“First Lady of Controversy”

A Springfield, Massachusetts, journal complained that Mary was a “dreadful woman” who forced “her repugnant Individuality before the world.”(Mrs. Lincoln, p. 275

I have always felt a little protective of Mary Todd Lincoln, as though by my tenderness I could somehow change the outcome of her story or at least find a reason to argue against the bad reputation she has carried down through history.

I’m not sure why this should be so. Maybe I identify with her a bit, as a woman from a border state, culturally of the South yet alienated from it.

Mary felt scapegoated by both South and North and, no doubt, she was. She received horrible press, as reference the quotation above, from Catherine Clinton’s Mrs. Lincoln. A Life (Harper-Collins, 2009), in reaction to the so-called Old Clothes Scandal, in which She tried to sell off some of her White House wardrobe. She always felt cash strapped, though she was not ever as poor as legend has it. Such shenanigans so embarrassed her sole surviving son that he has been accused of conspiring to have her institutionalized to save his own political career.

(Robert Todd Lincoln served as Secretary of War under James Garfield and was, rather poignantly, an eyewitness to Garfield’s assassination.)

This particular fiasco fed into accusations, á la the Clintons, that Mary Lincoln had sacked the White House. It’s true that she left D.C. with an astounding number of trunks — think of the weight of clothing Victorian women wore — but Clinton puts most of the actual damage to the Executive Mansion down to the hundreds of mourners who came through to view Lincoln’s body and left carrying a small souvenir.

Conversely, Mary Lincoln was also highly criticized for her extravagant redecoration of the White House.

She couldn’t win.

About the Old Clothes brouhaha, Mary “scribbled” to Elizabeth Keckly

“If I had committed murder in every city in this blessed Union, I could not be more traduced.”

Still, she was an incorrigible self-promoter, proud of being called “the power behind the throne,” protective of her position as First Lady and then as Lincoln’s widow. Thus, she was vulnerable to exploitation by scoundrels. So there was some fire behind the smoke. Clinton quotes Mary’s sister, Elizabeth Edwards,

. . . recognized that her sister was someone who had been given much to bear, handled it poorly, and “made the world hate her.” [p. 310]

Who, I wonder, could have handled it well?

Even disembarking from her last voyage home, as she returned from France at the age of 61, alone, injured, and ill, she was shoved aside by reporters eager to get to Sarah Bernhardt, who was sailing on the same ship. It is also possible that Sarah Bernhardt saved her life, a deed Mary didn’t seem too grateful for:

While on shipboard, unsteady on her feet, Mary nearly fell overboard when she pitched down an exterior stairway. A woman passing her on the stairs, the actress Sarah Bernhardt, instinctively reached out to grab the older woman and thereby saved her. Bernhardt warned the woman draped in widow’s weeds to be careful, saying, “You might have been killed.” Mrs. Lincoln did not express gratitude with any grace, and when Madame Bernhardt discovered the identity of this figure wrapped in black, she suggested that perhaps she had not done the poor widow any favors.[p.326]

Still, Mary Lincoln was never without friends and supporters. Though even her champions find her a difficult woman to love. Clinton often uses terms such as “apoplectic” to describe his reaction to his mother’s perceived bad behavior. Yet she, too, is inclined to statements like

In letters to friends, she complained bitterly about her situation, whining to her New York acquaintances . . .

And, after the death of her youngest son Tad:

. . .his mother failed to cope. . .

Here is a woman who had lost three of her four children, whose husband had been shot while she sat beside him, leaning on his arm, who had been through a Civil War in which she was estranged from her family (members of which alternately vilified her and tried to exploit their connection to her).

She failed to cope.

There is little doubt that Mary Lincoln experienced some mental instability. Whether it was situational or hereditary or both, no one will probably ever be able to settle for certain. There was a history of mental illness in her family, but she also may have been self-medicating with alcohol and chloral hydrate. She was also a woman of temper, more highly educated than most women of her class and culture, and active in her husband’s career. a civilizng influence on Lincoln. And as much as we may be charmed by the man’s rustic legend, he was a man in need of covilizing if he were to achieve the heights to which he aspired.

During her widowhood, she was fiercely independent, insistent upon being in control of her own affairs. Even after her son and her male protectors decided in their wisdom to have her forceably institutionalized “for her own protection,” without prior notice, and appointed a defense lawyer who thought she should be confined. Even then, she was able within a year to muster her defense and get herself released.

She spent years in exile in France, alone, to protect her independence.

I am tempted to find her emblematic of the South itself. Wrong-headed, vulnerable to exploitation by rascals, half mad, but stubbornly independent and unwilling to be scapegoated for the nation’s sins.

That’s a dangerous line of thought, however, and it won’t stand up to much scrutiny.

Mary Lincoln may have fought the wrong battles and fought them badly with the wrong allies, but she fought until nearly the end, and it is possible that her biggest sin was failing to fit the stereotype of Victorian womanhood.

Catherine Clinton calls her the “first White House spouse to lay claim to having been the fuel that fired her husband’s political career,” with having been one of the White House’s “most recognizable victims,” and with being the “first First Lady to carve out a separate and distinctive role for herself.”

Clinton’s biography is well written and well worth your attention. I found it fascinating reading and, though I’m not a professional historian, well documented with a good bibliography that I will follow up on, especially Elizabeth Keckly’s autobiography Behind the Scenes Or, Thirty Years a Slave and Four Years in the White House. I enjoyed reading the chapter notes for further insight into events and statements. I argued with Clinton a little bit, but I love a book that makes me feel passionate enough to argue.

I hope I may be indulged one last quotation:

At war with herself as well as with social convention and polite society, Mary Lincoln failed miserably in the court of public opinion. She was flawed and brilliant all at once, and never rose to the heights of humanitarianism that he husband so admirably achieved. Yet she provided Abraham Lincoln with the space and support he required to achieve his goals, and with the emotional yeast he needed to become the wartime president he became.

Her unconditional love sustained Lincoln’s growth to greatness. She was a woman of intense intellect and passion who stepped outside the boundaries her times prescribed and suffered for it. [p. 336]

Possibly related posts:

A perversely cruel press

The 19th century housewife

Abraham Lincoln

Slave state

The plantation wife

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