Mary Todd Lincoln Reconsidered

In May 1875, almost precisely 10 years after an assassin’s bullet felled the 16th president, his widow, Mary Todd Lincoln, learned she was to stand trial just an hour before the proceedings began. Clad in full mourning dress with her face veiled, Mary faced a jury assembled to determine whether she was insane.

It was an unimaginable betrayal. Mary’s sole surviving child, Robert, ashamed by her increasingly erratic behavior, which threatened his burgeoning political career and his marriage, had initiated the process to commit his mother to an asylum.

The trial marked the culmination of a decade-long nightmare for the former first lady. Traumatized by her husband’s violent death, which she witnessed firsthand, Mary had refused to leave the White House for six weeks. She did not take part in any of the two-week-long funeral ceremonies in Washington, D.C., or accompany the slain president’s casket on the train to Illinois for burial. Mary later described the weeks after the assassination as “a bed of illness & many days & nights of almost positive derangement.”

Additionally, Mary had endured the unimaginable loss of three of her four sons in the years before, during, and after the presidency. Both three-year-old Eddie and her “idolized child of the household,” 11-year-old Willie, had succumbed to tuberculosis. Eighteen-year-old Tad, his widowed mother’s closest companion, died of pleurisy and congestive heart failure six years after Lincoln’s assassination, leaving Mary bereft and alone.

Mary’s profound grief was exacerbated by financial strain. While Lincoln had left a considerable estate, the former attorney inexplicably died without a will. An executor took over two years to settle his affairs—leaving Mary and Tad virtually homeless, shuffling between middling hotels and cheap boardinghouses. To make matters worse, she had racked up a massive debt from years of shopping sprees. There was no precedent for the nation to provide financial support for a president’s widow, and Congress rejected Mary’s pleas for succor. Even after the estate was resolved, Mary careened from extreme thrift to wild spending, all the while humiliated by her diminished circumstances.

In the Chicago courtroom, a parade of seventeen witnesses—including doctors who had never examined Mary and merchants who had eagerly sold her luxury goods—testified to her mental instability. Robert might have insisted on a closed hearing, but instead permitted the public and the Chicago press corps to attend, ensuring his mother’s humiliation.

The jury deliberated for just 10 minutes before declaring Mary Lincoln insane. Increasingly paranoid about financial security, Mary had begun carrying the modern equivalent of $30,000 in cash and $1,000,000 in securities pinned to her undergarments. Robert instructed his lawyer to remove the bonds hidden in her petticoats. “You are not satisfied with locking me up in an insane asylum,” Mary cried. “But now you are going to rob me of all I have on earth; my husband is dead, and my children are dead, and these bonds I have saved for my necessities in my old age; now you are going to rob me of them.” It was an astonishing denouement for a former first lady, once accustomed to a life of luxury and influence.

In An Inconvenient Widow, Lois Romano, a former writer and editor at The Washington Post and Politico, seeks to correct the “unsettled legacy” of “the most misunderstood and tragic first lady in American history,” offering a sympathetic and nuanced portrait of a complex, resilient woman scorned during her lifetime and maligned by historians since. With a journalist’s instinct, Romano scrutinizes primary sources that shaped scholarly portrayals of Mary as difficult or crazy, casting a skeptical eye toward those she deems unreliable, tainted by grudges, or lacking in personal knowledge of the Lincolns.

Chief among these is Lincoln’s former junior law partner, William Herndon. Many historians today now view Herndon as an unreliable source who exaggerated his relationship with the president and loathed the first lady. Remarkably, a year after the assassination, Herndon delivered a bizarre public lecture on the Lincolns’ love life, depicting the late president as trapped in a miserable marriage, pining for a lost flame of his youth. Romano asserts that this claim lacked any basis in fact. Over the decades that followed, Herndon’s damning portrayal of the first lady hardened. He variously described Mary as “‘cold as a chunk of ice,’ avaricious, stingy, insolent, insulting, a tigress and a she-wolf.”

By the early 20th century, Herndon’s skewed portrayal had taken root, and given rise to a notion of Mary as the president’s cross to bear. “The more Lincoln’s legend soared, the more Mary’s reputation declined,” Romano writes. As evidence, she cites a 1932 Reader’s Digest article, which opened, “The great tragedy of Lincoln’s life was not his assassination but his marriage.”

But while Herndon’s commentary on the Lincolns’ marriage may have had little factual basis, his vituperative attacks on Mary’s character echoed those of others who knew her well. Mary’s list of detractors included cabinet secretaries, a Supreme Court justice, and White House staff. Lincoln’s personal secretary, John Hay, dubbed her “the hellcat.”

Romano neither dismisses nor minimizes Mary’s character flaws and troubling behavior. “Mary did herself no favors,” she acknowledges. “She was a larger-than-life, provocative character who spent too freely, grieved too publicly and for too long, and seemed unable or unwilling to corral her emotions, her temper, and her opinions. When she felt threatened or attacked, she could be catty, vengeful, and imperious.”

Of her various foibles, Mary’s proclivity toward fine goods and her unbridled spending—expensive clothing for herself and decor for the White House—drew the greatest public scrutiny. Despite her considerable political acumen, she could be remarkably tone deaf. For instance, in the spring of 1861, as young men were pressed to join the army and Congress struggled to pay for the war, Mary purchased a grand piano, draperies, a 190-piece set of fine china, and Parisian wallpaper during a lavish shopping spree in Philadelphia and New York. Romano depicts Mary as a compulsive shopper who once purchased 1,000 pairs of white gloves for herself. White House staff recalled stacks upon stacks of unopened boxes, filled with Mary’s expensive, unworn clothing and jewels.

Mary’s insanity trial serves as the book’s climactic scene, but it was hardly the first time Mary had faced scandal and mockery. “The ridicule she faced as a former first lady is unfathomable by today’s standards,” Romano writes. Even—and perhaps especially—in widowhood, her critics had no mercy. Sadly, Mary supplied them with ammunition. In 1867, she attempted to blackmail Republican Party luminaries into buying her cast-off wardrobe, threatening to publicly shame them for refusing her a widow’s pension. The plan backfired spectacularly: Several politicians leaked the story, and over 2,000 newspapers ran it, with one characterizing Mary’s actions as “vulgar, mortifying, disgusting, deranged, and revolting.”

Romano balances Mary’s less desirable traits with her more admirable qualities, refuting specific attacks. Among the most pernicious was the accusation that Mary—born into a wealthy Kentucky slaveholding family—was a Confederate sympathizer. On the contrary, Romano offers substantial evidence that Mary was deeply supportive of the Union, joining her husband on trips to the front line and regularly visiting injured soldiers in military hospitals.

Indeed, thanks to Romano’s multidimensional biography, one can imagine a modern-day PR professional spinning an entirely different story for the challenging first lady. To wit: growing up in the relatively cosmopolitan Lexington, Kentucky, Mary Todd lived in proximity to power and wealth, and was influenced by family friend Henry Clay, whom Lincoln called his “beau ideal” as a statesman and politician, who notably opposed the expansion of slavery into the territories. Mary read widely, received an unusually robust education for an early 19^th-century woman, and spoke fluent French.

As a young woman, she was surrounded by suitors, including her husband’s future political rival, Stephen A. Douglas, who would defeat Lincoln in 1858 to become U.S. Senator from Illinois and was his Democratic opponent in the 1860 presidential race. Much to her family’s chagrin, Mary selected instead the promising but uncouth Lincoln. Politically astute, Mary saw the presidency as Lincoln’s destiny, despite his slim national experience as a one-term congressman more than a decade earlier. When party leaders suggested he might have a shot at the vice presidency, Mary urged him to hold out for the top of the ticket.

Moreover, in an era when political wives—even first ladies—performed few public functions, Mary envisioned a visible role for herself. When Lincoln entered Congress in 1847, 28-year-old Mary took the unusual step of accompanying him to the nation’s capital. As future Supreme Court Justice David Davis, Lincoln’s friend and future executor, presciently noted: “She wishes to loom largely.”

Romano leans heavily on psychological explanations for Mary’s erratic behavior, relying on recent scholarship positing that the first lady’s conduct bore hallmarks of bipolar disorder, post-traumatic stress disorder, and a genetic predisposition toward acute anxiety and emotional instability—exacerbated by the deaths of her sons and husband. “One by one, I have consigned to their resting place my idolized ones,” Mary wrote, “and now, in this world, there is nothing left for me but the deepest anguish and desolation.” “Few among us,” Romano muses, “could survive such profound losses without the help of psychiatric professionals or contemporary anxiety and mood medication. Mary had neither.”

Romano devotes the most interesting portion of the biography to Mary’s 17-year widowhood, a deeply painful period characterized by grief, financial strain, illness, and despair. Much of Mary’s misery was internal, as Romano’s ruminations on her mental health elucidate, but perhaps the nation bore responsibility for her suffering as well.

Lincoln was the first president to be assassinated, and there was no precedent for bestowing public honor—financial or otherwise—befitting a former first lady. Mary saw herself as an extension of the martyred president and believed the nation, and particularly the Republican party leaders who had benefited from Lincoln’s patronage, owed her. She was baffled that, in a country that routinely raised funds for orphans and widows, no wealthy benefactors stepped forward to assist her, and especially galled by the generosity bestowed on General Ulysses S. Grant—who was gifted three “magnificent” mansions stocked with linens, silver, and food. “Life is certainly coleur de rose to him—if it is all darkness & gloom to the unhappy family of the fallen chief,” Mary wrote bitterly. After five years of Congressional debate, Mary was finally awarded a paltry $3,000 annual pension. “It mortifies me,” she wrote, “in this land, for which my precious husband’s life was sacrificed, I am unable … to shelter myself under my own roof.”

Throughout, the book seems to be asking Mary’s central question: What does a nation owe to those who sacrifice everything? Romano gives no answer, but by chronicling Mary’s grief with the urgency of a talented journalist, she gives her the best gift she can: a refurbished legacy.