A Visit to The James A. Garfield National Historic Site

Apparently, living near Ohio affords us the opportunity to visit a handful of presidential homes and historic sites as day or weekend trips. While I knew about the Hayes Home and Museum well in advance of our day trip there because a friend had recommended it to me, I was not aware that Ohio is second only to Virginia in terms of how many presidents were born in that state.

 

When I read that the Garfields made their home outside of Cleveland, I was reminded that we had actually visited the Garfield memorial and tomb in Cleveland's Lake View Cemetery when we visited the city to enjoy the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame back in 2013. 

 

 

Having finished the biography of Lucretia Rudolph Garfield, it was time for a day trip back to Cleveland to see Lawnfield, the home that James bought for his family in 1876, where James Garfield performed his "front porch campaign" for the presidency, and that Lucretia expanded and lived for more than three decades after James was assassinated. 

Being from generally the same period as the Hayes Home, it was fun to see that the Garfield Home was also covered in fantastic wallpaper, covering walls in every room and on the ceiling in most. The photograph below does not even begin to do justice to the beauty and detail of the wallpapers in this home. I apologize for my old cellphone camera and poor photography skills.

And while the house tour and corresponding museum exhibits were informative and enjoyable, I found the Garfield Home to be quite a contrast to the Hayes Home in terms of the story told. While the Hayes Home is very much the story of both Lucy and Rutherford together, the Garfield Home is very much the story of Garfield, with Lucretia only presented as a secondary character--quite surprising, and disappointing, considering how short a time Garfield was actually president and how much more time Lucretia spent in the home compared to James. In many ways, the home seems as much a memorial to James as it does the home Lucretia lived in and raised a family for four decades. The image above shows two portraits of Lucretia, but every room in the house had some sort of image of James, most had more than one. The most "alive" part of the home, when it came to Lucretia were the tiles around the fireplace in the dining room, which were painted by her and her children; Lucretia painted the to in the upper corners:

Stay tuned for future presidential historic site entries, now that I know there are at least two more presidential homes and the First Ladies National Historic Site in Ohio. 

Lucretia Rudolph Garfield

When I requested Lucretia Rudolph Garfield by Ann Heinrichs, I didn't realize it was written for children. When I picked it up from the library and saw the slim volume with large print, I let it slide--Garfield was in the White House for such a short time, it seemed fitting to read an equally short volume on the life of his wife. I have since discovered a biography more appropriate for adults and that more thoroughly incorporates the large volume of letters written between Lucretia and James: While I will not be reading Lucretia by John Shaw in full any time soon, I have read the preview available on Google Books and would recommend it over Heinrich's volume for what is likely a richer portrait of this First Lady. 

https://www.amazon.com/Lucretia-Rudolph-Garfield-1832-1918-Encyclopedia/dp/0516208462

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1594541515/ref=x_gr_bb_amazon?ie=UTF8&tag=x_gr_bb_amazon-20&linkCode=as2&camp=1789&creative=9325&creativeASIN=1594541515&SubscriptionId=1MGPYB6YW3HWK55XCGG2

In fact, the preview available describes Lucretia as having "an acute political sense" (Shaw, p. xv) which I would expect considering how highly educated she was--only the second First Lady to have a college education, according to Heinrichs--but entirely lacking in the volume for children. Shaw's preface goes on to say that Lucretia's "chief role ... was as a moral lodestar" (Shaw, p. xv) for James, but I imagine Shaw's book would give better insight into Lucretia as a more complete and complicated woman of her time. In Heinrichs's story, once Lucretia completed her education, she had little influence beyond that of wife, homemaker, and mother--her most significant contribution to the Garfield administration being the beginnings of a redecorating plan for the White House, and completely content after the death of James to live out her remaining decades on the family farm in Ohio "free of money worries" (Heinrich, p. 90) thanks to her presidential widow's pension won by the hard fight of Julia Tyler. I imagine there is a much more interesting history to be told and would hope that Shaw's book gives a more full portrait. 

Indeed, what struck me most from Heinrichs's book was how unusual a marriage Lucretia and James seemed to have compared to their presidential contemporaries. While the wives of Lincoln, Grant, etc. would travel frequently to be with their husbands throughout their pre-presidential careers--to state capitols, to Washington, or even to Civil War encampments--Lucretia and James spent several years of their early marriage living almost entirely apart. I read Heinrichs's description wanting to know much more about they dynamic of their relationship, and, as it turns out, my instinct may have been spot on. In the preview available for Shaw's text, there is talk of infidelity on the part of James and discussion of his contentious relationships/friendships with other women that seems to have put a strain on James's marriage to Lucretia, none of which appears in Heinrichs's account.

It seems, however (from the tellings of both Heinrich and Shaw), that as the years went on, Lucretia and James grew to have a mutually respectful and deeply devoted partnership. So devoted that when Lucretia fell ill with malaria in May 1881, just 2 months after James had been sworn in as president, "James dropped most of his official business to care for his wife," "doted and fussed over her" throughout the month, and traveled with her to the New Jersey shore once the fever broke, not returning to Washington until the end of June (Heinrich, p. 75). Reciprocally, James was shot on July 2, 1881, and died September 19, and Lucretia became famous for her bravery at her husband's bedside over the those months. 

While that makes for an commendable love story, all it really made me think about was how little time President Garfield actually spent "presidenting." He basically spent March and April working in an official capacity, spent 2 months at his wife's bedside, and then was on his own death bed for the remainder of his time in office. Obviously, a longer time working than William Henry Harrison, but still shockingly short. And who was really in charge and "doing the work" during those 2.5 months that James Garfield was dying? Did Lucretia have any sway in official decisions while at his bedside, as Woodrow Wilson's wife allegedly did after his stroke in office? And why did the country not use this crisis as a chance to more clearly define how that kind of temporary inability of a president would be officially handled?

Lucy Webb Hayes and a visit to Spiegel Grove

My apologies for the massive delay in writing and publishing this post. It's been nearly a year since I finished reading First Lady: The Life of Lucy Webb Hayes by Emily Apt Geer and visited Spiegel Grove. I typed out the notes below, which reflect what I found most interesting from Geer's biography, way back in September 2024, and I have no desire to extrapolate further (but I did convert most of the notations into complete thoughts and full sentences). I'll try to do better with Lucretia Garfield.  

• While Milton Stern makes the claim that Harriet Lane, niece of President James Buchanan, was the first woman to be referred to as First Lady, Geer informs us that "reference to Lucy Hayes as 'first lady' [in the press] marked the first known appearance in print of the term" (p. 138).
• Lucy Hayes was the first wife of a United States president to have earned a college degree (Cincinnati Wesleyan Female College), but she did not necessarily support education for women in general. AN while Fanny Platt introduced Lucy to the idea of women's suffrage, Lucy Hayes failed to support it in any meaningful way. It leads to interesting conjecture of what influence Lucy Hayes's sister-in-law could have had had on Lucy, had Fanny not died young (1856): "In the long run, Lucy's loss of Fanny was of more significance than Rutherford's. Fanny's intellectual standards had left an indelible impression upon her brother, but Lucy, only twenty-five, vitally needed the stimulation of a prolonged companionship with an intelligent and loving woman such as Fanny Hayes Platt" (pp. 33-34)
• "In time - and within the boundaries open to a nineteenth-century woman - Lucy would become almost as concerned about politics as her husband. Since election to public office would have been impossible for her, she learned to identify completely with Rutherford's political career and to regard it as their career" (p. 39). [I'm less convinced by this argument][edited July 7, 2025: I don't remember why I was not fully convinced by this argument other than what is in the notes that follow.]
• "The years as the wife of an Ohio governor prepared Lucy Hayes to become one of the most effective First Ladies of the latter half of the nineteenth century. Like many women of the period, she learned to identify herself completely with her husband's career and to balance her activities as hostess with the demands of a young family. Although not the custom for a governor's wife to be involved directly in politics, Lucy could and did work behind the scenes to influence legislation" (p. 93) [again, less convinced] 
• public activities mostly interested in welfare of young people and problems of handicapped and wounded soldiers 
• "Lucy could take a strong position on issues involving the welfare of veterans and children ... but she found it difficult to take the same kind of a stand on as controversial a political and social issue as woman suffrage" (p. 97) 
• She did not dispute her husband's stances when it came to women in work and woman's suffrage; "Instead, Lucy's charitable activities, family affairs, and housekeeping ... appeared to be her primary interests" (p. 98)
• "For Lucy, everyday life in the White House soon settled into a pleasant routine, which served, consciously or unconsciously, as a good example of middle-class propriety and Christian morality" (p. 145)
• Lucy Hayes bore criticism for the Temperance policy of the Hayes White House, and while she held religious conviction and practiced Temperance from young age, it was Rutherford Hayes who actually kept alcohol out of the White House (148-50). She abstained personally, but "she did not force her views on others (151). Rutherford Hayes "wished to set a good example for the nation" and to keep temperance advocates in the Republican Party (152). Geer argues that the most important reason was "Hayes's firm conviction that government officials should conduct themselves at all times with discretion and dignity" (153).
• "Except for her stance on temperance - which was as much Rutherford's as hers - Lucy shrank from involvement in controversial issues. Her feeling that radicalism and eccentricity marked the woman suffrage movement, plus Rutherford's sentiment against the enfranchisement of women, kept her from giving assistance" to the movement (237-8)
• "As Lucy Hayes approached the end of her initial year as First Lady, women reporters began to wonder if she really was the 'new woman' they had hoped for at the time of the inauguration. She lived up to their expectations as a hostess and as a supervisor of her family's activities, but did she consider herself a spokesperson for women? Was she interested in expanding opportunities for women in education and business? Did she believe in woman suffrage?" (p. 167) 
• consistently disappointed, followed husband 
• "she continued ... to be noncommittal on woman suffrage and professional education for women. 
• Lucy's apparent lack of interest in encouraging business enterprise by women also puzzled feminists of her era" (168). 
• "women interested in governmental activities continued to hope that Lucy would become more active in politics" (169)
• "Lucy Hayes, as did most presidential wives until the time of Eleanor Roosevelt, attached more importance to the supervision of White House social activities than involvement in reform movements" (200). "While Lucy showed an interest in politics, her main concern centered around the welfare of her family and friends" (207)
• "Although, as the first president's wife with a college degree, Lucy was in a position to serve as a role model for ambitious young women, it appears that she did not believe women should be educated for a profession such as medicine. Both Rutherford and Lucy, however, though that common school education should be free and universal" (237)
• "[A] willingness to help persons in desperate need of financial assistance reflected Lucy's innate kindness rather than any interest in abstract political ideas and policies. The zest for politics ascribed to Lucy by Washington correspondents was due more to her concern for people than to a study of the problems involved. Sometimes Rutherford discussed political issues with her, but it would have been contrary to her concept of herself as a supportive wife to have tried to dictate his actions" (239)
• "Lucy's passion for social harmony, which had marked her tenure as First Lady, continued to influence her actions even after the family retired to Spiegel Grove" = preference for limited public activity (252)
• "at no time did she enjoy life more than this last sojourn at Spiegel Grove" - close to all her children, friendships and church activities in Fremont (261)
• Note that they did not pursue the same college education for their daughter as Lucy's parents had sought for her (267), content with their daughter just finishing school
• White House Easter Egg Roll - "After Congress had passed a law closing the Capitol grounds to children rolling eggs on Easter Monday, Lucy, reluctant to have them disappointed, invited them to use the White House lawn. The grounds of the Mansion have been used for this happy event ever since" (215)

Published in 1984 by The Kent State University Press and the Rutherford B. Hayes Presidential Center, Geer's biography closely parallels what I learned on a tour of the Hayes museum and Spiegel Grove. Because it was such a close parallel, I don't remember learning anything new on the tour, but I do remember being enthralled by the amazing wallpapers inside the house at Spiegel Grove. And as a lover of wallpaper, myself, I was happy to see that it extended beyond the Victorian era, when the house was first decorated and wallpaper would have been expected for a family of the Hayes's stature, and continued into the redecorations of the mid-20th century that are on display on the upper floors of the home. I wish I had taken more photographs, but the two below give you a taste:

Julia Boggs Dent Grant: The General's Wife

 

I hold similar frustrations with Ishbel Ross's The General's Wife: The Life of Ulysses S. Grant as I have with previous biographies chronicled in this blog - most notably, that while purporting to be about Julia Grant, it is written as the story of a woman told through the life of her husband, and I learned much more about General, then President, Grant than I did about Mrs. Grant.  

I don't want to dwell on that criticism too long, however, in an effort to accept the book within its larger context. First published in 1959, The General's Wife is written as a traditional biography, chronologically telling the story of its subject with little concern for the more rigorous analytical demands that social movements of the following decades would thrust upon future historians. The author also makes her source base clear in her acknowledgments at the front of the manuscript and points out that Mrs. Grant was "not as zealous a letter writer as General Grant" and that while the Grants' descendants allowed the author access to Mrs. Grant's then-unpublished memoirs, she was "not to draw from it in any way" other than to offer her a "fuller understanding of her character and personality." 

All that being said, the book is full of an astounding amount of detail. What follows are some thoughts, in no particular order, on just a handful that I remember finding interesting while reading: 

• The book spends more time on the Civil War than on any other period in the Grants' lives, including the presidency, so it didn't do much to alter my understanding of Grant as simply the General who led the Union Army to victory and then became President off that popularity. I did, however, find it interesting to learn that Grant never had any real affinity for life in the Army and was not one to seek attention. According to this account, his mother and his wife were the only people who saw his true potential to do great things. 
• The tensions and complications of a marriage between the Union-backing Grants and the Southern-sympathizing and slave-owning Dents were more dramatic than any previous presidential pairing. We don't get a lot on Julia's thoughts or feelings on the subject, and the book is far from a fully fleshed-out analysis of the situation, but the Grant family made its animosity toward the Dents' lifestyle very clear--they did not even attend the wedding because they "abhorred the thought that Ulysses was marrying into a slave-owning family" (pp. 45-46). Julia's father highly disapproved of his son-in-law's Union allegiance, though Julia, apparently, handled it gracefully (p. 117). 
• Yet I was also shocked to learn that General Grant had owned an enslaved person, whom he freed in March 1859, and had "up to that time ... not taken an emphatic stand" on the subject of slavery (p. 96). The General who was essentially leading the Union Amry in its fight to end slavery in the United States even lived with enslaved persons in his camp household during the Civil War when Julia and their children would travel to join him at the front, which they did regularly: 

When Julia joined him briefly in Jackson ... Black Julia, the tiny ginger-colored maid Julia had had from birth, ran away. Grant was relieved. He forbade any attempt to bring her back, and expressed the wish that he could get rid of Julia's two other slaves in the same way. He had often told Auntie Robinson that he 'wanted to give his wife's slaves their freedom as soon as he was able.' (134)

• Julia Grant may not have been as well-read as her husband, but she was more sophisticated than he and was generally well-liked. As First Lady, she handled her social responsibilities with aplomb and came to relish the power and glamour that came with the presidential position - so much so that she tried to convince her husband to seek a third term. 
• I enjoyed reading about the two years the Grants spent traveling the world after the presidency. It was a trip few people will ever experience, even today. Considering they spent much of their early marriage often struggling to find financial success, it must have been an affirming experience to experience so much in such lavish fashion. 
• Part of the reason Julia was not as prolific a correspondent was that she suffered from "a mild case of strabismus" (p. 37), crossed eyes, that caused her some difficulty. It even led her to self-consciously pose in profile in portraits, as seen on the cover of the book (above). I found it sweet, though, that when she contemplated having it surgically corrected, General Grant asked her not to. He wrote:

I don't want to have your eyes fooled with. They are right as they are. They look just as they did the very first time I ever saw them--the same eyes I looked into when I fell in love with you--the same eyes that looked up into mine and told me that my love was returned. I have felt and seen that expression in them through all the years since then, and I don't want it changed now. This operation might make you look better to other people; but to me you are prettier as you are--as you were when I first saw you. (p. 221)

• Overall, Julia and Ulysses had a marriage of true love built on mutual respect and support. I think the last few paragraphs of Ross's book provide a good summation of what a more interpretive manuscript could have been developed around, had it been intended to be such: 

    None could question the fact that Julia had lived a rich and purposeful life. In her own quiet way she had made herself one of the more portent women in American history. She was not conspicuous in her generation, since she was neither a beauty nor scholar, a siren nor a politician. Her prosaic exterior gave no clue to the bright flame that Julia harbored, to the humor and warmth that infused her generous nature. She was always content to take a back seat and let Ulysses hold the reins, but behind her impulsive manner, her contradictions and her lenient ways, was the optimistic spirit that served him best in moments of crisis and discouragement. 

     Much wisdom underlay her air of simplicity in the closing years of her life. No American woman of her generation had traveled farther or met more famous people than Julia Grant. She had seen much of war, the world and the ways of government. At the end she had countless friends and few enemies. Above all, she had shared with unerring instinct the mixed fortunes of General Grant. Her faith in him was like a charm throughout his life. His love for her was a shield against destruction. (pp. 334-335)

Finally, the Grants moved around a lot, and I was surprised to learn that they spent some time living in Detroit. I might have to spend some time looking into whether any Grant-related buildings or markers still exist in the area. 

My Absence Explained

As I log back into my Blogger account for the first time in a long while, I see that I only managed a single post last year. The publication date for the entry, February 19, 2023, explains everything about the lack of further blog productivity to me, though perhaps not to my readers. 

You see, while life was calm enough in the weeks leading up to that blog post, the weeks after were some of the roughest of my life to this point. Without getting into details, several days after publishing my last blog post, I temporarily relocated to my home state to be with family as my younger brother was admitted to hospice care. He was gone in a couple of weeks, and I stuck around a little longer to help with everything that comes along with the death of a family member. 

The year and months since then have, for sure, included many moments from mundane to momentous. In addition to work and everyday living, traditional family gatherings and yearly celebrations, and keeping up with the shitshow of current world events, my husband and I celebrated 5 years of marriage with a trip to Jamaica, traveled through Spain, and experienced the total solar eclipse in Texas (and enjoyed the blue bonnets that Lady Bird Johnson played such a part in preserving and popularizing). We lost my mother-in-law to ALS and a sister-in-law to divorce, welcomed three new cats into our home (technically adopted two in January 2023 and cat-sat another for a few months later in the year), got to meet a celebrity (for whom one of those cats is named), dealt with water in our basement on more than one occasion, and are still dealing with the aftermath of putting in a (hopefully) permanent water abatement system. Amidst all that grief, mourning, celebrating, travel planning, cat caring, and crisis response, let's just say there was little desire to spend my time reading and writing about First Ladies. 

I finally decided last month that it was time to get back into the project, and I finished a biography of First Lady Grant last week. I hope to complete a blog post about it in the next few days. I knew absolutely nothing about Mrs. Grant going in, and while I don't know if I learned all that much about her 300+ pages later, I gathered (and remember) enough to write up some thoughts. 

Until then happy Father's Day, and (at the risk of sounding overly sappy) if you have a brother, tell him you love him. 

Eliza McCardle Johnson: A First Lady Still Unknown

Image from thriftbooks.com

Eliza Johnson: Unknown First Lady by Jean Choate is so poorly written I almost regret reading it. But it is the only full-length biography about the wife of Andrew Johnson not written for children that I could find. I learned almost nothing about Eliza Johnson, and what I read was so poorly punctuated, grammatically incorrect, and inconsistently cited that I did not know what to believe as fact versus historical conjecture. There is at least one grammar or punctuation error on every single page; most pages have multiple. I do not know how the book ever got published, as it clearly did not have a proper editor. There is also no way this book could have been peer-reviewed, as the footnoting situation is egregiously sub-par and confusing. In most of the instances when I was expecting to find a primary citation, it was secondary (and often incomplete or poorly punctuated), and on nearly all the occasions that some action, thought, or feeling was attributed directly to Eliza Johnson, there is no citation at all. On page 70, the author literally makes up an entire conversation between Andrew and Eliza, no citation whatsoever. Choate frequently writes that Eliza “knew” this or “thought” that or felt a particular way while providing no evidence to support those claims other than, seemingly, the general knowledge (dare I say stereotype) of how a typical woman in the nineteenth century might have lived and reacted. (Indeed, in this book, what is described is almost always a reaction on Eliza’s part rather than an action.) 

It is only on page 79 (of 154) that a footnote informs the reader that the letter cited, to Major General Kerby Smith from Eliza Johnson, refusing to comply with an 1862 order to leave her home in Confederate Tennessee, is “one of the few letters in existence which bears Eliza Johnson’s signature.” And a footnote on page 84 points out that the 1863 letter cited, from Andrew to Eliza, is “the only letter between the two that has been found thus far.” Had this been a proper historical biography, the author would have addressed that lack of source material about one’s subject in the introduction. Moreover, it takes a very talented, diligent, determined, and well-trained historian to overcome that limitation, critically analyzing all the source material surrounding your specific subject – searching for her and her circumstances in tangentially related primary collections and creatively utilizing secondary literature to provide “thick description” and fully place her within the historical context. Ms. Choate is not that historian. 

As such, the book is yet another purported biography of a woman that is actually just a shallow glimpse at her life as told through the story of her husband. With few exceptions, all the details and specifics as well as any substantial actions are attributed to Andrew Johnson, while Eliza Johnson is merely said to be making a home with him, worrying for him, or reading the news about him. To offer just one example of the many missed opportunities for true historical analysis of Eliza Johnson’s life and actions: The author tells me on page 109 that “Eliza also received letters from people asking that she pass on the message to the president” and that “Possibly they felt that she would influence the President to support their cause.” That’s it. End of paragraph, end of discussion. There is no citation offered and Choate goes into no further detail or exploration of that possible influence. The causes they were writing to her about, the messages she might have been passing on, and how she might have addressed them with her husband is exactly the type of stuff an interpretive historical biography would have expounded upon.

One of the only interesting things I learned about this First Lady is that she had more formal education than her husband. There is a brief mention very early on in the book about Eliza writing out old letters for Andrew to copy to improve his handwriting and reading aloud while Andrew, working as a tailor, sewed suits. The author writes, “Because she had so much more education than he, she could begin to open up new worlds for him” but quickly moves on from there to discuss Andew’s tailoring business and offers no further exploration of that dynamic within their marriage (p. 11). The rest of the book, while repeatedly pointing out that Eliza followed the national news and debates - indeed, read and clipped news articles related to her husband and his political pursuits - provides no critical or detailed analysis of how this president’s more formally educated wife would have most certainly had an influence on his politics and policies other than to say she would have been proud of or worried by his decisions and actions. An interpretive, overarching thesis about how Eliza lived her life would have improved this book dramatically, even if it was one to say that she chose to live a life grounded in frontier traditions and did not stray far from “traditional” female mores of the time. As written, the book does not strongly support or refute such a thesis but perhaps suggests it. 

There is so much more criticism that could be laid out against this book, not least of which would include its clumsy attempt at addressing the complications of the Johnsons’ politics as a southern, slave-owning family supporting the Union cause during the Civil War. I will not go into the details here. But if there are any talented historians of the Civil War era out there reading this, I would encourage you to see what you can do to make this “Unknown First Lady” better known. 

On a side note, I learned through reading this book that Eliza had tuberculosis (TB) and found it fascinating that she seemingly lived with it for an extended period of time, including during her husband’s presidency and after. I think it would be interesting to further explore Eliza’s TB and its effect on her role as a politician’s wife. It is made clear in the book that Eliza often stayed in Tennessee while Andrew was in Washington or cloistered in her room on the second floor of the White House and that she deferred to her daughter Martha when it came to the social responsibilities of the First Lady. Yet Choate also says that Eliza was often visited by family and others and was “the center of the household” (p. 102), so not completely devoid of energy. Furthermore, Eliza lived to be 65 years old, a relatively long life for the time, and she lived with tuberculosis for a good portion of her later life. Choate claims that Eliza “quite possibly” developed TB around 42 years of age (p. 36); that’s more than 20 years living with this chronic condition. I think it would be interesting to place her within a larger study of tuberculosis in the nineteenth century, how people lived with it and how it was perceived within larger society.   

Mary Todd Lincoln: A Complicated Life full of Grief

My knowledge of Mary Lincoln was limited to fictionalized accounts based on historical events: Lincoln, the Steven Spielberg film from 2012, and Mrs. Lincoln’s Dressmaker, the 2013 novel by Jennifer Chiaverini. Both of those focus on main characters close to Mary Lincoln, rather than on her specifically, so reading Catherine Clinton’s Mrs. Lincoln: A Life was my first exposure to a work distinctly about the former First Lady.

Amazon.com

It offered a well-rounded look at Mary Lincoln’s, and makes its own arguments around popular historical controversies such as Abraham Lincoln’s sexual orientation and Mary Lincoln’s mental health. Clinton comes down too strongly on the sides of definitely not homosexual and certainly of sound mind, respectively, for my liking, but I appreciate her attempts to address the historiographies.  

What I was struck by most in reading the manuscript was how difficult the Civil War must have been for Mary on a personal level. I never knew she grew up essentially as Kentucky gentry, meaning she had family members supporting, fighting, and dying for the Confederacy while she unfailingly supported her husband as President of the Union. Amidst horrible and often unfounded criticism in the press, Mary insisted on publicly supporting the Union cause, often traveling to the front lines and military hospitals to be with Union troops, all while personally mourning family losses to the Confederate cause, including half-brothers and a brother in-in-law, on top of mourning the tragic loss of her young son to illness early in the war years. It made me think about how someone’s personal experience with controversy can be much more complicated than anyone on the outside may truly understand.  

While death was much more a part of everyday life in the 19th Century than we of the 21st will ever truly understand, the compounding losses that Mary Lincoln experienced seem especially tragic – three sons dying before the age of twenty and a husband assassinated. Assuming she abided by strict Victorian mourning rituals, she would have spent a significant fraction of her life post-1850 in mourning garb, and the fact that she managed to rack up such high debts accumulating fabrics and other fashionable accoutrements is even more of an astonishing feat. Was it a symptom of undiagnosed bipolar disorder? Who am I to speculate? But I agree with recent arguments for a more complex understanding of how her prolonged grief may have affected her mental state or the public’s perception of it: Why Historians Should Reevaluate Mary Todd Lincoln's Oft-Misunderstood Grief | Smart News| Smithsonian Magazine. 

On a side note, I never before stopped to consider Mary Todd Lincoln’s maiden name, which she shared with another prominent former First Lady, Dolley Madison, making them distant kin by marriage. I was reminded of the name during a trip to Philadelphia back in April, when we were able to view the Dolley Todd House. Unfortunately, the home has been closed since COVID, and we were unable to go on a tour, but here are a few photographs: