C O F F E E T O W N cp P R E S S

The Addiction of
r
le

Mary Todd Lincoln

eid
.BE
ne
An
The Addiction
of
Mary Todd
Lincoln

Anne E. Beidler

Seattle, WA
The Addiction of Mrs. Lincoln was first published in 2009.

Copyright © 2009 by Coffeetown Press

All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced or

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Cover design by Sabrina S. Beidler

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Beidler, Anne E., 1940-

The addiction of Mary Todd Lincoln / Anne E. Beidler.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references.
ISBN 978-1-60381-021-0 (alk. paper)
1. Lincoln, Mary Todd, 1818-1882--Health. 2. Lincoln, Mary Todd,
1818-1882--Mental health. 3. Presidents’ spouses--United States--
Biography. 4. Lincoln, Abraham, 1809-1865--Family. 5. Migraine--
United States--Case studies. 6. Drug addiction--United States--
Case studies. 7. Morphine abuse--United States--Case studies. I.
Title.

E457.25.L55B45 2009
973.7092--dc22

2009002186
Contents

Introduction __________________________________________ i 
A Chronology of Mary Todd Lincoln’s Life __________________________ viii 
Mary Todd Lincoln _____________________________________________ ix 
I: What We Know about Mary Todd Lincoln ________________ 1 
Growing Up ___________________________________________________ 1 
Wife and Mother ______________________________________________ 7 
Widowhood _________________________________________________ 30 
II: Opiate Addiction in the Nineteenth Century ____________ 55 
Availability of Opiates _________________________________________ 56 
Characteristics of Addicts _______________________________________ 60 
Prevailing Attitudes toward Addiction ____________________________ 67 
Methods of Treatment _________________________________________ 74 
Stories of Individual Addicts ____________________________________ 81 
III: The Addiction of Mary Todd Lincoln___________________ 95 
Did She Have a Destructive Relationship with Mood Altering Drugs?____ 98 
Was She Genetically Vulnerable to Chemical Addiction? _____________ 103 
What Mood-Changing Chemicals Did She Have Access To? ___________ 108 
In What Ways Did She Behave Like an Addict? _____________________ 120 
What Treatment Would Have Been Available to Her? _______________ 147 
To Sum Up __________________________________________________ 150 
Appendix: What We Now Know about Chemical Addiction _ 157 
What Is Chemical Addiction? _____________________________ 159 
Who Is Most in Danger? _________________________________ 163 
What Drugs Are Dangerous to Them? ______________________ 165 
How Do the Victims Behave? _____________________________ 167 
What Treatment Is Available to Them? _____________________ 170 
Bibliography___________________________________ 173 
The evil spirit of the drug
hides its strength and touches
the doomed one gently until
it has made its grasp sure,
then claws protrude from
that soft hand and clutch
the captive with a grip which [s]he
can have little hope of breaking.

—an unnamed addict, 1881,

quoted by H. Wayne Morgan
in Yesterday’s Addicts, 1974
Introduction
You probably know a Mary Todd Lincoln. A person in
pain. A person in pain who goes to the doctor and then goes
home and takes the prescribed medication whenever
necessary to relieve the pain. And at first it works
wonderfully. After a while, however, the dosage must be
increased. And increased again. This person does not know
about his or her genetic vulnerability to addiction, does not
even think about addiction as relevant. All that matters is
finding some measure, any measure, of relief from that pain.
After all, what could possibly be wrong with relieving pain?
Yet sometimes it goes all wrong. Sometimes the pain gets
destroyed but so does everything else.
The destruction began in Mary Todd Lincoln, wife of
Abraham, long before she became our nation’s First Lady.
The destruction was slow and steady, its progress
inexorable, like that of a deadly green worm eating away
inside her brain. She’s gone now. Her agony ended long ago,
but perhaps we can learn from her suffering. Perhaps from
the distance of 125 years we can look back and see a pattern
that she and her family and friends could not see because it
was so close and so confusing and so terrible. Mary Todd
Lincoln was, after all, a wise and generous woman, and I
think she would want us to know her story in the hope that
some of us will not be doomed to repeat it. For there are
among us still many Mary Todd Lincolns.
Let’s go back. Several able tellers have told the story of
the life of Mary Todd Lincoln, born into the rich and famous
ii THE ADDICTION OF MARY TODD LINCOLN

Todd family, mother of four sons, wife of our Civil War

President, Abraham.
Her cousin, Katherine Helm, first tried to tell the world
that Mary was not nearly so difficult and peculiar and weird
as the Chicago newspapers tried to make her sound. Helm
told many real and touching anecdotes of their happy
childhood days together. Like the time they wanted to look
sophisticated and wear hoop skirts when they went to
church, but had no hoops, so made their own lop-sided ones
out of willow branches. It was painstaking and futile work,
but they had fun.
Then Carl Sandburg, devoted to the memory of Abraham
Lincoln, wanted to tell the world that anybody as wonderful
as Abraham must surely have had excellent taste in a wife.
Sandburg described Mary as a lovely lady and a good wife, at
least at first. The fact that she became a bit crazy now and
then was certainly no fault of Abraham’s, according to
Sandburg.
In the 1950s a respectful biographer and careful
researcher, Ruth Painter Randall, wrote a meticulous story
of Mary’s life, the story of a loving mother, a loving wife,
whose life was beset with trouble.
The Turners too, historians who gathered together Mary’s
existing letters, were sympathetic to Mary, who found
herself in the national limelight at a tragic time. They
wondered why we have built a marble temple for her
husband yet still dismiss his wife as “a shrew, a spendthrift,
a madwoman” (Turner 4).
More recently, the perceptive historian, Jean Baker,
vividly described the tumultuous times Mary lived in and
delicately suggested that Mary’s troubles were psychological.
Jason Emerson followed up on this explanation by
describing Mary Todd Lincoln as suffering from bipolar
disorder.
 INTRODUCTION iii

There is one problem, however, with each of these caring

summaries of Mary Todd Lincoln’s life. None of them
explains the huge and awful thing that her son Robert did to
his mother. Whatever made him feel he had to resort to such
drastic action?
It happened in Chicago, in the year 1875, when Mary was
56 years old: 1

She waited. She waited before she opened the door

because she was afraid. For it seemed she lived in
constant danger now, even though the war was over. Her
murdered husband was already being called, “The Great
One,” while she, the former First Lady, the wife who had
always faithfully supported him, they were calling crazy.
They. If only they would leave her alone.
That insistent knocking. Those stupid people. She tried
to be always vigilant, but this time her hair was not
combed, her dress was not clean. She was not expecting
visitors, at least she did not think she was. But whoever
was knocking, what would they think when she, looking
like a common servant, opened the door herself? The old
panic pushed in her throat.
“Mrs. Lincoln,” began this man, whom she had known
for many years, “you are under arrest. Come with me, for
they are waiting for you in court. Your insanity trial will
begin in one hour.”
He seemed so business-like, almost as if he were
telling her that her roof needed some minor repairs. Yet
she didn’t own a roof any more, and this man was not
acting like an old friend, but like still another new enemy.
Ever so politely, he threatened to use force, if necessary,
to take her to this public trial, which her first-born son

1
Italicized passages are my attempts to imagine or reconstruct certain
scenes as they might have happened.
iv THE ADDICTION OF MARY TODD LINCOLN

had so carefully arranged for her. Mary Todd Lincoln

went.

The President’s wife, crazy? Mrs. Abraham Lincoln,

arrested? And all of this arranged by her son? Yes. Her trial
had been carefully planned. The judge and jury and 17
witnesses were already there waiting for her. Her son Robert
was there too, of course. Her only living child, Robert Todd
Lincoln, was 32, married, the father of two small children,
and already a prominent and respected lawyer in Chicago.
Mary listened impassively as the witnesses recounted her
erratic behavior during the recent months that she had been
living in a Chicago hotel. Some of the witnesses were hotel
workers, who testified that she was sometimes terrified of
imaginary things, that she sometimes heard noises that no
one else could hear. Other witnesses, local merchants,
testified that she shopped compulsively, buying large
quantities of things, like lace curtains, that she could not
possibly use. Robert himself testified that although she had
always been kind to him, she had been irresponsible and
unpredictable since his father’s murder–especially about
money. For her own safety, he felt she must be restrained.
And five eminent doctors testified that Mary Todd Lincoln,
whom they had not recently examined, was of unsound
mind.
She was insane, they all said, and legally it was so
decreed. Which meant that they kept her under guard, took
away control of her money, and committed her to an insane
asylum. It was the nicest insane asylum they could find, but
still she would be a captive there. Quite alone. She was
publicly humiliated as the nation’s newspapers screamed
that Mrs. Abraham Lincoln was a lunatic.
This story from our national family history we perhaps do
not care to remember. But it is true. Lovely, intelligent,
 INTRODUCTION v

charming Mary Todd from the rich, aristocratic and

powerful Todds of Lexington, Kentucky, married that nice
nobody, Abraham. They eventually had four sons, and
Abraham became president and she was a good wife and a
good mother and a good First Lady. Then one day she was
called crazy and locked up in a lunatic asylum.
A controversy raged. Some well-meaning people thought
that Mary Todd Lincoln was wrongfully incarcerated; other
well-meaning people believed that at last she would receive
treatment for her illness, whatever that was. At any rate, she
behaved herself in the asylum for four months, and one year
later, just when the newspapers had almost forgotten her,
the lawyers got together again and declared her sane once
more. Although legally sane, she was an ill and broken
woman who wandered around Europe for a few years and
then came back to her sister’s home in Illinois to die.
This story of Mary Todd Lincoln’s insanity trial has been
well told several times before, but it seems that we have
trouble remembering her story. Perhaps because her story
still raises many disturbing questions. Was she really of
sound mind? Why did Robert arrange such a rigged and
public trial for his mother? How had such a wife as Mary,
struggling with illness, affected her famous husband? And
where exactly is that sometimes wobbly line between two
labels, sane and insane?
Mary. Perhaps she wouldn’t mind our calling her that.
Mary, Mary, quite contrary. Now, she would mind that. Was
she contrary? Many people have thought she was. Many
historians have, straining to be charitable, pronounced her
so. You see, historians seem always willing to talk about her
nice husband—indeed they want to talk about that American
icon—so it is hard to avoid at least a discreet mention of his
perhaps contrary wife.
vi THE ADDICTION OF MARY TODD LINCOLN

The historians try to be kind, really they do, but what do

you say about a woman who inspired so many conflicting
opinions? One of her neighbors loved her, another one hated
her. One servant respected her, another one quit in disgust.
One cousin described her as generous, another as stingy.
One White House employee found her capable and kind,
another, helpless and rude. The adjectives range in the
extremes. As through the years the Lincoln name became
increasingly golden, many, many people remembered Mary.
Still, most of the memories are contradictory.
Remembering, after all, is a hazardous business. Imagine
a journalist today trying to flesh out a person who had
suddenly come under the public eye:

“Excuse me, sir, I’m from the newspaper, and I was

just wondering what you might remember about a
person you went to school with, an Elaine
Wigglesworth?”
“Who?”
“Elaine, Elaine Wigglesworth. Many people have
heard of her now, of course, but I wonder if you
remember anything about her back when you were
classmates in the second grade?”
“Oh, yes. She was a good friend of mine. A lovely girl.
I thought the world of Elaine.”
“So you would say, then, that there was no sign of
deranged behavior back then?
“Deranged behavior? Of course, not. She was perfectly
normal, a charming girl.”
“In other words, sir, when you were second graders
together you noticed nothing at all about Elaine which
would indicate that she was capable of murdering a
busload of school children on their way home from
kindergarten?”
“She did that?”
 INTRODUCTION vii

“Thirty-seven dead, from the bomb she planted, and

nine terribly injured.”
“Well, now that I think about it, Elaine Wigglesworth
wasn’t very well liked by the other kids. She argued
constantly with the other girls. And she didn’t talk to the
rest of us. And once, I remember very clearly, she copied
from me when we were having a spelling test. The
teacher was always having to punish her. Yes, we all
knew she was headed for trouble.”

And so it was, perhaps, for Mary Todd Lincoln. “Mary

who? Oh, yes, I remember when. . .”
Most people being remembered, however, through the
filter of collective memory, come out pretty much one way or
another, good or bad. Mary Todd Lincoln’s father, for
example, has gone down in history as an upright, able man.
Similarly, the stories that have come down to us about
Abraham are positive. All the adjectives are good. The same
is true of their son Robert, who lived to be much older than
either of his parents. He is still usually described as
intelligent, prominent, capable, responsible, private, and
honest.
Then there is Mary. Mary Todd Lincoln was sometimes
serene, but other times hysterical; sometimes charming and
interested, but other times nasty and self-absorbed;
sometimes poised, sometimes paranoid. She was, in a word,
unpredictable, at least in the public part of her life. Kind
historians call her an enigma.
But if we look at Mary Todd Lincoln more closely, I think
we can understand her a little better. I think we need to
understand her better, for, although more than a hundred
years have passed between us, she was very much like many
of us today. She was an addict. And as her addiction illness,
which sometimes looked like craziness, worsened, the effect
viii THE ADDICTION OF MARY TODD LINCOLN

on her husband, who now belongs to all of us, was

enormous. We must try to understand that too.
After many years of working in the field of chemical
addiction, I am drawn to Mary. Any woman in our addiction
therapy groups would immediately feel a kinship with her.
She acts like an addict, she sounds like an addict, and she
comes from a family rampant with addiction. Any recovering
addict, like me, would welcome her into the room, and
would feel in an instant sisterhood with her. We would
understand, by sympathetic instinct, what she must have
gone through, even though some of the actual hard evidence
of her addiction may have disappeared from the historical
record.

A Chronology of Mary Todd Lincoln’s Life

Mary Todd Lincoln’s life spanned from 1818 to 1882. Her

63 years included three major periods: 1) her youth, 2) her
time as wife and mother, and 3) her widowhood.
Until the age of 24, Mary was the third daughter, and
probably the most accomplished, of six surviving children
born to Robert and Eliza Parker Todd in Lexington,
Kentucky. The Todds and Parkers had been founding
families in Lexington, and Mary grew up in the household of
one of the richest, most prominent families in town. The
Todds were the Kennedys of Kentucky.
During the second phase of her life, Mary Todd Lincoln
was, in her own mind, primarily a devoted wife and mother.
She married Abraham Lincoln when she was 24. Their
marriage ended 23 years later when he was killed in
Washington, D.C. They had four sons, two of whom died
before their father did. Mary and her family spent most of
this period in Springfield, Illinois, but during the last four
 INTRODUCTION ix

years she was our First Lady in the White House.

Throughout this time, Mary’s migraine headaches plagued
her. Also throughout this time, she, who was raised by
slaves, remained openly opposed to slavery.
A widow at the age of 47, she spent the last 16 years of her
life restlessly moving around and coping with many
troubles: health, legal, and money troubles, but also
relationship troubles. Spiritually, she became weary. At age
63, she died in her sister Elizabeth’s home in Springfield,
Illinois.
Generally speaking, Mary Todd Lincoln’s biographers
agree that the first phase of her life was a mostly positive
time, that the last phase was a mostly negative time, and that
the phase in the middle was a time full of contradictions. Let
us now look at a more detailed chronology of her life. This
chronology will help us see the big picture of her life and also
identify the turning points where her difficulties deepened.

Mary Todd Lincoln

1818 Born in December, Lexington, Kentucky.

1825 Mary’s mother died at age 31, leaving Mary’s

father Robert and six young children under 12:
Elizabeth, Frances, Mary (age six), Levi, Ann, and
infant George Rogers Clark Todd.

1826 Mary acquired a stepmother, Betsey Humphreys

Todd. Betsey and Mary’s father Robert then had
nine more children within 15 years.

1827 At age 8 Mary went to school.

x THE ADDICTION OF MARY TODD LINCOLN

1832 Mary’s sister Elizabeth married well (a bright

young lawyer, son of the Illinois governor) and
moved to Springfield, Illinois. Mary began
attending a French school in Lexington.

1837 Mary spent some time in Springfield with her

sister Elizabeth, whose house was a social center
for the frontier city.

1839 At age 21, Mary moved to Elizabeth’s home in

Springfield and began a relationship with
Abraham Lincoln, a young lawyer with neither
wealth nor connections. Mary’s sister and her
prominent husband did not approve of this
relationship. They thought Mary could do better.

1841 In January Abraham broke off his relationship

with Mary.

1842 In the summer Mary and Abraham were

reconciled and eventually married. They had very
little money, so they lived frugally in a boarding
house in Springfield. Mary learned about life
without servants or slaves to care for her.

1843 Their son Robert Todd Lincoln was born. Mary

Todd Lincoln was 24, and Abraham was 34.

1846 Their second son, Eddie was born. Abraham was a

circuit lawyer, spending much time traveling far
from home. Abraham was elected to represent
Illinois in the U. S. Congress.

1847 The Lincoln family (Robert was four and Eddie,

one and a half) moved to Washington, where they
lived in a boarding house.
 INTRODUCTION xi

1848-49 For much of this time Mary and the boys

boarded in Springfield while Abraham was in
Washington, but eventually they were all settled
once again in Springfield.

1850 Eddie died in February, at age four. Robert was

seven. Then Willie was born in December, when
Mary was 32.

1853 Tad was born.

1855 Abraham lost the race for U. S. Senate.

1856 Mary remodeled their house while her husband

was away.

1858 Abraham lost Senate race again.

1859 Robert went to Harvard.

1860 Abraham elected President of United States.

1861 Lincoln family moved to Washington D.C., again,

but this time not to a crowded boarding house.
Mary, the new First Lady, was 42. She had her
first carriage accident.

1862 Willie died.

1863 Mary had her second carriage accident.

1864 Robert graduated from college. Abraham was

elected to a second term as President.
xii THE ADDICTION OF MARY TODD LINCOLN

1865 Robert was appointed to Grant’s staff in army.

War ended. Abraham was killed in April, leaving
Mary, age 46; Robert, 22; and Tad, 12.

1867 Used clothes sale.

1868 Robert married Mary Harlan. Mary and Tad went

to Germany to live. Behind the Scenes was
published by Elizabeth Keckley.

1869 Robert’s first child, Mary, was born.

1871 Mary and Tad returned to U.S. and stayed at first

with Robert. Tad died. Then Mary began her
wandering years. The Great Fire swept Chicago.

1872 Robert’s family went to Europe. Robert hired Mrs.

Fitzgerald to be a nurse/companion for Mary.

1873 Robert’s second child, Abraham, was born.

1875 Mary was in Florida for a while. The insanity trial

was held in Chicago in May; Mary was declared
insane and sent to Bellevue Sanatorium in
Batavia, Illinois, where she stayed almost four
months. Robert’s third child, Jessie, was born in
November.

1876 Mary declared legally sane in June. She left for

France and another period of wandering.

1879 She fell and injured her back.

1880 She fell again on a stairway, then again on a boat.

Mary came back to the U.S. She had not written to
Robert while she was in Europe.
 INTRODUCTION xiii

1881 Robert became Secretary of War. Robert and his

daughter Mary visited Mary in Springfield for a
sort of reconciliation.

1882 In July Mary died in Elizabeth’s house in

Springfield at age 63.
I: What We Know about Mary
Todd Lincoln
Within this framework of the major events of her life, we
are now ready to examine what we can be pretty sure we
know about Mary Todd Lincoln as a person. Was she always
an enigma? Were there signs of her “insanity” in her early
years? When and in what ways did the green worm of
addiction begin gnawing at her brain?
Let us look at each of the three parts of her life as
carefully as we can. We will listen to her biographers, of
course, but whenever possible we will listen very carefully to
Mary’s own words. About each of the three major periods of
her life, her growing up, her wife and mother time, and her
widowhood, we will try to answer four basic questions:

1. How did she look?

2. How did she feel?
3. How did she behave?
4. What things did she value most?

Growing Up
Mary spent most of this important first part of her life in
Lexington, Kentucky, with her large, privileged family. She
was born into luxury and prestige:

She came into the kind of home where there was a fan-
shaped window above the entrance, the gleam of silver on
2 THE ADDICTION OF MARY TODD LINCOLN

the sideboard, and rich furnishings reflected in gold-

framed mirrors. There were dainty clothes, the gentle
brown hands of a Negro “mammy” to receive her, and an
imposing circle of relatives to exclaim over the new baby.
(Randall 20)

This was the tone of the first part of Mary Todd Lincoln’s
life, including the years in Springfield at her sister
Elizabeth’s house. During these fortunate years as child,
student, and socialite, Mary “had few conflicts and almost no
responsibilities” (Evans 108). She seems to have been
reasonably happy.
Our sources of information about her during this time
include very few of her own words, for we have only three of
her letters. Among her biographers, however, there is almost
complete agreement about the young Mary’s auspicious
beginnings.

How did she look?

Mary Todd consistently appeared healthy, attractive,

pretty, and well-dressed.

How did she feel?

Apparently she felt good most of the time. There is no

mention of sickliness or of any physical problems that got in
her way. Although she lived through a cholera epidemic as a
child, she did not get the disease. Writing in 1932, W. A.
Evans mentions that she had headaches since the age of 20,
and Abraham implies that she had headaches sometimes
when he first met her, but there is no indication that these
 CHAPTER I 3

headaches interfered with her busy life during her first 20

years. Perhaps her headaches had begun earlier, and
perhaps the medicine she took for them worked better then.
We cannot be sure.

How did she behave?

The people who knew Mary best saw her as intelligent,

humorous, sociable, and self-confident.
Mary made no attempt to disguise her intelligence. An
excellent student, she went to school much longer than most
girls did. She had a good memory, a talent for acting, a love
of reading, and an interest in politics. She soon became
fluent in French. Mary also became a good letter writer and
a good conversationalist (both highly prized
accomplishments in her society). Many also found her a
shrewd judge of character, “far above the average quality as
regards capacity for observation, for ability to read and in
other ways acquire information, and for analysis” (Evans
301).
Mary had a good sense of humor, and her early letters
show her ability to laugh at herself as well as others. Her
cousin told a story of Mary’s about Old Sol, a down-and-out,
alcoholic white man who had been sold to a black woman:

“Oh, Elizabeth, I am so ashamed of myself! Just to think,

two years ago I was laughing at him, laughing at his funny
old clothes, laughing because he, a white man, had been
publicly sold as a vagabond to an old negro woman for
thirty cents. Oh, I was an unspeakable little beast,” wept
Mary. “I cannot forgive myself, but”—smiling at me
through her tears—”it was a lucky bargain for the old
darkey.” (Helm 51)
4 THE ADDICTION OF MARY TODD LINCOLN

People described young Mary as sociable, charming, lively,

and interested in the activities of people around her. She was
also an excellent dancer. And it was good that she excelled at
these social skills, for as a young, unmarried woman, she
was expected to find a husband. Indeed, she had many
suitors, but, for her time, she did not marry until relatively
late.
One of the reasons she was discriminating in her choice
of husband was that she was apparently very self-confident.
As a child she was often a leader, and as a young woman of
21 she was brave to start a new life in frontier Springfield.
There a handsome, talented young lawyer, the grandson of
Patrick Henry, courted her, but she wrote to her friend about
him:

“I love him not, & my hand will never be given, when my

heart is not.” (Turner 18)

Mary acted as if she knew her own mind and was quite
comfortable with it. When she did finally marry, she pleased
herself, but not her family. She was the only one of the Todd
daughters to

show some daring in her choice of husband. In the teeth of

family opposition, she married Abraham Lincoln, a
penniless young lawyer born in the backwoods and largely
self-taught, in whom she, almost alone at first, saw
greatness. (Turner 4)

Mary had full confidence in her choice.

 CHAPTER I 5

What things did she value most?

It would seem that Mary valued her appearance and the

traditional woman’s role of wife and mother. In the people
she loved and admired, however, it seems that she valued
substance more than appearance, placing particular value on
intellect, culture, and friendship.
As a child Mary told her cousin Elizabeth that when she
grew up she would be perfectly satisfied with herself if she
could be just like her Grandmother Humphreys (her
stepmother’s mother). According to her cousin, Mary meant
that their grandmother was “exquisite in dress and mind and
manner, the quintessence of all the elegance, virtue, and
culture which Mary hoped to emulate” (Helm 34).
Throughout this first period of her life, Mary did enjoy
being well-dressed. No doubt she worked hard to be
exquisite in dress and manner, for such elegance would have
also helped her attract a husband, a necessary part of
becoming a wife and mother.
To be exquisite in mind, however, was perhaps a less
universal goal for a society woman in early nineteenth-
century America. Mary valued intellect in herself and in
others. She read in both English and French, she kept up
with politics, and she loved discussing her political views:

By the age of fourteen she was a fiery little Whig, who

could not think of enough dreadful things to say about
Andrew Jackson. (Turner 7)

Another political issue on which she had a strong opinion

was slavery. Although she grew up lovingly cared for by
some loyal slaves in the Todd household, she came to think
of slavery as morally wrong. Although she had benefitted
from it, she spoke out against it. Her cousin quotes Mary as
6 THE ADDICTION OF MARY TODD LINCOLN

saying, “It’s all wrong… this selling human beings into

slavery” (Helm 51). Although this conclusion about slavery
seems obvious now, it took great courage for Mary, a
southern aristocrat, to stand up for what she believed in
those volatile times.
And finally, it seems that Mary valued very highly her
relationships with a few important people in her life—people
such as her two older sisters and a few female friends. She
nurtured these friendships, as we see in her correspondence
with her friend Mercy Levering, whom she met in
Springfield in 1839, and then wrote to when Mercy moved
back to Baltimore. She seemed to cultivate connections with
people, not because they were important or potentially
useful to her, but because she genuinely liked them.

What we have learned.

Among Mary Todd Lincoln’s biographers, most agree

with Ruth Painter Randall that Mary’s growing up was
relatively untroubled, that there was no hint of the erratic
behavior that was to develop later on. Only Jean Baker
implies that the loss of Mary’s mother (when Mary was six)
may have scarred her for life. This speculation, however, is
merely that. She lost her mother, yes, but her warm
relationships with her father, her Grandmother Parker, the
slave Mammy, and her older sister Elizabeth all remained
and continued to nourish her.
Indeed, if we did not know about Mary Todd Lincoln’s
later craziness, it would never occur to us to expect it. In the
three existing letters that Mary wrote during her first 24
years, she sounds busy and happy. There is no trace of self-
pity, no hint that she felt mistreated or unlucky. In two
letters written much later she did refer to her childhood in
 CHAPTER I 7

what could be interpreted as a resentful way: her “early

home was truly at a boarding school” (Turner 447), and her
“desolate childhood” (Turner 588), but both these letters
were written during a terribly difficult time of her life (1867
and 1871) when she was bitter about almost everything and
lashing out at everyone. We simply have no facts to explain
either of these comments.
During the first third of her life, then, Mary Todd Lincoln
appeared to be healthy and attractive. There is no reason to
believe that she did not feel as well as she looked. She
behaved in accordance with her high social position and
advanced education. It would appear that in herself she
valued most her appearance and her future role as wife and
mother, but that beyond herself she valued most intellect,
culture, and friendship. This first third of Mary Todd
Lincoln’s life was for her primarily a positive time.

Wife and Mother

This part of Mary Todd Lincoln’s life was the most public
part. If we have seen a picture of her, it is most likely from
this period. If we have an idea about what sort of person she
was, it is most likely because we have read or heard
something that she did or said during this time of her life. It
was during this time that Mary Todd Lincoln both fulfilled
her fondest dreams and suffered her most terrible losses. It
was during this time that the craziness started, that the
glaring contradictions began to accumulate. Yet throughout
these 23 years, even when presiding in the White House,
Mary Todd Lincoln was above all a wife and mother.
Few people noticed when Mary Todd married someone
“beneath” her, someone without property or pedigree. Yet
later when her husband was murdered, an entire nation
watched her mourn. By the time her husband died, she had
8 THE ADDICTION OF MARY TODD LINCOLN

already lost two of her four children also. And she had lived
through the Civil War in which she had loved ones fighting
and dying on both sides. She began this period of her life in a
boarding house in obscure but friendly Springfield, Illinois,
and ended it in the White House in the more cosmopolitan,
more dangerous Washington, D.C. This was, for Mary Todd
Lincoln, a time of extremes.

How did she look?

She looked good. For most of this period Mary Todd

Lincoln appeared healthy. She was pregnant four times and
had four safe deliveries. Although she put on some weight,
she did not become “bloated,” as she put it, until later on.
And as the Lincoln’s social standing improved, so did Mary’s
wardrobe, enabling her always to look elegant in public.
A woman who as a child knew Mary Todd Lincoln
recalled that:

Mrs. Lincoln was a very good looking woman, and had

very pretty manners. I can remember how beautifully she
looked with a lavender and white parasol, and clothes and
gloves and everything to match. (Goltz 50)

Even William Herndon, Abraham Lincoln’s controversial

law partner in Springfield, described Mary, whom he never
liked, as “one of the belles of the town.” He grudgingly
admitted that she was “handsome and vivacious, affable and
even charming in her manners” (Randall 120).
When Mary, a newcomer to Washington, became First
Lady, most observers were favorably impressed. In 1860, a
New York reporter described the comely Mrs. Lincoln who
would, he predicted, adorn the White House:
 CHAPTER I 9

Whatever of awkwardness may be ascribed to her

husband, there is none of it in her. On the contrary, she is
quite a pattern of lady-like courtesy and polish. She
converses with freedom and grace and is thoroughly AU
FAIT in all the little amenities of society. (Kinnaird 65)

Another observer, the prominent James Harlan of Iowa,

whose daughter later married Robert Lincoln, described the
new First Lady:

She was fair, of about medium height, but standing near

her husband, by comparison seemed short. Her quiet,
gentle manners and fine womanly bearing impressed
everyone with the conviction that she as a well-educated,
cultured lady, accustomed to the usages of society and
with ability to take care of herself.” (Kinnaird 77, Helm
167)

It seems, then, that in this second third of her life, as during

the first, Mary Todd Lincoln appeared to the world around
her as a physically healthy woman, well-mannered and well-
dressed. Her body did not yet appear ravaged as it would
later appear to be.

How did she feel?

It begins to be more difficult to understand how Mary

Todd Lincoln felt during this time of her life, for she
obviously wanted very much to feel well. Although she had
many responsibilities, private and public, her
responsibilities as wife and mother seemed to come first. Yet
her biographers agree that her physical distress was
increasing through these years. Her pain was not yet the
10 THE ADDICTION OF MARY TODD LINCOLN

main theme of her correspondence, but it was a recurring

theme.
Unfortunately, we have very little of her correspondence
from the first years of her period as wife and mother. This
may have been partly because Mary, newly married, had to
learn very quickly about the hard realities of daily life.
Suddenly she had no servants to care for her. Instead, she
herself sewed the clothes, cleaned the chimneys on the
lamps, baked the bread, carried the water for washing
clothes, cooked the supper, and soon also cared for the
babies. By all accounts she, formerly of the leisured class,
did this hard work willingly and well. At least there are no
records of her complaints.
As the Lincolns moved up in the Springfield social world,
there were also more social duties for Mary to attend to, so
perhaps she had little time for correspondence. At any rate,
we have no letter from her that was written near the time
when her son Eddie died at age four. We know that she and
Abraham nursed Eddie, day and night, for almost two
months. We know that both parents were devastated, that
Mary was especially distraught. Although she was soon
pregnant again and her life remained at least outwardly the
same as it had been, we can be sure that Mary’s sadness
about Eddie never completely went away.
We do know, however, from Mary’s own words, that
much later, when Robert left Springfield for distant Harvard,
Mary missed him just as most of us miss our children when
they go off to college. To a friend, in 1859, she wrote:

I am feeling quite lonely, as Bob, left for College, in

Boston, a few days since, and it almost appears, as if light
& mirth, had departed with him. I will not see him for ten
months, without I may next spring, go on to see him.”
(Turner 58)
 CHAPTER I 11

It would appear at this point, then, that Mary Todd Lincoln

felt about her children pretty much as we would expect a
devoted mother to feel. Similarly, in 1861, when she moved
into the White House, she sounded happy and excited about
her new home, perhaps just as most of us would feel if we
were moving in there today. She wrote to her good friend
back in Springfield, inviting her to come visit the Lincoln
family:

This [the White House] is certainly a very charming spot &

I have found many delightful acquaintances. Every
evening our BLUE ROOM, is filled with the elite of the
land. . . I want you to spend the month of May, with us.
...the drives round here are fine, and our carriage we find
VERY LUXURIOUS. ... Be sure & bring your boys, with
you, the pleasure grounds here, are exquisite. ...I am
beginning to feel so perfectly at home, and enjoy
everything so much. (Turner 81)

A few months later she wrote again to this friend, urging her
to come soon for a visit and to bring along her young sons. It
is clear that Mary missed her:

Bring your boys with you, it will be more pleasant all

around. I am going to take my boys with me, with a
servant man, who will take charge, of your children also. ...
I feel that I must have you with me. I wish, I could hand
you over the magnificent bouquet, just sent to me, the
magnolia is superb. (Turner 94)

We remember, of course, that a terrible war was going on,

right at her doorstep, while Mary Todd Lincoln was in the
White House. There is, however, very little about this war in
her letters. We know from other people that she was deeply
12 THE ADDICTION OF MARY TODD LINCOLN

concerned about the war, that some of her own relatives died
fighting the North, that she did what she could for the war
effort in Washington, yet in her letters she sounded like
most of us—concerned about her immediate family.
During this time she lost yet another son to illness—
eleven-year-old Willie. More than two years after Willie’s
death, Mary wrote a sympathy letter to her friend who had
also just lost a young son. From this letter we can tell very
vividly how Mary felt about Willie, and how guilty she felt
now that he was gone:

I am very deeply attached to you..., yet since I last saw you,

I have sometimes feared, that the DEEP WATERS,
through which we have passed would overwhelm me. ...
Willie, darling Boy! was always the idolized child, of the
household. ... THE WORLD, has lost so much, of its
charm. My position, requires my presence, where my heart
is SO FAR from being. I know, YOU ARE better prepared
than I was to pass through the fiery furnace of affliction. I
had become, so wrapped up in the world, so devoted to
our own political advancement that I thought of little else
besides. ...how small & insignificant all worldly honors are,
when we are THUS so severely tried. (Turner 188)

Physically also, Mary Todd Lincoln felt increasing pain in

her life. Indeed, it is in this period that we can trace the
beginnings of what was to be a dominant theme in Mary
Todd Lincoln’s life. Pain, sheer physical pain. From her early
twenties on, she was plagued with headaches. The earliest
reference to these headaches is in a letter from Abraham to
Mary in 1848. At this time they had two small sons and
Abraham was away much of the time with his work. He
inquired about her headaches, which must have already
been a problem for at least nine years.
 CHAPTER I 13

And you are entirely free from headache? This is good—

considering it is the first Spring you have been free from it
since we were acquainted. (Evans 38)

But she was not free from headache, nor from other pains.
Indeed, a sentence from one of her letters written in 1861
could speak for the rest of her life: “The weather is so
beautiful, why is it, that we cannot feel well” (Turner 106). It
would seem that throughout the rest of her life Mary Todd
Lincoln never again felt well. But her headaches were her
most debilitating source of pain.

Reached here last evening. Very tired and severe

headache. 1863 (Turner 159)

I was quite unable during several hours yesterday to leave

my bed, owing to an intensely severe headache & although
it has left me, yet I am feeling so weak this morning that I
fear, that I shall be prevented from visiting the Hospitals
today. 1864 (Turner 176)

An intense headache, caused by driving out, in the heat of

the day, deprived me of the pleasure of seeing. . . 1864
(Turner 177)

Perhaps it is not surprising that the presence of pain in

her life left Mary Todd Lincoln sometimes feeling sorry for
herself. This theme of self-pity was not before apparent in
her life, but by the White House years, even though she was
rich and famous, Mary Todd Lincoln increasingly felt that
her lot was unbearably hard.
After Willie’s death, Mary was desperate with grief. She
did not seem able to pull herself together. Abraham hired a
skilled nurse, taking her away from the wounded soldiers
who needed her, and asked her to care for Mrs. Lincoln for a
14 THE ADDICTION OF MARY TODD LINCOLN

few weeks. This woman, Mrs. Pomroy, was 40 and had

already buried a brother, a son, a daughter, and a husband.
She sat alone with Mary for hours every day for three weeks.
She said of Mrs. Lincoln:

She says she is tired of being a slave to the world, and

would live on bread and water if she could feel as happy as
I do. (Boyden 79)

No doubt few people could see how Mary Todd Lincoln was
in any way a “slave to the world,” but that is the way she felt
at least some of the time during the period of her life when
she was working hard at being a good wife and a good
mother.
Mary Todd Lincoln’s terrible headaches may have been
exacerbated by the two carriage accidents she had while she
was living in Washington. More pain.
How did she feel? During these years Mary Todd Lincoln
felt close to her husband and children, but physically she felt
increasing pain accompanied by a good measure of self pity.

How did she behave?

The inconsistencies were creeping in. During these years

Mary Todd Lincoln was almost two different people: one of
them the devoted wife and mother and First Lady that she
was much of the time and the other a temperamental, self-
pitying, unpredictable woman who embarrassed her family.
She was both. Remembering that she was often in pain, that
she had very high standards for herself, let us see what her
actions tell us. We are not judging her, but respectfully
looking for patterns in her behavior.
 CHAPTER I 15

Mary Todd Lincoln still appeared to others as a highly

intelligent woman. She read a lot to her children, even when
she must have had many other things to do. She kept up her
lively correspondence throughout this period. And she
relished the idea of being in the political thick of things in
Washington. She became friends with Charles Sumner and
apparently loved to discuss the issues of the day with other
prominent visitors to the White House. Some of these
visitors, of course, spoke French, and Mary could converse
with them in their own language.
As Baker pointed out, many political wives of the time
either chose not to participate actively in the social scene or
were unable to do so because of ill health. Mary, however,
was a beautifully dressed, gracious and captivating hostess
at the White House even though she was often feeling bad.
She determinedly organized and presided over White House
dinners and receptions even when she was in pain. A visitor
at one such reception, left alone with Mrs. Lincoln for a
moment, was charmed. According to this gentleman she
“ended with giving me a gracious invitation to repeat my
visit and saying she would send me a bouquet. I came home
entranced” (Baker 197).
Her reaching out to people took other forms also. She
frequently visited Union soldiers in the hospitals, taking
them flowers, donating turkeys for their Christmas dinners.
Often she would sit with individual soldiers and read to
them or write letters for them. In 1864, she wrote to the
mother of the sick boy beside her:

I am sitting by the side of your soldier boy. He has been

quite sick, but is getting well. He tells me to say to you that
he is all right. With respect for the mother of the young
soldier.
Mrs. Abraham Lincoln (Turner 179)
16 THE ADDICTION OF MARY TODD LINCOLN

Early during this period of her life, unlike later on, Mary
Todd Lincoln’s sense of humor was still prominent. She had
a characteristically witty way of observing the people around
her. For example, in 1859, she commented about the “secret”
pregnancy of a mutual friend:

One of the seven wonders has taken place. Mrs. Dubois,

has a daughter, born two or three days since. Until the last
hour, NO ONE suspected her, as she looked smaller than
she ever had done. (Turner 59)

Another example of Mary’s wit was recorded by her

friend Elizabeth Keckley who was Mary’s seamstress and
companion at the White House. (More about this
remarkable friendship later. Elizabeth was a former slave
who had purchased her own freedom and then developed a
successful sewing business in Washington.) Apparently,
First Lady Mary wanted to depart from custom and have
three large receptions at the White House instead of a series
of smaller, more costly state dinners. Besides, she could kill
more birds with just three stones. Keckley quoted Mary,
talking to Abraham, trying to convince him to accept her
new plan:

Public receptions are more democratic than stupid state

dinners—are more in keeping with the spirit of the
institutions of our country, as you would say if called upon
to make a stump speech. (Keckley 97)

Abraham agreed.
A good example of Mary Todd Lincoln’s quick humor
involves a story. Apparently she and Abraham had visited
the war front, near Washington, at Fort Stevens, and
 CHAPTER I 17

watched as the Union forces withstood a Rebel attack but

did not then seize the advantage and counterattack. Instead,
they let the Confederate Army escape. Mary blamed
Secretary of War Stanton for this embarrassing military
display. When Stanton later called on the Lincolns, he
reportedly said to her, no doubt in jest, “I intend to have a
full-length portrait of you painted, standing on the ramparts
at Fort Stevens overlooking the fight.” Few people, however,
successfully tangled with Mary Todd Lincoln, and she
quickly put him in his place:

That is very well, and I can assure you of one thing, Mr.
Secretary, if I had a few LADIES with me the Rebels would
not have been permitted to get away as they did. (Kinnaird
82)

We can probably safely assume that Mr. Stanton had

nothing more to say on this subject.
In addition to her intelligence, sociability, and wit, there
is one other characteristic of Mary Todd Lincoln that her
biographers agree on. Most people who knew her agreed
that Mary’s “maternal instinct was of the very essence of her
being” (Randall 81). A later biographer wrote of Mary that,
“It was with her children that Mrs. Lincoln is most
attractive” (Wives 30). Miss Sprigg remembered that Mary
was “the kind of woman whom children naturally liked and
that she adored her own children” (Goltz 50). When she
wrote to a friend about the birthday party she had for her
son Willie, for example, she sounded like many a devoted
mother:

Speaking of BOYS, Willie’s birthday [ninth] came off on

the 21st of Dec. and as I had long promised him a
CELEBRATION, it duly came off. Some 50 or 60 boys &
18 THE ADDICTION OF MARY TODD LINCOLN

girls attended the gala, you may believe I have come to the
conclusion, that they are nonsensical affairs. However, I
wish your boys, had been in their midst. (Turner 61)

There were some, however, who pointed out that although

Mary was a devoted mother, she was also becoming erratic
in her methods. According to Evans, Mary sometimes
punished her boys:

. . . even whipped them; at other times she permitted them

unrestrained liberty; and still at other times her method
lay between these extremes. She did not maintain
uniformity in either her attitude or her method. (Evans
139)

We can say, perhaps, that few mothers or fathers maintain

this uniformity Evans is talking about. Indeed, one of Mary
Todd Lincoln’s most sympathetic biographers did make
excuses for her becoming a “nervous, overanxious mother:”

Pregnancy, childbirth, household drudgery, and sick

headaches were beginning to tell on this abnormally
intense little woman. (Randall 118)

The point is not that we expect Mary Todd Lincoln to have

been a consistently wonderful mother just because she was
in the public eye. Rather, the point is that somewhere during
the middle of this period of Mary Todd Lincoln’s life
something within her was changing. Suddenly her loving
and scholarly biographers begin to reach for excuses for her,
to describe her tactfully as “inconsistent” and “erratic.” The
point is that there was now something about Mary Todd
Lincoln that needed to be explained.
Elizabeth Keckley was employed by Mrs. Lincoln, and
was also her intimate friend during the White House years.
 CHAPTER I 19

But even Keckley, a loyal supporter who tried to defend

Mary Todd Lincoln’s sometimes strange behavior, confessed
that

I never in my life saw a more peculiarly constituted

woman. Search the world over, and you will not find her
counterpart. (Keckley 182)

John Hay, one of Abraham Lincoln’s two secretaries,

faithfully kept a journal during his stay at the White House.
He had frequent dealings with Mrs. Lincoln, and an entry
from a dreary day in 1862 is fairly typical of his apparent
opinion of his boss’s wife, whom he often referred to as the
Hell-cat:

Things go on here about as usual. There is no fun at all.

The Hell-cat is getting more Hell-cattical day by day. (Hay
41)

Another person who worked in the Lincoln White House was

William Stoddard, who later (1890) wrote more kindly of
Mrs. Lincoln’s inconsistencies:

It was not easy, at first, to understand why a lady who

could be one day so kindly, so considerate, so generous, so
thoughtful and so hopeful, could, upon another day,
appear so unreasonable, so irritable, so despondent, so
even niggardly, and so prone to see the dark, the wrong
side of men and women and events. (Stoddard 62)

Clearly, by the time Mary Todd Lincoln was first lady,

something was causing her behavior to be sometimes out of
control. People who disliked her pointed to these times with
relish, and people who liked her tried to explain them away.
But clearly these unfortunate times were there.
20 THE ADDICTION OF MARY TODD LINCOLN

Mrs. Pomroy, who nursed Mary Todd Lincoln in 1863,

said something disturbing about Mary—something that will
perhaps make more sense to us later on: “My heart yearns to
see her seeking comfort in something besides these unstable
pleasures” (Boyden 79). We are left to speculate what these
“unstable pleasures” might have been. Let us remember that
the woman who used this phrase was a skilled nurse who
spent several weeks at Mary’s bedside at a time when even
Abraham was wondering what he was going to do with his
unpredictable wife.
Sandburg, who admired Abraham Lincoln tremendously
and did not wish to find flaws in Lincoln’s mate,
nevertheless had to mention the trouble with Mary—her
increasing loss of control:

The contrast between them [Abraham and Mary] which

grew in the years was in temper or control. She grew more
explosive; her outbursts came at more frequent intervals,
were more desperate exhibitions, enacted in the presence
of more important persons. Her physical resources and
mental ability took on such added pathos from year to year
that in a wide variety of ways many who met her referred
to her as a “sad case.” (Sandburg 63)

Indeed, every biographer of Mary Todd Lincoln has had

to come to terms with her increasingly erratic behavior. Yet
sometimes, as we have already seen, even during the White
House years, Mary Todd Lincoln seemed fine. Then the next
day she would be angry for no apparent reason. Randall, a
kind biographer, put it bluntly:

Mary would use stinging words one day and the next day,
in a forgiving mood, words of high praise for the very same
person she had derided. The bitter words would then be
erased from her mind; what she did not realize was that
 CHAPTER I 21

the one who had been their target remembered. (Randall

154)

And then she would be nice again. Randall compared Mary

Todd Lincoln to a foot soldier with a “secret lameness”
(Randall 221), which was not always apparent to the people
around her. If Mary had had an obvious handicap, such as
blindness or a crippled limb, people would perhaps have
been able to understand her. Increasingly the people around
her sensed that something was wrong, but they didn’t know
what. A secret lameness is a kind way to put it.
What was it that the people around her saw? How did she
appear to be losing control? What exactly did Mary Todd
Lincoln do that baffled them? People around her saw two
things mainly: her outbursts of temper and her outbursts of
spending.
Who among us has not had an outburst of temper? We
all, after all, know how it feels to be edgy, to be out of sorts,
or to just plain lose it and blow up. But there are only a few
of us for whom this tendency to explode would be listed, by
everyone we know, as a major character trait. Nor was it a
trait of the young Mary Todd Lincoln, who was sometimes
bold and outspoken and willful, apparently, but never, to our
knowledge described as temperamental, unpredictable,
explosive, or erratic.
Already during the Springfield years, as a harried mother
and a political wife in a frontier town, Mary Todd Lincoln
was being called erratic. Evans said that during this time she
suffered from “erratic nerves, wild, sudden rages of temper”
(Evans 155). And the Turners, who collected her letters, also
noted the unfortunate change that was apparent in Mary
Todd Lincoln by 1850 (the time after Eddie’s death):
22 THE ADDICTION OF MARY TODD LINCOLN

The humor and control that had sustained her in the past
became increasingly submerged in fearfulness, self-
indulgence, and in sudden outbursts of rage, often
directed at her husband or a servant and occasionally
overheard by the neighbors. (Turner 41)

During these outbursts, Abraham was compassionate, they

said, because he knew that his wife was “powerless to help
herself.” And here we have the first mention of Mary’s
powerlessness over whatever this worsening trouble was.
Randall also believed that Mary was not responsible for
these outbursts, her “hysterical seizures:”

It is a terrible thing for an adult woman to go into a frenzy

in which she is not responsible for her words or actions.
(Randall 122)

And it was a terrible thing. Whether as harried Springfield

housewife or as famous first lady, it must have been
extremely difficult for Mary to see that wary look in the eyes
of the important people in her life as they tried to deal with
her.
In the White House, Abraham told Mary’s cousin that
Mary’s nerves had “gone to pieces,” and her cousin was also
alarmed that Mary had become so “nervous and wrought up”
(Helm 225). And when we listen to some of Mary’s words
written in the fall of 1861, we do hear the bitchy (not a
nineteenth-century word) tone as Mary wrote vindictively
about her sister Ann:

Poor unfortunate Ann, inasmuch as she possesses such a

miserable disposition & so false a tongue. . . Even if Smith,
[Ann’s husband] succeeds in being a rich man, what
advantage will it be to him, who has gained it in some
cases most unjustly, and with such a woman, whom no
 CHAPTER I 23

one respects...[who] as a child & young girl, could not be

outdone in falsehood. . . She is so seldom in my thoughts I
have so much more, that is attractive, both in bodily
presence, & my mind’s eye, to interest me. (Turner 105)

Mary Todd Lincoln was becoming the kind of person who

was easily angered, but it was hard to tell when this anger
would erupt.
One famous example of her sudden anger happened in a
very public way, just before the end of the war and not long
before Abraham was shot. It was early 1865, and Mary and
some others had gone to the front to join Abraham in a
review of the about-to-be-victorious troops under General
Grant. It was a time of pride, at last, for the Union forces,
and on this warm spring day Mary Todd Lincoln was there
to witness the ceremonies.
Accompanying Mrs. Lincoln and Mrs. Grant on this
arduous, cross-country journey, was Adam Badeau, who 22
years later wrote a vivid account of Mary Todd Lincoln’s two
embarrassing outbursts. The first was in the carriage, when
Mary heard someone say that another military wife was
already with the men (including Abraham). Mary was
enraged: “What do you mean by that, sir? Do you mean to
say that she saw the President alone” (Badeau 10)?
When the others in the carriage tried to reassure her that
there was no reason to be jealous, Mary only grew more
angry, demanding that the driver stop the carriage right
there and let her out, presumably so that she could charge
right over to the woman and reprimand her. No doubt
thinking this would be unseemly, Badeau did not stop the
carriage, whereupon Mary grabbed the driver’s arms and
physically tried to force him to stop.
The second outburst was even worse when, the next day,
Mary saw that another general’s wife was riding near the
24 THE ADDICTION OF MARY TODD LINCOLN

President. Mary’s jealous rage “was beyond all bounds,” and

she was in a “frenzy of excitement.” Mary insulted the
bewildered woman and “called her vile names” and
“stormed” at her until the poor woman burst into tears.
“Everybody was shocked and horrified.” And then to make
matters even worse, Mary Todd Lincoln stormed at her
husband right there in front of everybody, repeatedly
attacking him, turning “on him like a tigress.” All of this was
for Badeau, and no doubt also for the others, a “hateful
experience.”
It must have been hateful for Mary as well. According to
Badeau, in her “saner intervals” she regretted “the very acts
she was at other times unable to control.” Indeed, Mary
spent the rest of her stay at City Point in seclusion. Her
husband apologized for her, telling the others that she was
unwell. But by then many people had witnessed the
unpredictable temper of Mrs. Lincoln (Badeau 10).
In addition to such outbursts of temper, the world was
also seeing in Mary Todd Lincoln strange outbursts of
extravagance. Although she grew up with wealth, she never
appeared as a young woman to be particularly concerned
with money. Then during her early married years she had
barely enough money to live on. But during the later
Springfield years, the money theme, which would later
become such an ugly and prominent one, began to flicker in
Mary Todd Lincoln’s life.
By 1856, according to Randall, Mary’s “gathering
intensity about spending was a mania” (Randall 156). While
Abraham was away she bought an expensive carriage and
built a large addition on their house. He was surprised. And
by 1859, the records show that Mary Todd Lincoln had made
extravagant purchases of silk and cashmere for her own
wardrobe (Baker 156).
 CHAPTER I 25

We will see, however, that Mary Todd Lincoln was never

consistently extravagant. Rather, she puzzled the people
around her by sometimes flagrantly wasting money and at
other times behaving like a miser. Evans, the doctor who
later looked back and tried to analyze Mary Todd Lincoln,
said of her:

Mrs. Lincoln, between 1861 and 1865, was most foolishly

extravagant and at the same time decidedly near, close, or
frugal. (Evans 311)

Stoddard, who worked in the White House, described an

example of Mary Todd Lincoln’s paradoxical attitude toward
money. After a few hours of “extreme depression,” she
proposed to SELL the manure from the Executive Stables
and also to cut off all spending for necessities in the
household in order to save money. A week or two later,
however, “no demand for undue economy” could be
discovered in her (Stoddard 62).
Abraham Lincoln was apparently very much aware of his
wife’s erratic behavior with money. After all, he was the
President of a country mired down in an expensive,
debilitating war. Therefore, he:

tried to keep a responsible person with her when he could,

watched over her himself, and, when she spent
government money in a way he disapproved, offered to
make it up out of his own pocket. (Randall 316)

Abraham probably disapproved of the exorbitant sums of

money Mary spent redecorating the White House, for
instance. She ordered wallpaper from Paris, spent over
$2,000 on carpet and curtains in one day, and personally
visited the best stores in Philadelphia and New York (eleven
26 THE ADDICTION OF MARY TODD LINCOLN

shopping trips to New York!) (Baker 185). Lincoln certainly

would have disapproved of his wife’s buying herself a $1,000
camel hair shawl (Turner 88). According to Neely, her
husband was furious:

Lincoln exploded in anger at the spectacle of extravagance

displayed by his wife while soldiers shivered without
blankets, but Congress covered the possible scandal up by
burying a supplemental appropriation amidst other
legislation. (Neely 4)

Congress may have covered up her extravagance, but Mary

Todd Lincoln was widely criticized, as we can well imagine,
for spending this warring country’s depleting dollars the way
she did.
She would have been even more criticized, however, if
people, including her husband, had known how far in debt
Mary Todd Lincoln really was. She told her friend Elizabeth
Keckley how important it was for Abraham to win his 1864
campaign for re-election to the presidency. There was more,
she said, at stake in this election than her husband dreamed
of:

I have contracted large debts, of which he knows nothing,

and which he will be unable to pay if he is defeated.
(Keckley 149)

Mary went on to explain that, unbeknownst to her husband,

she owed over $27,000, much of it to New York stores for
her own personal wardrobe. This was the same Mary Todd
Lincoln, tangled in debt, who had told this same Elizabeth
Keckley only three years previously:
 CHAPTER I 27

I cannot afford to be extravagant. We are from the West,

and are poor. (Keckley 85)

As we know, Abraham Lincoln won that election, but as we

also know now, his wife had already purchased, just before
the election, $1,000 worth of mourning clothes and $3,200
worth of jewelry (Turner 88, Neely 5, Randall 371). Clearly,
her irrationality about money, her spurts of extravagance,
were interfering with her life. Shopping had become a “kind
of intoxication to her” (Randall 259).
Mary Todd Lincoln behaved during this middle period of
her life in an increasingly erratic manner. Evans described
her as:

explosive, but reasonable, angry but tender, kind but

miserly, cultivated yet crude, a composite of conflicting
elements. (Ross 321)

Much of the time she still acted like the intelligent, sociable,
humorous woman that she was, relishing her role as wife
and mother and even First Lady. But some of the time,
increasingly often, she was like another person—a woman
who lost her temper a lot and sometimes went on spending
sprees. By the end of this period of her life, it was clear to all
those around her that there was something seriously wrong
with Mrs. Lincoln.

What things did she value most?

In herself, Mary Todd Lincoln still seemed to value most

highly her role as wife and mother. She still valued the
appearance she presented to the world and paid much
28 THE ADDICTION OF MARY TODD LINCOLN

attention to her clothes—so much so that she ran up large

debts.
But during this period of her life, perhaps because she
had much physical pain, she also valued her health. It would
almost seem that, because she was so focused on herself, in
fact, she had less and less time to nurture friendship and to
read and discuss politics.
And a new value had crept in—secrecy. Mary Todd
Lincoln’s secret debts and secret shopping trips and secret
arrangements with some of the White House staff made her
life extra complicated. There seemed to be a number of
things she did not want her husband to know about.
We know that she valued her family, that she loved them
very much. But something was interfering and making that
love more selfish. For example, when Abraham suggested
that their son Robert, who wanted very much to leave college
and join the army, should be permitted to do so, Mary
refused. They had already lost one son, she said, and she
could not bear to sacrifice another. (She referred to Willie,
who had died in childhood, not in war.) Her husband then
pointed out that:

many a poor mother has given up all her sons, and our son
is not more dear to us than the sons of other people are to
their mothers. (Keckley 121)

But Mary was adamant. She would not permit Robert to be

exposed to danger in the field where his services were not
required. Her husband’s answer was:

The services of every man who loves his country are

required in this war. You should take a liberal instead of a
selfish view of the question, mother. (Keckley 122)
 CHAPTER I 29

They reached a compromise, and near the end of the war

Robert was given a position of relative safety on General
Grant’s staff. Mary loved her husband and her son dearly,
but this “selfish view” of hers was becoming more apparent.
It seems that by 1865, Mary Todd Lincoln, who was losing
control, valued her health, which she must have felt slipping.
She also valued her beloved family, especially her husband
who protected her and comforted her during her “nervous
spells.” But she now had many secrets. The circle of things
that she valued most in life was shrinking considerably and
shifting in ways that she probably really regretted.

What we have learned.

During the middle period of Mary Todd Lincoln’s life, she

was proud to be a wife and mother and, eventually a first
lady. Throughout this most public part of Mary’s life she
dressed well and carried out her duties even when she felt ill.
She felt close to her husband and children, even fearfully
clinging to them. But something—perhaps the persistent
pain, perhaps the medicine for that pain—began to interfere
with her life. Toward the end of this period in particular, her
erratic behavior became obvious. She was still intelligent
and gracious and witty sometimes, but other times she was
quick to anger for no apparent reason and prone to spending
unreasonable sums of money on things she didn’t need.
Although she clearly loved her family and longed to feel well
again, her increasingly unpredictable behavior made her
increasingly difficult for others to deal with.