Book Review : The Trials and Tribulations of Mary Todd Lincoln’s Life

Mary Todd Lincoln: A Biography by Jean H. Baker (Norton: $19.95; 442 pages)

The Trials of Mrs. Lincoln by Samuel A. Schreiner Jr. (Donald I. Fine: $18.95; 307 pages)

In life, she was often a liability to her illustrious husband; in death, a blot on the American conscience. No wonder that Mary Todd Lincoln, the wife and widow of our most revered President, has been treated gingerly and summarily by biographers. Now, after an entire century, historians are taking a second look at the record, and in the process of setting it straight, reevaluating the received wisdom.

Baker’s full-scale biography is scholarly, factual and dispassionate; Samuel A. Schreiner’s account of the events surrounding her insanity trial is journalistic, conjectural and unabashedly designed to rehabilitate his subject’s much maligned image. Because Jean H. Baker covers so much ground and Schreiner’s field is strictly limited, the books complement rather than compete with one another. Read Baker and your curiosity about the trial will be aroused; choose Schreiner and you’ll want to know more about the larger context in which it took place.

Baker reminds readers that Mary Lincoln was neither a published writer, a dedicated reformer, an idealist, an early feminist nor an abolitionist. She had no discernible influence upon Lincoln’s policies or his public pronouncements. Moreover, she wasn’t even a typical 19th-Century woman, being far too well educated, eccentric, and outspoken for that stereotypical role. Instead, she was “battered by personal adversity and trapped by conventions of Victorian domesticity.” After struggling valiantly, Baker finally succeeds in making those harrowing experiences a metaphor for the sufferings of Mary Lincoln’s generation.

Once launched into the text proper, Baker’s tone softens somewhat, becoming increasingly less judgmental as the research proceeds and the evidence accumulates. True, the woman was impetuous, extravagant and mercurial, but she endured tragedies calculated to reduce the Rock of Gibraltar to gravel. Not only was her husband assassinated before her eyes, but three of her four children died young: Eddie at 3 of tuberculosis, Willie at 11 of typhoid, affectionate Tad of pleurisy at 18.

Bad Luck

“Ill luck,” Mary Lincoln wrote bitterly after the devastating loss of Tad, “presided at my birth and has been a faithful attendant ever since.”

Bereft, aging, in failing health and half-mad with grief, she was left with only the eldest son Robert Todd Lincoln, with whom she had already been at odds over financial matters. Baker explores Mary Lincoln’s childhood, marriage, Springfield interlude, White House years and disconsolate wanderings in Europe, handling the trial itself with traditional circumspection.

That crucial event in her catastrophic life is covered in detail by Schreiner, who has based his book upon newly released transcripts of the trial and Robert Lincoln’s letters. Though the first scholars to examine this material found it only mildly interesting, Schreiner was convinced that the records represented “pure moral melodrama, a true parable of man’s inhumanity to woman.”

He set out to prove his point by turning the letters and reports into a hybrid of fact and fiction in which indirect statements become dialogue, characters’ thoughts are hypothesized, and the lacunas filled in with guesswork. While his labors have been diligent and conscientious, the result falls somewhat short of his ambitious intent. Despite the 20,000 letters, the pertinent facts are redundant and surprisingly bland.

Denied the pension to which she felt entitled after the assassination of the President, Mary Lincoln lived in sadly reduced circumstances, convinced she was a virtual pauper. In a misguided effort to improve her situation, she attempted to sell some of her gowns and jewels, a gesture regarded as scandalous if not downright demented. Eventually persuaded that her financial condition was not as desperate as she imagined, she reverted to her previous habits of compulsive shopping.

Alone and miserable, she bought household effects for which she had no need in her furnished hotel rooms, bright dress fabrics a widow couldn’t wear. Never robust, she suffered increasingly from headaches and fevers, in the grip of which she sometimes made irresponsible statements.

Declared Insane

In May, 1875, Mary Lincoln was declared insane in Cook County Courthouse, removed under duress from her quarters in Chicago’s Grand Pacific Hotel, and sent to a pastoral retreat run by Dr. Richard Patterson as a “Hospital for the Insane of the Private Class.” The action had been brought by son Robert, who was embarrassed by his mother’s behavior. In addition to her moodiness, depression and unbridled expenditures, she often exhibited a vindictive attitude toward those she thought had wronged her; a syndrome to which First Ladies seem particularly vulnerable.

Today Mary Lincoln would be diagnosed as neurotic, but that useful word hadn’t yet been invented. A century ago, insane was the term for aberrant behavior, and Americans used it often and loosely. After she was adjudged in need of confinement, she was taken to Patterson’s establishment, where she was carefully protected from the sight and sound of the doctor’s more unruly patients. While she was comfortably housed and treated with great respect by all, encouraged to pay and receive calls and drive out in her carriage, it was not by any means an agreeable interlude. Intelligent and independent, Mary Lincoln was publicly humiliated and exploited by the press.

After a year during which she behaved with admirable good grace, she achieved her own release from Bellevue Retreat, moving temporarily to her sister’s house in Springfield. In 1876, she sailed for France, spending the next few years at a pleasant spa in Pau, where her health seemed to improve. Sadly, she injured her back in a fall, ending her days back in Springfield as the all-too genuine invalid she had finally become--perhaps not the heroine of a moral melodrama, but certainly the central figure in a pathetic domestic debacle.