* Dr. Stacy Pratt McDermott wrote a book about Mary Todd Lincoln and is a Lincoln scholar. Today is the 200th anniversary of Mrs. Lincoln’s birth and McDermott has a post up on her blog defending the former First Lady…

First, we should take off our stove-pipe hats to Mary Lincoln’s intellect and her extraordinary education, which consisted of ten years of formal schooling when most Americans, like Abraham Lincoln himself, had very few educational opportunities. Let’s acknowledge the fact that Mary’s education, combined with her unique family circumstances in the peculiar context of Lexington, Kentucky, emboldened her nature. Let’s remember that her father and her sophisticated French female teacher gave Mary confidence and encouraged her to raise her own voice. It is true, indeed, that raising her voice often landed Mary “in trouble,” but doesn’t that tell us more about the gendered nature of nineteenth-century America than it does about Mary Lincoln? And do you really think Abraham Lincoln knew nothing of Mary’s confident voice when he married her in 1842? Do you really think the brilliant Mr. Lincoln knew nothing of Mary’s strong will and opinionated nature before he put the ring, engraved with “Love Is Eternal,” on her finger?

Let’s acknowledge the intellectual connection Mary shared with her husband. Let’s give Lincoln some credit for wanting a wife who was pretty and smart. Throughout their marriage, the couple shared a passion for partisan politics, a deep appreciation for literature, and love of music and the theater. Remember, too, Mary gave Abraham Lincoln four of his greatest joys: his sons. The Lincolns shared a love of their four boys and were, together, indulgent and thoroughly modern parents, who believed in the idea of childhood. The Lincoln marriage was not perfect, because both Mr. and Mrs. Lincoln struggled with their own very different emotional difficulties. Mary was high-strung and prone to wild mood swings; while Abraham was emotionally distant and depressive. But throughout their marriage, they were companions and shared common interests and beliefs. In the dark days of Civil War, Mary carved out periods of family time, which not only gave her boys some semblance of normalcy but were a refuge for her overburdened husband, as well. Lincoln needed Mary to force a little leisure upon him, and the brief periods of escape at Soldier’s Home or the theater brought some solace to his suffering soul.

Let’s acknowledge Mary Lincoln’s own suffering and give her some credit for living through it. During most of her adult life, she suffered migraine headaches and a difficult delivery of her fourth son left her with an injury that plagued her. She also definitely suffered some degree of mental illness, which no doubt would have been much alleviated had she lived in a time of modern medicine instead of a time when so-called doctors dismissed women’s health issues as hysteria. Yet despite her ill physical and emotional health, Mary got up out of bed almost every day of her life, and she put on pretty dresses, and she raised her boys (often all by herself), and she found joy in books, at White House receptions, while shopping and visiting the theater, and through her husband’s politics.

Mary Lincoln also suffered terrible emotional blows. She buried her four-year-old toddler Eddy in Springfield in 1850, and she buried Willie, her beloved 11-year-old boy, in Washington in 1862. She lost family members to the Confederacy and had a public, front-row seat for the horrors of the war, witnessing the physical and emotional damage on soldiers she visited in Washington. In 1865, Mary Lincoln was sitting next to her husband when an assassin put a bullet in his head; people removed her from her husband’s deathbed, where he died without her, because she was wailing at the loss of him; and people criticized her for lingering too long afterwards in grief in the White House. In 1871 just as she was finding her way through life as the widow of a martyred president, she buried her third son Tad, a blossoming eighteen-year-old man in whom she found joy and so much comfort.

I buried a child myself, and let me tell you, if I had to bury a second one there would be no breath left in my body. Losing three children and witnessing her husband’s violent murder, along with the post-traumatic stress of it all, was not the end of her suffering, either. Mary Lincoln then had to endure fears of financial disaster as a widow in nineteenth-century America, fears exacerbated by her emotional instability, emotional instability that was not her fault! She also faced public ridicule for visiting spiritualists, which was in fashion at the time and brought her some comfort. She had to listen to snipes for visiting health spas, even as mainstream physicians failed to offer her relief. She was also unfairly judged for shopping with her own money and for selling her own dresses; and then her last surviving son Robert had her incarcerated in a mental asylum, an injustice that cut her off from her grandchildren.

Go read the whole thing.

* This is one of my favorite prints…

RIP