against those who slighted Mary in even the most superficial ways. Her too youthful and décolleté fashions were available for mockery, and, though Napoleon’s Union-supporting nephew remained polite enough during an 1861 visit to the White House, he noted in his private diary that Mary had “the manner of a petit bourgeois and wears tin jewelry.” A young James Garfield, the future President, disparaged Mary’s looks in a letter home and was scolded for doing so by his wife.
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 “sat 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.” Her Unionism was, in fact, implacable: when Jefferson Davis’s wife,Varina, learned of Lincoln’s assassination, she wept; when Mary heard of Davis’s capture and imprisonment, a month after her own husband’s killing, she wrote to her abolitionist friend Charles Sumner that her faith in God’s 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’s pension for Mary.
Her childhood naïveté about the supposed contentment of the Todd family’s slaves evolved slowly toward an abolitionism more emotive and less tactical than Lincoln’s. 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’s empathetic yet candid book, “Behind the Scenes; or, Thirty Years a Slave, and Four Years in the White House,” in 1868, Mary spoke with a disgraceful bitterness about “the colored historian.” It was the kind of sarcastic insult she had at one time summoned against the Irish and immigrants in general.
Though prone to guilt (she regarded Willie’s death as punishment for her own failings), Mary did not feel regret for having proceeded with the couple’s plans for Good Friday evening in 1865, even after many invitees declared themselves unavailable to join the Lincolns at Ford’s 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 “had remained at the W.H. on that night of darkness, when the fiends prevailed, he would have been horribly cut to pieces—Those fiends, had too long contemplated, this inhuman murder, to have allowed, him, to escape.” There is no denying her perceptiveness, and her contemporaneous letters to her husband’s successor, Andrew Johnson—mostly attempts to secure positions for Lincoln loyalists—do 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.
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’s 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 “disordered life” Mary now led: “strategic and manic, rational and desperate, canny and crass.” 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 “a bizarre parade of store clerks and hotel maids” swearing to Mrs. Lincoln’s odd behavior. Mary was soon released, largely through the efforts of Myra Bradwell, a “self-trained attorney” who later became the Illinois bar’s first female member.
If “An Inconvenient Widow” seems to speed through Mary’s last several years—more European exile, cascading physical infirmities, a final return to Springfield—the reader is almost relieved, having come to share her frequently expressed yearning for release into the afterlife.
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’s Springfield law partner, started lecturing about his reminiscences within months of the President’s 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’s 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 “it would be sixty years” before the story was publicly contested, though attempts at refutation actually began almost immediately.
Measured rehabilitation of the First Lady’s character has been the dominant mode of Mary Lincoln biography for more than seventy years. Ruth Painter Randall’s 1953 book told (and perhaps overstated) “the amazing and hitherto neglected story of Mrs. Lincoln as abolitionist.” Twenty years later, Ishbel Ross, assessing Mary’s unruly behavior, wrote that “her attacks were intermittent, and her eccentricities were only a small part of her story.” The nineteen-eighties brought Jean H. Baker’s balanced and widely read study, which swept away “classic instances of a male-ordered history that is no longer acceptable.” And Catherine Clinton’s “Mrs. Lincoln: A Life, ” from 2009, further extended the well-rounded approach. If there is a recent outlier that is tough on Mary, it would be Michael Burlingame’s “An American Marriage” (2021). But the prevailing forgiving approach was taken by Elizabeth Keckly as far back as 1868: “Mrs. Lincoln may have been imprudent, but since her intentions were good, she should be judged more kindly than she has been.”
And yet, when it comes to what Romano calls “the popular imagination,” Mary is perpetually vanquished. There, a mad, out-of-control Mary lives on as tenaciously as George Washington’s inability to tell a lie. She has been sensitively portrayed by any number of actresses—among them Julie Harris, Mary Tyler Moore, and Sally Field—whose performances have somehow never really altered our perception. For the past two years, Cole Escola’s “Oh, Mary!,” 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’t understand her husband’s objections to her ambition, or even his frame of reference:
“Oh, Mary!” 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’s birthday.
One key to Bad Mary’s 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’s book will be given a further clue to posterity’s demonization of Mary:
What counts more here than Keckly’s balanced view of Mary is her paean to Lincoln. Our need to meditate upon Lincoln as a savior and a saint—especially in times as rotten as the present—gives 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’s unreasonableness provides him with an extra measure of purity. Romano is aware of the thumb on the scale, and she blames “early historians” for it: “The more Lincoln’s legend soared, the more Mary’s reputation declined.” But the fault lies more with the citizenry than with scholarship. Each reiteration and exaggeration of Mary’s 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. ♦