“You've no equal in the United States."—Mary
Todd Lincoln, to her husband Abraham, quoted in Katherine Helm, The True Story of Mary, Wife of Lincoln (1928)
Mary Todd Lincoln—born 200 years ago today in Lexington,
Kentucky—is easily the most tragic of America’s First Ladies, and among the
most complicated and controversial. Her extravagant spending, frequent bouts of
temper, and consuming grief over the deaths of two of her sons represented
another cross to bear for a President already struggling with a war of
unparalleled challenges and carnage.
After her husband’s assassination and a third son’s
death, her last surviving child, Robert, sought to confine her to an insane
asylum. Ever since, historians have debated the nature and extent of her
afflictions.
Much of this has seeped, in a general way, into the
public consciousness. But, for all the heartache she might have added to Abraham Lincoln’s incredible burden in
the Civil War, she contributed enormously to his rise in American politics.
Lincoln’s gifts were such that he still might well have gained the Presidency
without her, but, as his law partner John Stuart noted afterward, it was her “fire,
will and ambition” which made it a certainty.
Of all the actresses who have played Mrs. Lincoln—including
Sally Field, Penelope Ann Miller, Mary Tyler Moore, and Julie Harris—the one
who best captured this often-forgotten drive on behalf of her husband, I think,
was Ruth Gordon in Abe Lincoln in Illinois.
In fact, Gordon’s performance ( a far cry from his Oscar-winning role as a dotty old witch in Rosemary's Baby) may be the best
element in the 1940 Presidential biopic starring Raymond Massey in the title role. That
adaptation of Robert E. Sherwood’s Pulitzer Prize-winning play may have
exaggerated Abraham’s diffidence, but Mrs. Lincoln might have recognized much
of herself in Ms. Gordon onscreen: flirtatious, talkative, vivacious, sarcastic,
driven, shrewd, outspoken, politically astute, and well-educated.
The last quality is especially important. Her
father, Robert Smith Todd, a merchant, lawyer, and Kentucky politician,
recognizing his daughter’s aptitude for learning, sent her to the best schools
that a young woman of the time could attend.
All of this meant that she could talk to any male on
any subject, which she proceeded to do. As the “belle of the town” in
Springfield (where she was visiting her sister), she could have had her pick of
any of the numerous men drawn to her flame (including a rising politician and
her husband’s future rival for the U.S. Senate and Presidency, Stephen A
Douglas).
The unlikely winner of her hand was an ungainly
attorney who shared with her a passion for Whig politics, a hero in Henry Clay,
a flashing wit, and a love of poetry: Abraham Lincoln.
In the nearly two decades between their marriage in
1842 and the start of Lincoln’s Presidency in 1861, Mary:
*handwrote his letters to Whig leaders soliciting
appointive positions, after his single term in Congress ended in the late
1840s;
*advised him to turn down an appointment as
territorial governor of Oregon, correctly noting that it would remove him from
the epicenter of American politics;
*kept her husband’s faith alive that his political career
would revive in the decade that followed;
*attended sessions of the Illinois legislature,
where she noted members’ party affiliation and stances on the Kansas-Nebraska
Act—key metrics as her husband sought election to the U.S. Senate through that body;
*bolstered Abraham’s anti-slavery feelings with
her own abolitionist sentiment (doubly unusual in that she was raised in a
family of slaveholders);
*spoke to reporters in the 1860 Presidential
election, at a time when candidates’ wives were expected to keep quiet.
On the bicentennial of her birth, we should not only
try to better understand this beleaguered First Lady, but also pay tribute to
her for recognizing, before America and the world caught on, the immeasurable
value of her husband.
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