Flashback, July 1871: Death of David H. Todd, Lincoln’s Notorious Confederate In-Law

Less than two weeks after Mary Todd Lincoln mourned the death of her 17-year-old son Tad, the widow of Abraham Lincoln had to deal with the loss of another family member.

But the former First Lady felt far more mixed emotions upon learning of the death from tuberculosis at the end of July 1871 of David Humphreys Todd in Huntsville, AL. It wasn’t just that she was not as close to this half-brother 14 years her junior than she was with the third of her sons to die before reaching adulthood.

No, David would have reminded her of a deeply painful split that mirrored a larger division in all too many American families. Of the 14 offspring of her father, the prominent Kentucky lawyer, soldier and politician Robert Smith Todd, six had sided with the Union while the others supported the Confederacy that President Lincoln had successfully but bloodily suppressed. In this “brothers’ war,” two male Todd siblings died fighting for the South, while two of the Todd daughters (including Mary) lost their husbands during the conflict.

From the age of 14, when David had run away from home to fight in the Mexican War, he had troubled family members with his impulsiveness. Matters would not improve in adulthood, when his actions in the Civil War gave the enemies of Abraham and Mary Todd Lincoln grist for calumny.

Lack of combat in the Mexican War left David’s appetite for adventure and glory unsatisfied, even as he developed a propensity to drink and gamble. After journeying out to California in 1850 for the gold rush, he went down to Chile the following year to participate in its revolution as “freebooter,” or soldier for hire. The only tangible results of the latter were tattoos he had made. Later in the decade, he worked without making any particular mark for a New Orleans carriage company.

The outbreak of the Civil War put David and his siblings in a quandary. Their plantations and the aristocratic style it supported were unsustainable without slaves.

At the same time, they now had a brother-in-law—previously embraced, through marriage to Mary, as part of the family—who, while willing to permit slavery in states like Kentucky, was committed to halting its expansion into new American territories.

As Stephen Berry noted in his collective biography of the Todds, House of Abraham, these bluegrass bluebloods had, in a sense, become Abraham Lincoln’s surrogate family, filling the void left by an abusive father and a sister who died in childbirth. The fact that he seldom if ever spoke of slaveholders with the blistering rhetoric used by so many abolitionists may have owed something to knowing and cherishing some as in-laws.

That did not mean, however, that he was blind to their faults. One legend had him joking, “God Almighty is perfectly content having one ‘d’ at the end of his name. The Todds insist on having two.” Litigiousness and alcoholism ran as heavily in the family as intelligence and ambition.

As First Lady, Mary was prone to extravagance and outbursts of anger, but her husband’s opponents also engaged in guilt by association in charging her with disloyalty because of some siblings’ support of the Confederacy. The more extreme members of the press even accused her of spying, forcing her husband to appear voluntarily before Congress to deny the rumors.

Negative reports by sensationalistic Northern newspapers—particularly about David, and Mary’s attitude towards him—vexed the Confederate contingent of the family, as seen in this excerpt from a July 1861 letter by Mary’s younger half-sister Elodie:

“I see from today’s paper Mrs. Lincoln is indignant at my Bro. David’s being in the Confederate service and declares ‘that by no word or act of hers should he escape punishment for his treason against her husband’s government should he fall into their hands.’ I do not believe she ever said it and if she did and meant it she is no longer a sister of mine nor deserves to be called a woman of nobleness and truth and God grant my noble and brave-hearted brother will never fall into their hands and have to suffer death twice over, and he could do nothing which could make me prouder of him than he is doing now, fighting for his country. What would she do to me, do you suppose? I have as much to answer for.”

Rushing to the Confederate cause after Fort Sumter, Elodie’s “noble and brave-hearted brother” was assigned to General John H. Winder, commandant of Richmond’s prisons—just as the Confederacy pondered what to do with 1,400 Union prisoners taken at the Battle of Bull Run.

Winder, desiring to move captured Union soldiers away from any campaigns for the Confederate capital, wanted David to transport them to Raleigh, N.C. But before that could happen, these prisoners were ensnared in the propaganda war between North and South.

Separating truth from falsehood was difficult enough while David was alive, but it only grew more so after his death. Records often proved elusive, and the children of family members, recalling events more than half a century later, often compounded the difficulties of historians.

It may very well be that, like Mary, David was more sinner against than sinning. But it is also true that, like her, he was thrust in a situation requiring tact that he didn’t possess.

Before long, David was being accused of cruelty to Northern prisoners at Richmond’s Libby Prison. Although he was not as bad as the notorious Henry Wirz of Andersonville and at least some stories about him appear to have been exaggerated, he angered Union service personnel often: preventing spirits from being brought into the prison, for instance; telling guards in this unventilated, hot converted warehouse to shoot off any part of a body sticking out a window; and, according to Union seaman Lewis Horton, “saber[ing] a poor fellow one day because the prisoner had a small bit of lighted candle in order to see to dress his wound” and executing another for just looking out the window.

By November 1862, David featured prominently in a Harper’s Weekly story on the Confederate ties of Mary’s siblings. The magazine even claimed that Jefferson Davis had fired Mary’s half-brother for inhumane treatment of prisoners after David had been only two months on the job.

If the Confederate President did, in fact, relieve him of this command, David may have felt he was being done a favor. By early 1862, David had had enough, and began to look around to where he could be more useful. 

“Having no duty to perform in this Regt, and nothing to which I can be assigned,” he requested a transfer to New Orleans. He got his wish, at a time when Union forces were pressing hard on the city and the Mississippi, the crucial waterway bringing food, supplies and troops to the Southern cause.

By May he was appearing on the regiment rolls as a lieutenant, and in a few more months he had been promoted to captain in the Siege of Vicksburg. He was gaining a reputation as a fighter, though he would surely not have liked a description of him by a female diarist, Julia Le Grand of New Orleans, as “tall, fat and savage against the Yankees.”

After Vicksburg fell to Ulysses S. Grant in July 1863, Captain Todd was paroled. Any hopes for military glory were fading, as the North consolidated its stranglehold on the deep South and David’s health began to worsen.

It was not true, as some later historians wrote, that David had been “mortally wounded” while defending Vicksburg.

But, in an application for retirement from the army, he explained that he had “been permanently disabled in the service of the Confederate States and in the line of duty, by Phthisis Pulmonulis (i.e. tuberculosis) caused by exposure and from which I have suffered during the past two years with frequent attacks of Hemoptysis (i.e. expectoration of blood). I have been absent from my Command unable to perform duty for the past four months.”

In late 1864, David began to court a young widow, Susie Williamson, in Huntsville, AL. They married April 4, 1865—five days before the Confederate surrender at Appomattox, and 10 days before David’s brother-in-law was shot by John Wilkes Booth at Ford’s Theater.

David was listed as a merchant in the 1870 Census, but he had very little time to succeed in the profession. He died of tuberculosis the following year. As for his half-sister: Throughout the remaining 17 years of her troubled widowhood, Mary Todd Lincoln never saw any of her surviving siblings again.

Quote of the Day (Mary Todd Lincoln, Bolstering Her Husband’s Confidence)

“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.

Chautauqua Travel Journal: Day 5

If Tuesday involved much running around here at the Chautauqua Institution, then Wednesday turned out slower. This was less a matter of choice than circumstance. But more on that in a minute…

I attended more single sessions in my classes on Walt Whitman and "Civil War victims" and the Book of Job. In the case of the poet, I continue to be surprised at how much he overturned, poetically and sexually. He remains our contemporary in ways I couldn’t imagine when I read him as an undergrad.

As for Job, the Civil War victim in this case turned out to be Mary Todd Lincoln. The closest parallel in the Book of Job to the First Lady, Job’s unnamed, briefly seen wife, turned out to be all too appropriate. Both, in the principal accounts we have of them, are depicted as shrews who help their husbands in no productive way when misfortune strikes. And yet, both are indisputably among the worst victims of fate, losing one child after another.

The morning Civil War lecture was the most dynamic, though not unexpected, of the week so far. Gary W. Gallagher (pictured)—the only military historian on the program this week--played devil’s advocate against the notion that 1863 represented a turn of the tide in the war. It was an argument I had heard before, in an essay in a book he edited, The Third Day at Gettysburg and Beyond.

Nevertheless, the capacity audience at the Amphitheater seemed to lead him to make the case with unstoppable gusto, something merely suggested by the conclusion of his guest column in the morning’s Chautauquan Daily:

“If we had been able to poll people during the incomprehensibly bloody spring and summer of 1864, no one would have said Gettysburg and Vicksburg had sealed the fate of the Confederacy and guaranteed emancipation. Not Abraham Lincoln. Not the loyal citizenry of the United States. Not the Confederate citizenry. Not the more than 3 million black people who remained enslaved in the Confederacy. For them, living in the midst of continuing turmoil, the military events of 1863 lay far in the past, well remembered but scarcely connected to expectations about how and when the seemingly endless bloodletting would cease.”

The two classes and the morning lecture were my major activities for the day. I had planned to see Alfred Hitchcock’s 1942 film Saboteur at the Chautauqua Cinema. But a half hour before that showing, as I prepared to leave Afterwords Café, I looked outside the window, only to see what appeared to be a slanting gray wall.

It was actually hailstones, and their startling drumbeat kept me in place for 25 minutes, too late to catch the start of the movie.

(I discovered later that weather conditions were worse elsewhere. Floods in Pittsburgh were bad enough to make the evening news. In my hometown of Englewood, N.J., led to such high energy demand that my neighborhood experienced a brief loss of power the next morning.)