An American Marriage

The Untold Story of Abraham Lincoln and Mary Todd

Michael Burlingame

• Publisher: Pegasus Books
• Year: 2021
• eBook ISBN: 9781643137353
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Historical Biographies
• Index: History

An enlightening narrative exploring an oft-overlooked aspect of the sixteenth president's life, An American Marriage reveals the tragic story of Abraham Lincoln's marriage to Mary Todd. Abraham Lincoln was apparently one ofthose men who regarded "connubial bliss" as an untenable fantasy.During the Civil War, hepardoned a Union soldier who had deserted the army to return home to wed hissweetheart.As thepresident signed a document sparing thesoldier'slife, Lincoln said: "I want topunish the young man—probably in less than a year he will wish I hadwithheldthe pardon." Based on thirty years of research, An American Marriage describes and analyzes why Lincoln had good reason to regret hismarriage to Mary Todd. This revealing narrative shows that, as First Lady, Mary Lincoln accepted bribes and kickbacks, sold permitsand pardons, engaged in extortion, and peddled influence. The reader comes to learn that Lincoln wed Mary Todd because, in alllikelihood, she seduced him and then insisted that he protect her honor. Perhaps surprisingly, the 5'2" Mrs. Lincoln often physicallyabused her 6'4" husband, as well as her children and servants; she humiliated her husband in public; she caused him, as president, tofear that she would disgrace him publicly. Unlike her husband, she was not profoundly opposed to slavery and hardly qualifies as the "ardent abolitionist" that somehistorians have portrayed. While she providid a useful stimulus to his ambition, she often "crushed his spirit, " as his law partner putit. In the end, Lincoln may not have had as successful a presidency as he did—where he showed a preternatural ability to deal withdifficult people—if he had not had so much practice at home.

PART I THE COURTSHIP

1839–1842

1 GIRL MEETS BOY

1839–1840

At the age of thirty, a tall, wiry, up-and-coming Illinois lawyer-politician, Abraham Lincoln, met a short, plump, twenty-year-old, well-educated Kentucky belle, Mary Todd, the cousin of his law partner, John Todd Stuart. He initially encountered her shortly after she had left her family home in Kentucky to live in Springfield, Illinois, with her eldest sister (and surrogate mother), Elizabeth, and her husband Ninian Edwards, son of Illinois’s first governor. At parties in the Edwards’s home on “Aristocracy Hill,” Mary Todd flirted with young men searching for a wife. At the time, Springfield had a dearth of eligible young women.

THE COURTSHIP BEGINS

During the social whirl that accompanied sessions of the Illinois General Assembly, Mary Todd was popular, even though “she was not what you could call a beautiful girl,” as a schoolmate remembered. A young man from Springfield termed her “the very creature of excitement” who “never enjoys herself more than when in society and surrounded by a company of merry friends.” Among those friends was Kentuckian Joshua Speed, a merchant in his mid-twenties. To social events on Aristocracy Hill, Speed brought along a fellow Kentuckian, his lanky friend and roommate Abraham, and so Lincoln began seeing Mary during the winter of 1839–1840.

Elizabeth Edwards at first encouraged a budding romance, for she considered Lincoln “a rising Man,” and thus a possible mate for her sister Mary. As time passed, however, Elizabeth had second thoughts, for he lacked basic social graces; she reported that he “Could not hold a lengthy Conversation with a lady—was not sufficiently Educated & intelligent in the female line to do so—He was charmed with Mary’s wit and fascinated with her quick sagacity—her will—her nature—and Culture—I have happened in the room where they were sitting often & often and Mary led the Conversation—Lincoln would listen & gaze on her as if drawn by some Superior power, irresistably So: he listened—never Scarcely Said a word.”

Elizabeth Edwards presciently warned her sister that Lincoln and she were not “Suitable to Each other,” for they “had no congeniality—no feelings &c. alike.” Mary “was quick, lively, gay—frivalous it may be, Social and loved glitter Show & pomp & power.” Elizabeth and her husband “told Lincoln & Mary not to marry” because “they were raised differently.” Their “natures, mind—Education—raising &c were So different they Could not live happ[il]y as husband & wife.”

Sharing their skepticism was Mary Todd’s cousin Stephen T. Logan, who warned her that Abraham was “much too rugged for your little white hands to attempt to polish.” But Mary thought that if another of her cousins, John Todd Stuart, found Lincoln to be a suitable law partner, perhaps this Lincoln might also be a suitable life partner.

In Springfield, Lincoln was variously described as “a mighty rough man,” “uncouth,” “moody,” “dull in society,” “badly dressed,” “ungainly,” “careless of his personal appearance,” as well as “awkward and shy.” Soon after moving to the Illinois capital in 1837, he said that he avoided church because “I am conscious I should not know how to behave myself.” His manners were indeed somewhat oafish. Shod in heavy Conestoga boots, he would enter a ballroom and exclaim: “How clean these women look!” In the opinion of Mary Owens, whom he had courted before he met Mary Todd, Lincoln “was deficient in those little links which make up the great chain of woman[’]s happiness.”

Unsurprisingly, young ladies in Springfield shied away from Lincoln. “We girls,” Catherine Bergen Jones remembered, “maneuvered so as to shift on each other the two awkward, diffident young lawyers, Abraham Lincoln and Samuel H. Treat.” Lincoln briefly dated Mary’s older sister Frances, who recalled that “he took me out once or twice, but he was not much for society. He would go where they [we?] took him, but he was never very much for company.” At that time, he was considered “the plainest man in Springfield,” she said. Another Springfield woman marveled at the “almost prophetic insight” that led Mary Todd to choose “the most awkward & ungainly man in her train,” one “almost totally lacking in polish.”

LINCOLN’S SOCIAL INEPTITUDE AND LACK OF SEX APPEAL

Lincoln had been uncomfortable around young women from his days in Indiana, where he lived from the age seven to twenty-one. Hoosier maidens liked him but not as a beau, for they thought him “too green.” One remembered that “he was so tall and awkward” that “the young girls my age made fun of Abe.” Although he “tried to go with some of them,” they would “give him the mitten every time,” because he was “so tall and gawky.” Another young lady complained that he “just cared too much for books.”

Similarly, in Macon County, Illinois, and later in New Salem (locales where Lincoln dwelt from the age of twenty-one to twenty-eight), young women thought he “was not much of a beau.” One described him as “a very queer fellow,” “homely,” “awkward,” and “very bashful.” At social events, he “never danced or cut up.”

Although in Indiana Lincoln had refused to dance, explaining that “my feet weren’t made that way,” later in Illinois he managed to overcome his shyness enough to approach Mary Todd at a party, allegedly saying: “I want to dance with you in the worst way.” She accepted his invitation, but his terpsichorean ineptitude was so pronounced that she told him afterwards: “Mr. Lincoln I think you have literally fulfilled your request—you have danced the worst way possible.”

MARY TODD’S DETERMINED PURSUIT OF LINCOLN

Despite that inauspicious beginning, Mary Todd pursued Lincoln, though just how she did so is unclear. In 1875, Lincoln’s good friend Orville H. Browning said: “I always thought then and ever since that in her affair with Mr. Lincoln, Mary Todd did most of the courting.” Browning added that “Miss Todd was thoroughly in earnest [in] her endeavors to get Mr. Lincoln,” and that there was “no doubt of her exceeding anxiety to marry him.” Browning knew whereof he spoke, for—as he told an interviewer—in “those times I was at Mr. Edwards’ a great deal, and Miss Todd used to sit down with me, and talk to me sometimes till midnight, about this affair of hers with Mr. Lincoln.”

Sarah Rickard, sister-in-law of Lincoln’s friend and host William Butler (at whose Springfield home/boarding house Lincoln took his meals for several years), recalled that Mary Todd “certainly made most of the plans and did the courting” and “would have him [Lincoln], whether or no.” Joshua Speed, Lincoln’s closest friend, testified that “Miss Todd wanted L. terribly.” To impress Lincoln, she “read much & committed much to memory to make herself agreeable,” according to a member of the Springfield elite.

At first, Mary Todd’s strategy worked. Lincoln reportedly admired her “naturally fine mind and cultivated tastes,” for she seemed like “a great reader and possessed of a remarkably retentive memory,” was “quick at repartee and when the occasion seemed to require it was sarcastic and severe.” Her “brilliant conversation, often embellished with apt quotations,” made her “much sought after by the young people of the town.” Her friends “looked upon her as a well educated girl of bright and attractive manner, when she was not stirred to sharp rejoinder.” William Herndon, Lincoln’s law partner and biographer, recollected that before she wed, Mary Todd was “a very shrewd girl,” “somewhat attractive,” “a fine judge of human nature,” as well as “polite,” “civil,” “rather graceful in her movements,” “polished,” “intelligent,” “well educated,” “a good linguist,” “a fine conversationalist,” “highly cultured,” “witty,” “dashing,” and “rather pleasant.” Lincoln’s friend and physician William Jayne called her “a woman of quick intellect,” a “bright, lively, plump little woman—a good talker, & capable of making herself quite attractive to young gentlemen.” Lincoln was doubtless impressed that she knew her townsman Henry Clay, Lincoln’s beau ideal of a statesman. (Clay and Mary’s father were good friends in Lexington, Kentucky.)

Moreover, Lincoln may have been drawn to Mary’s youthful qualities. A woman speculated that Lincoln saw in his wife, “despite her foibles and sometimes her puerileness, just what he needed.” In all likelihood, it was because of that “puerileness” rather than despite it that he was attracted to her. As Helen Nicolay (daughter of Lincoln’s principal White House secretary) noted, Lincoln’s “attitude toward his wife had something of the paternal in it, almost as though she were a child, under his protection.” Indeed, Lincoln had a deep-seated paternal quality that made him enjoy children and child surrogates, and Mary Todd fit the latter role well. According to one of her most sympathetic biographers, Ruth Painter Randall, Mary Todd “aroused the paternal instinct that was always so strong an element in his make-up.” Randall noted that “in some ways” Mary Todd “never grew up” and “had a timidity and childlike dependence upon the strength and calmness of others.” As First Lady, she was, in Randall’s view, “a child” in the hands of unscrupulous men and was “as defenseless as a trusting child” among the scheming women of Washington society. After she was married, “nothing pleased her more than having her husband pet and humor her, and call her his ‘child-wife.’ ” In 1848, when Lincoln was a congressman in Washington and she, then staying in Kentucky with her parents, expressed a desire to join him in the nation’s capital, he asked her: “Will you be a good girl in all things, if I consent?” Two decades later, Mary Lincoln described her husband as “always a father” to her. Her best friend during Lincoln’s presidency, Elizabeth Keckly, wrote that when he “saw faults in his wife he excused them as he would excuse the impulsive acts of a child.”

Mary’s keen desire to wed Lincoln caused her to overlook much, for she had “a bitter struggle with herself” whenever he “would carelessly ignore some social custom or forget an engagement.” He occasionally failed to “observe the conventionalities of society,” much to her annoyance. When she criticized him “for committing some faux pas,” he would “look at her quizzically” as though to say, “How can you attach such great importance to matters so trivial?”

Nonetheless, Mary Todd kept pursuing him. The two could have seen each other in Springfield throughout the first quarter of 1840, but they were apart from April to November; he was then practicing law on the Eighth Judicial Circuit and campaigning for the Whig party throughout southern Illinois, while she spent much of that summer in Missouri visiting relatives. So they courted through the mail. According to Joshua Speed, Lincoln “wrote his Mary—She darted after him—wrote him.”

Sometime in the late fall of 1840, Abraham and Mary evidently became engaged, though there was no ring, no public announcement, no shower, and no party. Lincoln seems to have proposed because he desired a “child-wife,” and because he evidently believed she wanted him to do so.

MARY’S PARENTS SHORTCHANGE HER EMOTIONALLY

Just as Lincoln may have been attracted to Mary as a surrogate child, she may well have been drawn to him because she desired a surrogate paterfamilias to take care of her and provide the love that her father, Robert Smith Todd, had evidently failed to give her after he had remarried soon after becoming a widower. To please his new, much younger wife (Elizabeth Humphreys), he had apparently withdrawn emotionally from Mary, who was only six years old when her mother, Eliza, died. The newlyweds promptly had a child, then eight more in rapid succession. With so many offspring, Robert Todd could pay little attention to Mary, who remembered her childhood as “desolate.” She evidently felt betrayed, abandoned, and rejected. Thus a deep-seated, unconscious anger may well have taken root in her psyche as she came to think of herself as unloved and unlovable. Out of those feelings, it would appear, grew a hunger for ersatz forms of love—power, money, fame—and a subconscious desire to punish her father.

Lincoln was well suited to fill the emotional void thus created for Mary Todd; not only was he more than a foot taller and almost a decade older than she, but he also somehow radiated the quality of a wise, benevolent father. A friend said that Lincoln during his early years in Springfield reminded him of “the pictures I formerly saw of old Father Jupiter, bending down from the clouds, to see what was going on below.” Mary Todd was predisposed to find a man resembling Father Jupiter highly desirable, someone who might take good care of her.

Once she wed her surrogate father (Lincoln), Mary Todd evidently displaced onto him her unconscious rage at her biological father. As psychologist Linda Schierse Leonard has observed, a “woman’s rage” is “often rooted in feelings of abandonment, betrayal, and rejection which may go back to the relation with the father, and which often come up over and over again in current relationships” with men. Such rage “is often mixed with feelings of jealousy and revenge that are strong enough to kill any relationship and the woman’s capacity for loving herself as well.” Thus “many women destroy their relationships… through continued hysterical outbursts.” Mary’s rage attacks and hysterical outbursts would not destroy her marriage, but they were to undermine it badly.

If Mary Todd felt emotionally shortchanged by her father, she felt even more so by her stepmother. Mary, according to her sister Elizabeth, “left her home in Kentucky to avoid living under the same roof with a stepmother” with whom “she did not agree.” Mary recalled that her “early home was truly at a boarding school,” Madame Charlotte Victoire LeClerc Mentelle’s Academy.

Mary’s discontent was shared by her younger brother, George, who “complained bitterly” about Betsey Humphreys’s “settled hostility” and said that he felt compelled to leave “his father’s house in consequence of the malignant & continued attempts on the part of his stepmother to poison the mind of his father toward him.” George insisted that Robert Smith Todd was “mortified that his last child by his first wife [i.e., George himself] should be obliged, like all his other first children, to abandon his house by the relentless persecution of a stepmother.” George evidently articulated the deep-seated resentment that he and his siblings felt for their stepparent.

Each of Eliza Todd’s daughters left Lexington as soon as they could, partly because life in that city was so uninteresting. Mary’s cousin Elizabeth Norris recalled that she and her friends “had few privileges & led very dull lives.” The first-born daughter, Elizabeth, wed Ninian W. Edwards and settled in Springfield. Her younger sisters followed her there, were introduced into society, and were courted by beaux whom they married. Mrs. Edwards explained that her sisters “had visited her in Springfield because of their differences with their stepmother.” Robert and Betsey Todd rarely sojourned in the Illinois capital, and the daughters of Eliza Todd seldom returned to Kentucky.

Mary Todd’s niece reported that her aunt “was a bundle of nervous activity, willful and original in planning mischief,” who often clashed “with her very conventional young stepmother.” When ten-year-old Mary and her cousin Elizabeth used willow branches to convert their narrow dresses into fashionable hooped skirts, Betsey Todd ordered the two girls to “take those things off, & then go to Sunday school.” Elizabeth recalled that she and Mary “went to our room chagrined and angry. Mary burst into tears and gave the first exhibition of temper I had ever seen or known her to make. She thought we were badly treated—and expressed herself freely on the subject.”

Mary Todd probably resented her stepmother for bearing so many rivals for her father’s attention. Her dislike for her half-siblings manifested itself during the Civil War, when all but one of them supported the Confederacy. In 1862, she expressed the hope that her half-brothers serving in the Confederate Army would be captured or slain. “They would kill my husband if they could, and destroy our Government—the dearest of all things to us,” she declared, soon after her half-brother Samuel fell at the battle of Shiloh. The following year, when another half-brother (Alexander) was killed, Mary shocked a confidante by stating: “it is but natural that I should feel for one so nearly related to me,” but Alexander had “made his choice long ago. He decided against my husband, and through him against me. He has been fighting against us; and since he chose to be our deadly enemy, I see no special reason why I should bitterly mourn his death.”

MARY’S PSYCHOLOGICAL DISORDERS

Mary required a lot of care, for in addition to her intense emotional neediness, she suffered from what psychiatrist James S. Brust described as “a significant psychiatric illness, most likely bipolar disorder.” Symptoms of that disease appeared early. An intimate childhood friend, Margaret Stuart, observed that Mary Todd in her Kentucky years was “very highly strung, nervous, impulsive, excitable, having an emotional temperament much like an April day, sunning all over with laughter one moment, the next crying as though her heart would break.” Orville H. Browning recalled that she “was a girl of much vivacity in conversation, but was subject to… spells of mental depression…. As we used familiarly to state it she was always ‘either in the garret or cellar.’ ” Later, she displayed classic signs of bipolar behavior: prolonged bouts of depression, excessive mourning for losses, wild spending sprees, ego inflation, and delusions of grandeur.

Like many people with bipolar disorder, Mary had spells of mania and depression that were not a constant feature of her life, but rather came and went. She reportedly suffered from what a Springfield neighbor called “monthly derangements” (i.e., premenstrual stress syndrome, which can cause depression, irritability, and mood swings). Frederick I. Dean, who lived across the street from the Lincolns’ home, remembered that in his youth he “noticed strange vagaries on the part of Mrs. Lincoln.” He told a Lincoln biographer that “as I grew older, I heard conversations between my mother and neighboring ladies touching upon that subject, and I formed the idea from that source that the vagaries arose from a functional derangement common alone to women, and that they occurred only semi occasionally, but regularly at stated times, & were of but brief duration, and as I grew older these facts were very plainly to be seen by myself.” Shortly after Lincoln’s death, when Dean asked William Herndon about that pattern, he replied that it “corresponded exactly with his own ideas, and exactly in line with what Mr Lincoln had frequently himself told him, with broken tearful voice.” In 1862, Mary Lincoln wrote her husband describing one such episode: “A day or two since, I had one of my severe attacks, [and] if it had not been for Lizzie Keckly, I do not know what I should have done—Some of these periods, will launch me away.”

In addition to bipolar disorder, Mary also exhibited symptoms of narcissism and borderline personality disorder. Her contemporaries did not use such language, which was unknow...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Introduction
• Part I: The Courtship, 1839–1842
• Part II: The Springfield Years, 1842–1861
• Part III: The White House Years, 1861–1865
• Conclusion
• Photographs
• Appendix: An Appraisal of the Literature on the Lincolns’ Marriage
• Acknowledgments
• About the Author
• Index
• Copyright