Mary Todd Lincoln (1818–82,) née Mary Ann Todd, was the American first lady 1861–65 and wife of President Abraham Lincoln. Happy and energetic in her youth, she suffered ill health and personal tragedies subsequently and acted erratically in her later years.
Born to a slave-owning family in Lexington, Kentucky, Mary was wooed by Abraham Lincoln while living with her sister in Springfield, Illinois, and, although their engagement was once broken, she married him in 1842. She was a sensitive, cheerful woman with a streak of neurosis. Although tales of the Lincolns’s incompatibility as a married couple may be fictitious, it is certain that the deaths of three of their four sons, especially twelve-year-old Willie in 1862, brought them much sadness.
During their years in the White House, Mary found a close friend and confidante in the dressmaker Elizabeth Keckley, an ex-slave who may have influenced Mary’s feelings toward African Americans. Mary was criticized for her extravagance and wrongly accused of disloyalty to the Union because of her Kentucky origins and her brothers fighting on the Confederate side.
Abraham Lincoln’s assassination in 1865, which occurred as Mary sat next to him in Ford’s Theatre in Washington, D.C., disturbed her completely. For much of the rest of her life, Mary was plagued by the paranoiac conviction that she was in dire poverty and by the compulsion to shop regularly. She was committed to a mental institution in 1875 by her surviving son, Robert Todd Lincoln, but was declared stable the following year. She is buried beside her husband at Oak Ridge Cemetery in Springfield.
Notable biographies about Mary Lincoln include Barbara Hambly’s The Emancipator’s Wife (2005,) Jean Harvey Baker’s Mary Todd Lincoln: A Biography (2008,) and Catherine Clinton’s Mrs. Lincoln: A Life (2009.)
More: Wikipedia • READ: Works by Mary Todd Lincoln
I explain to you, exactly and truly, how we are circumstanced. A greater portion of our means is unavailable, consisting of a house in S. Springfield and some wild lands in Iowa. Notwithstanding my great and good husband’s life was sacrificed for his country, we are left to struggle in a manner…of life undeserved. Roving Generals have elegant mansions showered upon them, and the American people leave the family of the Martyred President to struggle as best they may! Strange justice this.
—Mary Todd Lincoln
Clouds and darkness surround us, yet Heaven is just, and the day of triumph will surely come, when justice and truth will be vindicated. Our wrongs will be made right, and we will once more, taste the blessings of freedom.
—Mary Todd Lincoln
Topics: Justice
My evil genius Procrastination has whispered me to tarry ’til a more convenient season.
—Mary Todd Lincoln
Topics: Procrastination
I am convinced, the longer I live, that life and its blessings are not so entirely unjustly distributed as when we are suffering greatly we are inclined to suppose.
—Mary Todd Lincoln
Topics: Blessings, Hedonism, Self-Pity
Tell me, how can I live without my Husband any longer? This is my first awakening thought each morning, and as I watch the waves of the turbulent lake under our windows I sometimes feel I should like to go under them.
—Mary Todd Lincoln
Topics: Grief, Grieving
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