Sherry Chandler

“My Life had stood – a Loaded Gun -”

Lyndall Gordon has written a new biography of Emily Dickinson.

Here is Jeanette Winterson’s review from the Times Online:

Lives Like Loaded Guns: Emily Dickinson and her Family’s Feuds:

The eccentric poet, the dressy adventuress, the top man in town, his outraged wife, his vulnerable son, a cache of poems and letters hidden in trunks and chests … it could be the plot line for a potboiler; it is the Emily Dickinson story.

This most reclusive of poets, unmarried, virtually unpublished in her lifetime, knew who she was and fired that knowing through her poetry. Everyone had a stake in inventing her, including her brother, sister and sister-in-law. Her wild truthfulness was unsettling; it was easier to turn from the authenticity of the poetic blast towards a fictional person who could be offered up as a softer, simpler explanation.

While Emily Dickinson was alive there was at least a physical presence that had to be reckoned with — as time passed almost no one saw her, but she was fiercely there — refusing, for instance, to aid her brother in a gift of family land to his mistress. When Dickinson died in 1886, at 55, the invention of Emily Dickinson became an industry — and a feud.

And here is an article from the Guardian written by Lyndall Gordon herself,
A bomb in her bosom: Emily Dickinson’s secret life

It was Emily herself who helped to devise the blueprint for her legend, starting at the age of 23 when she declined an invitation from a friend: “I’m so old-fashioned, Darling, that all your friends would stare.” In place of the tart young woman she was, she adopted this retiring posture. Born in 1830 into the leading family of Amherst, a college town in Massachusetts, she never left what she always called “my father’s house”. Townsfolk spoke of her as “the Myth”.

On the face of it, the life of this New England poet seems uneventful and largely invisible, but there’s a forceful, even overwhelming character belied by her still surface. She called it a “still – Volcano – Life”, and that volcano rumbles beneath the domestic surface of her poetry and a thousand letters. Stillness was not a retreat from life (as legend would have it) but her form of control. Far from the helplessness she played up at times, she was uncompromising; until the explosion in her family, she lived on her own terms.

For one such as I, educated in a time when poets like Elizabeth Barret Browning and even Dickinson herself were sniffed at as neurotic poetesses, not quite up to canonical standards — Browning got a particularly bad rap, portrayed as a silly leech on the superior powers of her husband — the most refreshing idea put forward in these newspaper articles is that illness was not a weakness for these creative women so much as a tool. From the Times:

Gordon is right, though, in her argument that cites illness as control. A writer needs time and solitude, necessities not available to women of any class at that time, without some special circumstances overriding convention.

Like Elizabeth Barrett Browning and, later, Virginia Woolf, Dickinson was able to use her vulnerability to excuse herself from domestic duties and tiresome entertaining. Her father sanctioned her “withdrawal” on medical grounds, and this gave her time to write. She began at about 3am, and kept herself to herself until noon. Later, she did not engage in family life at all.

Or, as Elizabeth Oakes expresses it in her excellent poetry collection The Luminescence of All Things Emily (Wind Publications, 2009)

Emily’s niece tells this story.
Emily stood before her bedroom
door, mimicked turning a key,
and said, “Freedom, Mattie.”

Going up the stairs was like leaving
the eye of a storm. . . .

As the WomPonies, from whom I stole these links, particularly Louisa Howerow, point out, much of this material is known, though it may not be widely known. Certainly Oakes has already covered it, though in poetic, not analytic form.

I am not so sure about Gordon’s argument that Dickinson was epileptic. I am not all that certain that such diagnoses can be made after the fact, though it seems to be a modern temptation. Nevertheless, such retroactive diagnoses at least treat the disease as real, rather than dismissing it as hysteria.

For an excellent consideration of retro diagnoses in the case of Mary Todd Lincoln, another of history’s crazy women, see Diagnosing history at I See Invisible People. As Terry says, “it is possible to be both feminist and bipolar, or schizophrenic as some have said, at the same time.”

The value of these retro discussions of diagnosis may lie in recognizing that a woman can be both brilliant and ill, just as a man can. Abraham Lincoln famously experienced depression and Doestoevsky had epilepsy. The discussion may also allow us to contemplate these women as fully adult human beings who were able to turn a liability into an asset. So establishing whether Gordon is correct or not in her diagnosis may not be as important as the discussion it engenders.

At any rate, Gordon is an excellent writer, so I look forward to reading this volume.

The cruelties of women

Since I am on this sad subject, I had marked this passage to share with you from Rebecca Smith Lee’s Mary Austin Holley: A Biography (University of Texas Press, 1962).

After Horace Holley’s death in 1827, Mary decided in 1829 to return to the Louisiana sugar plantation La Bonne Espérence, where the owners, the LaBranche family, had offered her a position as governess to their small daughters and where she could also teach her young son. Thus she experienced New Year’s Day on the plantation and “finishing the sugar.”

The weather was perfect for merrymaking, soft and bright and warm. After the slaves had feasted on fresh beef and casks of wine, they donned their best blackcoats and deresses, the women wearing colored kerchiefs round their heads and the men waving bright scarves as flags. Then they paraded in the dusk to the door of the big house shouting “Bonne Ann&ecute;e pour vous!” and making their bows to the master and mistress, to the noisy accompaniment of violins and kettle drums and tambourines.

There was one ceremonial Congo dance, done in the old, old manner. The most elderly of the men approached the master, bending first on one knee and then on the other, singing all the while in a weird minor key. It was an ancient ritual of homage from a faraway homeland, and the sight of the rapt black faces moved Mary Holley profoundly and in a curious way. She felt that Mr. Hermogene [LaBranche, the plantation owner] and the dancers were actors in a strange and primitive drama, controlled by inexorable forces, a drama in which she herself was not personally involved. By thus detaching herself from the tragic implications of the scene, she arrived at the mixed attitude toward slavery held by most of the people she knew in Kentucky. As she closed the letter to her daughter she could still hear the throbbing of the drums in the quarters half a mile away and she commented that the “rigors of slavery seem softened since I have seen these poor wretches in their gala time and witnessed so much benevolence in their master and mistress.” [p. 202]

This was, of course, the fairytale all the white plantation class told itself.

I’m not exactly sure where Lee stands on this. This book was written when the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s was just beginning to heat up. But it is intended as a flattering biography of one of the Texas Austins. So it walks a thin sort of line that looks barbaric to our 21st century eye.

Compare it to this short passage from Catherine Clinton’s Mrs. Lincoln: A Life (HarperCollins, 2009):

When Mary was nineteen, her father was on the jury during the trial of an abusive mistress, Caroline Turner, who, among other depravities had thrown one of her slaves out a window. Her husband accused her of murdering half a dozen of their African-American charges—his tales were another catalogue of horrors, signs of slavery’s brutal effects. [pp. 22-23]

Helen Deiss Irvin shows us a somewhat less reverential side of the slave/mistress relationship in stories of Sophia Ward, a slave born in Clay County in 1837:

The mistress had an old parrott and one day I was in the kitchen making cookies, and I decided I wanted some of them, so I took out some and put them on a chair; and when I did this the mistress entered the door. I pick up the cushion and throw over the pile of cookies on the chair, amd Mistress came near the chair and the old parrot cries out, “Mistress burn, Mistress burn.” Then the mistress looks under the cushion, and she had me whipped, but the next day I killed the parrot, and she often wondered who or what killed the bird. [p. 51]

Or there was Sarah in Bourbon County:

Sarah is the biggest devil that ever lived, having poisoned a stud horse and set a stable on fire, also burnt Gen. R. Williams stable and stack yard with seven horses and other property to value of $1500. She was handcuffed and got away at Ruddles Mill on her way down the river, which is the fifth time she escaped when about to be sent out of the country. [pp. 51-52]

In spite of the gracious surface of life in antebellum Kentucky, there was always an undertone of fear. Margaretta Mason Brown, wife of Kentucky’s first U.S. Senator, wrote, in a letter to her husband that

the Monster Slavery may destroy the people of Kentucky before long [p. 57]

Margaretta Brown was an emancipationist, favoring a gradual freeing of the slaves. She feared that abolitionists would incite an uprising like that in Santo Domingo.

Slavery is the worm at the heart of the rose of U.S. democracy. Or maybe I should say it is one of the worms, the genocide of the indigenous nations being the other. It puts a taint on the very real achievements of these 19th century women.

On the other hand, humanity produces very few saints and those it does produce are not always nice folk.

Slave state

Some snippets from Helen Deiss Irvin on slavery:

In the Kentucky social hierarchy, most powerless were black women. Subject to all of the abuses of slavery, they were vulnerable to additional ones as women. It was widely known, for example, that the slave trader Lewis Robards of Lexington sold black women into prostitution—a practice in which no one intervened—and other traders operated breeding farms for southern markets. Moreover, the exploitation of black women by their owners was not unusual, as evidenced by numbers of nearly white slave children.

Nice word: exploitation. But to continue:

. . . The sales in Lexington of Eliza, only one sixty-fourth black, and of two sisters who were graduates of Oberlin College—all three the daughters of their white masters—were causes célèbres, as J. Winston Coleman, Jr., relates in Slavery Times in Kentucky. But black women, children, and men were sold every court-day, and no one turned a head. It was whiteness, the obvious kinship with the white ruling class, that distressed onlookers. [pp. 48-49]

Coincidentally, NPR recently ran a story about a study showing that people who approve of Barack Obama perceive his skin tone to be lighter than it is while those who disapprove see it as darker. Obviously we have not got beyond this prejudice for the white.

With African-American slaves as with Native Americans, there was a great fear of miscegenation that did not apply to white men. Here is a key paragraph from Catherine Clinton’s Mrs. Lincoln: A Life (HarperCollins, 2009):

From the earliest years of settlement, the rising birthrate of mixed-race children induced authorities to attempt to resolve “miscegenations” with a stroke of the pen: In 1662, the Virginia assemply passed legislation declaring that slave offspring inherited the status of the mother (partus sequitur ventrem) This law provided white males with an incentive to prefer slave women as illicit sexual partners—as they could not be charged with bastardy. [p. 23]

Clinton tells the story of Richard M. Johnson, a friend of Mary Lincoln’s father, John Robert Todd, and an exception to the rule of “exploitation,” the one that said these sexual liaisons would be politely ignored. Johnson would serve as vice president under Martin Van Buren but before achieving that high estate, he created a scandal in Lexington not only by acknowledging his two mixed-race daughters, offspring of his long liaison with his “housekeeper,” but also by trying to arrange advantageous marriages for them with white men. He accomplished this in part by settling lands and money on them, thereby adding fuel to the fire (see “bribed” below).

Like the sisters sold at auction, Johnson’s daughters were well educated. When Lafayette stayed with Jonson on his visit to Lexington in 1825, Clinton quotes a neighbor as reporting the event thus:

Evry thing that was necsary for the occasion was prepared in fine order. Johnson’s Two Daughters they Played on the piano fine. They Ware Dressed as fine as money Could Dress them & to one that Did not no they ware as white as anny of the Laydes thare & thare ware a good many. [p. 24]

I daresay the daughters, Imogene and Adaline, could probably spell better than the reporter, too.

Lexington Society might have tolerate such socializing from a wealthy powerful war hero, but with their marriages, Johnson had gone too far. George D. Prentice, editor of the Louisville Journal, explained the situation thus in 1835:

The author of the Declaration of Independence had his faults, but he was at least careful never to insult the feelings of the community with an ostentatious exhibition of them. He never lived in open intercourse with an “odoriferous wench”; He never bribed “his white fellow citizens” to “make such beasts of themselves” before the open eyes of the world as to stand up in the church, grasp the sable paws of negresses and pronounce the sacred vows of wedlock. [p. 25]

Prentice was a Unionist, an ardent Henry Clay supporter, and a member of the Know-Nothing Party but his writing style was broadly satiric and the liberal peppering of quotation marks in this passage leads me to wonder just where his barbs were falling.

Clinton reports that Adaline died of a “broken heart” in February 1836 because of all her father suffered on his daughters’ account [p. 25].

Horace and Mary Austin Holley were instrumental in bringing Lafayette to Lexington, by the way. Mary Holley would, no doubt, have been one of those white women present at Johnson’s plantation, Blue Springs in 1825. In 1818, when Mary Holley first came to Lexington with her husband, who was to be president of Transylvania University, she was uneasy about having slaves as servants. She soon adjusted, however, and when the Holleys were preparing to leave Kentucky in 1827, Rebecca Smith Lee records that:

[Horace Holley] reckoned up his own financial condition carefully . . . and wrote to Orville that he was leaving Kentucky worth at least six thousand dollars, counting his books, furniture, land, and two slaves. [Mary Austin Holley: A Biography (Univ Texas Press, 1962), p. 172]

Unfortunately, when the Holleys left Lexington, they fell on hard times. They went to Louisiana where events did not work out the way Horace Holley thought they would. Ill and humiliated, he decided he had to flee the cursed south:

“One breath of air,” he cried out as Mary begged him to lie back on the couch by the window and let her fan his brow, “one breath of air from the Northern shore of freedom, though borne upon the eastern gale, were worth all the boasted luxuries of the ever-smiling scented South, alluring but to destroy!” [Mary Austin Holley: A Biography, pp. 181-182]

But in order to book their passage, the Holleys had to have money:

He hastened to book passage for himself and wife and son on the Louisiana two weeks hence, and spent his scanty strength making preparations to leave. Most of his ready cash had gone toward equipment for the house and school, and a few days before sailing he was compelled to sell their excellent colored woman named Susanna for the sum of four hundred and fifty dollars, with Mr. Martin Duralde as witness to the transaction. [Mary Austin Holley: A Biography, p. 182]

Horace Holley never made it to the Northern shore of freedom. He died of yellow fever on the voyage. After his death, Mary Austin Holley returned to Louisiana to serve as governess on the LaBranche plantation.

“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.
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The 19th century housewife

Even that most notorious of Southern Belles, that most notoriously pampered of wives, Mary Todd Lincoln, had a heavy (literally) work load. This was especially true for Mary while she was wife of that poor rising lawyer in Springfield. Here is Catherine Clinton’s description of a 19th century middle class urban housewife’s duties, from Mrs. Lincoln. A Life (Harper-Collings, 2009, pages 70-71):

Even a woman with servants [Mary Lincoln's were Irish for the most part] had a long list of chores to perform. Someone was expected to check the mattresses for fleas and bedbugs. While servants might make beds, empty chamber pots, dust and polish, swab and sweep, most housekeepers prepared their own family meals.

Lincoln was notorious for missing his and Mary often had to send one of the children to fetch him. Wives of men of genius seldom have it all that easy. Lincoln loved to hang out and talk and politic and lose all track of time. Clinton tells a story of how he was once pulling the baby along the street in a wagon. When the baby fell out and lay crying in the street, Lincoln didn’t noticed, but walked on, deep in thought, pulling the empty wagon.

Monday was one of the most challenging of weekdays, as it was traditionally laundry day. The household laundry was an onerous task, and women were expected to not only use starch and bleach, but to hang clothes to dry and press most of the washing with hot irons, as well. Thus the “Monday blues” had an additional meaning for most housewives, alluding to the compounds used to counteract the yellowing of white fabrics.

Monday washdays like this were still a fact of life when I was a child, though my mother had a wringer washer with an electric motor that, no doubt, made her life somewhat easier than Mary Lincoln’s. Though, on the other hand, my mother had no servants of any kind to do the heavy lifting. Anyway, I remember the washer and two rinse tubs on a raised frame. The wringer would swing on its axis so you could wring clothes from washer to first rinse and then from first rinse to second, and finally into the basket for hanging. The second rinse always had blueing in it to whiten the sheets.

I’m not sure my mother starched sheets.

Food preparation was a constant daily and seasonal burden. Yes, the woman in town, unlike her rural sister, did not have to slaughter or pluck, plunge her arms up to the elbow in brine, or grind her own flour. But many kept chickens to collect the eggs, and cows to ensure unadulterated milk. The Lincolns kept both a cow and a horse (for Lincoln’s travel) housed in one of the outbuildings on the property.

My mother did a fair amount of slaughtering and plucking. See my poem “How to Dress a Chicken.”

There’s a lot more, some of which sounds very similar to the way life was lived in mid-twentieth century rural Kentucky. Some interesting facts from the Clinton book: the Mason jar was introduced in 1850; the metal eggbeater was also a 19th century innovation. And the Lincoln children were given a Saturday night bath.

A perversely cruel press

Over at Salon, Joan Walsh has this to say about press coverage of Bill Clinton:

“The Clinton Tapes” makes clear that from start to finish, President Clinton was besieged by a vicious just-say-no GOP abetted by the perversely, inexplicably, cruelly anti-Clinton leaders of the so-called liberal media — from the New York Times’ lame crusades against Whitewater and Chinese donors and Wen Ho Lee, to the integrity-free “opinion” journalism by Maureen Dowd and, sadly, Frank Rich, to a whole host of other liberal media characters who couldn’t shake their feeling that Clinton was a fraud, a poseur, a hillbilly, a cynic. Their trashy eight-year oeuvre will likely go down in history as the most spectacularly malevolent and misguided White House coverage ever. . .

Lately I’ve been reading in Catherine Clinton’s biography Mrs. Lincoln, A Life (HarperCollins, 2009), and I am struck by the similarities in the way the Lincolns and the Clintons were treated. Certainly, one can’t carry such a comparison too far, but I see it especially in the treatment of the two wives, Mary and Hillary.

Washington, D.D. was just as much an insider society in 1861 as in 1991. It was referred to as The Cave and The Cave found the Lincolns a bit uncouth, just as D.C. found the Clintons:

Harriet Lane [James Buchanan's niece and White House hostess] met with Mrs. Lincoln in advance and arranged a meal for the Lincolns following the inauguration. But she was not impressed and wrote cattily tht Lincoln resembled the Iris doorkeeper, Thomas Burns, and reported, “Mrs. Lincoln is awfully western, loud & unrefined.” [p. 124]

I don’t know whether Abraham Lincoln ate lunch at his desk, as did the Clinton White House staff, but Lincoln himself was prone to work through meals if his wife didn’t insist that he eat.

D.C. was also a southern city. Mary Todd Lincoln was also southern, of course, but the fact was no advantage to her. She was viewed as a traitor by the D.C. social elite with southern sympathies and accused of being a southern spy by those whose sympathies lay with the north.

The press was particularly vicious with Mary Lincoln. They accused her of extravagance, of buying expensive china to match the livery of the White House servants (the White House had no liveried servants but that was a mere detail), of having affairs with members of the White House staff, and, as I have said, of spying. When Mary insisted on a daily drive or entertaining friends, she was painted as demanding and self-centered. But it is also possible that she was trying to protect her husband from his own habit of overwork to the point of collapse. She was the one who could draw him out of his depressions.

She was unfortunate in her rivals for Lincoln’s ear and his time. She made enemies somehow of his secretaries (male) whom Clinton calls “the couriers nattering on the second floor of the Executive Mansion.” These courtiers referred to Mrs. Lincoln as the Hellcat. During the period when she was prostrated with grief over the death of her son Willie, John Hay wrote of her:

Madame has mounted me to pay her the Steward’s salary. I told her to kiss mine.

and

The Hellcat is getting more Hellcatical day by day.

Granted, Mrs. Lincoln was not stoical in her grief. Lincoln himself warned her that she might wind up institutionalized if she didn’t pull herself together.

Another unfortunate enemy was Kate Chase, daughter of the Secretary of the Treasury, Salmon P. Chase. Consider this anecdote:

One day, when an African-American teacher came to call on Mrs. Lincoln at the White House, having been invited to tea, she was escorted around to the kitchen entrance by the doorman [who may have been a lighter skinned African-American]. Mary was infuriated by this sight. The First Lady became especially solicitous during tea with her guest in the Red Room. Afterward, her black guest enjoyed the First Lady’s promise to bring the cause of African-American education to her husband’s attention. Then she was cordially escorted to the formal entrance, where Mary pointedly shok hands with her while bidding the woman good-bye. This gesture was observed by both the Chases, who just happened to be driving by the Executive Mansion at that very moment. Naturally, Chase’s daughter spread the story—willing to use it to her father’s political advantage by portraying Mrs. Lincoln as someone who was “making too much of the Negro.”

This jab at Mary Lincoln was particularly hypocritical coming from Kate Chase, whose father was a staunch abolitionist. Chase had long promoted emancipation as part of his political agenda, and criticized Lincoln for being weak on abolition. But when his wife made a gesture toward racial equality, the Chases made political hay by broadcasting Mary’s liberality among unsympathetic listeners.[p. 171]

The press seemed willing to believe anything of Mary Lincoln without bothering to think that some of the rumors contradicted others.

To this day, Lincoln biographers seem eager to heap calumny on Mary Todd. And unlike Hillary Clinton, Mary Lincoln was not in a position to hold high office herself, to make for herself a reputation o counter the slanders.

Mary Todd Lincoln

A review by Janet Maslin in the NYTimes today of Daniel Mark Epstein’s new book, The Lincolns: Portrait of a Marriage (Ballantyne Books):

One of Mr. Epstein�s primary goals, it seems, is to break with convention when it comes to the story of the Lincolns� stormy domesticity. He takes a more generous, warmblooded view of this union than most biographers do. He appreciates the early attraction between the two of them, the sustained intimacy that lasted long into their lives together and the fond, even frolicsome nature of their shared communication.

Mr. Epstein is also mindful of the image-consciousness that they shared, a matter inadvertently underscored by this book�s cover image. It shows the Lincolns together, but it is a synthesis of two separate images; they always resisted being photographed together because of the great discrepancy in height between them. The president would joke about this as �the long and the short of it.�

�The Lincolns� relies less on new information than on a thoughtful, sometimes even presumptuous examination of existing material. For instance Mr. Epstein surmises that the abrupt hiatus in the couple�s courtship reflected Lincoln�s fear that he had contracted syphilis, rather than ascribing this breakup to Lincoln�s doubts about his love for Mary Todd.

If anything, according to this book, he loved her too much to marry her in 1840, not too little. She was described at that time, after all, as �the very creature of excitement� and �one who could make a bishop forget his prayers.�

There is even some novelty in Mr. Epstein�s willingness to write about Mary � or Molly, as her husband called her � as a mesmerizing creature rather than a harridan in the latter part of the marriage. Even after the Lincolns had been battered by the deaths of two sons and the immense public pressure of the presidency, he asserts, they were closely bound by Mary�s enduring (if sometimes troublemaking) involvement in her husband�s political career.

Epstein is atypical as a Lincoln biographer because he is less scholar than poet. He has published three books of poetry and biographis of Aimee Simple McPherson, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Lincoln and Whitman, and Nat King Cole.

Here’s copy from the publicity blurb:

She was witty, tempestuous, a Kentucky blueblood; he was brilliant, moody, a farmer�s son born in a log-cabin. They got married on a few hours notice in 1842, when he was thirty-three and she was nearly twenty-four.

…

Now Daniel Mark Epstein has produced an incisive and balanced portrait of the Lincolns, from their mysterious and troubled courtship in 1840 until his assassination in Ford�s Theatre in 1865. Of their twenty-two years of marriage, all but five were spent in Springfield, Illinois. This is the first biography to give due attention to the Springfield years: the close quarters of the Globe Tavern�their first dwelling; their joyful creation of a home together on the edge of town as Lincoln built his law practice and made his first forays into politics; their shared joys and sorrows as parents of four boys; their travels together to Washington, New York, Chicago, and Niagara Falls; their burning ambition as Lincoln achieved celebrity status during the Lincoln-Douglas debates, and at last was elected to the highest office in the land.

The marriage that found a balance in small-town Springfield disintegrated in the cauldron of Civil War Washington. Epstein captures the glory and pathos of the White House years: the grandeur of Inaugural Balls and State dinners, Mrs. Lincoln�s social triumphs and failures, her susceptibility to mediums and sycophants after the death of their favorite child, Willie.

Here’s a sample Epstien poem at The Cortland Review.