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.
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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:
