Mary Todd Lincoln

Her father owned a bank and a 14-room house on West Main Street in Lexington, and she was raised for a drawing room. Mary Todd's mother died when she was six. Her father remarried and had nine more children, and Mary was sent to Madame Mentelle's, where she learned French well enough to keep it for life, along with dancing, drama and an appetite for politics that girls were not supposed to have. At 20 she moved to Springfield to live with a married sister. Stephen A. Douglas courted her. So did a poor circuit lawyer whose prospects her family disliked enough to break the engagement once. She married Abraham Lincoln on November 4, 1842, at 23.

She reached Washington in 1861 as the first western First Lady and was resented from both directions at once. Northern papers called her a traitor because several of her half-brothers were fighting for the Confederacy. Washington society called her coarse. She overran the White House refurbishment appropriation so badly that her husband was furious and Congress had to vote the money twice, and she went on buying jewelry on credit. She also visited army hospitals with fruit and flowers and wrote soldiers' letters home for them, which drew almost no coverage. In February 1862 her son Willie died of typhoid upstairs in the mansion. She took to her bed for three weeks and could not attend the funeral. Three years later she was holding her husband's hand when John Wilkes Booth shot him.

Robert Todd Lincoln was the only one of her four sons to live past 18, and on May 20, 1875 he had his mother tried as a lunatic. She had been walking around Chicago with 56,000 dollars in government bonds sewn into her petticoats, buying draperies for rooms she did not have, and telling him that someone had tried to poison her on a train. A jury heard the case in a single sitting and committed her to Bellevue Place in Batavia. She tried to kill herself with laudanum the next day and a pharmacist gave her a placebo instead. Then she smuggled letters out to the suffragist lawyer Myra Bradwell and to the editor of the Chicago Times. The publicity turned on Robert. She was released within four months and declared competent to manage her own affairs in 1876.

She spent four years abroad, mostly at Pau in the Pyrenees, going blind from cataracts and, in 1879, injuring her spine in a fall. She collapsed at her sister's house in Springfield on July 15, 1882 and died the next morning of a stroke, at 63, and was buried in the Lincoln Tomb with her husband and three sons. For a century the histories carried her as Lincoln's burden — extravagant, hysterical, an embarrassment. That has moved. Siena College's survey of historians ranked her last of 42 First Ladies in 1982 and 29th of 40 in 2020, as scholars began reading the spending and the visions as illness rather than character, and Robert's motives as something less than filial.

Mary Todd Lincoln's life against the full span of the corpus.

• The White House refurbishment other
  New furnishings, wallpapers and state china that blew through the congressional appropriation 1861
• The old clothes sale other
  She advertised her White House wardrobe for auction in the New York World and scandalized the country 1868
• The presidential widow's pension law
  She lobbied Congress herself and won 3,000 dollars a year on July 14, 1870 1870
• The increased pension of 1882 law
  Won in New York lobbying after Garfield's assassination reopened the question 1882

• December 13, 1818 aged 0 Born in Lexington, Kentucky, fourth of seven children Her father Robert Todd was a banker. Her mother died in childbirth when Mary was six.
• October 1839 aged 20 Moves to Springfield, Illinois, to live with her sister Stephen A. Douglas was among the men who courted her there.
• November 4, 1842 aged 23 Marries Abraham Lincoln after an engagement that had already collapsed once Her sister and brother-in-law thought him beneath her.
• February 1, 1850 aged 31 Her son Eddie dies in Springfield at three Tuberculosis. The first of three sons she would bury.
• February 20, 1862 aged 43 Willie dies of typhoid fever in the White House at 11 She kept to her bed for three weeks and did not attend the funeral.
• April 14, 1865 aged 46 Sits beside her husband at Ford's Theatre when Booth fires She was holding his hand. Stanton ordered her out of the room at the Petersen House that night.
• July 15, 1871 aged 52 Tad dies in Chicago at 18 Pleurisy or heart failure. Only Robert was left.
• May 20, 1875 aged 56 Tried for insanity in Chicago at her son Robert's instance and committed She was released within four months and declared competent to manage her own affairs in 1876.
• July 16, 1882 aged 63 Dies at her sister's house in Springfield of a stroke She had collapsed the previous day, 11 years to the day after Tad's death.

• Abraham Lincoln 1809–1865
  16th President who preserved the Union during the Civil War and issued the Emancipation Proclamation. married to
• John Wilkes Booth 1838–1865
  Actor who assassinated President Lincoln in 1865 — altering the course of Reconstruction. widowed by