After the verdict, Robert came to her with tears streaming down his face, and he took her hand. “O Robert,” she said, “to think that my own son would ever have this done.” For Mary, this was a final, devastating betrayal. That night, for the first time in her life, she tried to kill herself with a lethal dose of camphor and laudanum. But her druggist had substituted a harmless ingredient for the laudanum, and she did not die. The next day, thoroughly miserable, she rode with Robert himself to a private sanitarium west of Chicago.
With an airy room and the freedom to go for walks and rides, Mary was not physically uncomfortable here. But the news of her incarceration had flashed across the country, and she seethed with resentment, schemed to get out. She was no maniac. She was Mrs. Abraham Lincoln. She would prove that to Robert and all her enemies and detractors.
She found ready allies in Myra and Judge James Bradwell of Chicago, both dedicated feminists; the Bradwells in turn enlisted the help of Elizabeth and Ninian Edwards of Springfield—Mary’s sister and brother-in-law—and pressed the sanitarium to let her live with them. Less than four months after she entered it, the sanitarium released her in the Edwards’s custody. When the court in a second trial ruled her sane, Mary felt exonerated. She wrote “Robert T. Lincoln” and demanded the return of her things. “You have tried your game of robbery long enough,” she said, and signed the letter “Mrs. A. Lincoln.”
She stayed a year with the Edwardses, fled to Europe again, then in 1880 came back to Springfield for good, back to their home on the hill, back to her room there. Ill, partially blind, and crippled from a back injury, Mary spent her final days in this shuttered room, seldom venturing out, seldom seeing anyone. In May, 1881, Robert came to ask his mother’s forgiveness and love. With him was his daughter, who was named after Mary. Incapable of saying no to her and Robert together, Mary promised to forgive and forget. Then they were gone and Mary was alone again in her dimly lit room. She kept the curtains closed, her eyes unable to tolerate any light beyond that of a single candle. Outside, children played in the streets, and some whispered that a crazy woman lurked behind the window with the curtains drawn. But Mary was beyond that world now; it could no longer hurt her. She lingered in the room where the candle burned, drifting with the days, caressing her wedding ring with its inscription “Love Is Eternal,” and counting over her memories of past happiness. She lived in the past now, in a gentler time when she had first come to Springfield and stayed in this house…when she had loved so to dance with all the “gay” gentlemen…when she had met and married a tall, awkward young attorney who had the most congenial mind she had ever known…when she had carried his sons and made him a home. Then at night Mary would rise, blow out the candle, and slip into bed, lying carefully to one side in order not to disturb “the President’s place” beside her.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I am grateful to the following people for helping me prepare this volume: M. S. “Buz” Wyeth, Jr., my long-time editor at Harper & Row; Terry Karten, my supportive second editor there; Gerard McCauley, my long-time agent; Eva Langlois, my indispensable assistant; Sally Ives, my imperturbable typist; and Frank J. Williams, President of the Lincoln Group of Boston, and Mark E. Neely, Jr., Director of the Louis A. Warren Lincoln Library and Museum, who shared with me their vast knowledge of Lincoln and who read the manuscript and offered constructive comments. In addition, Frank Williams and his gracious wife Virginia welcomed me into their home—with its rich Lincoln collection—for weekends of inspiring Lincoln talk. I am also indebted to Ralph G. Newman, founder of the Abraham Lincoln Book Shop of Chicago and a devoted Lincoln scholar, for his generosity, counsel, and friendship over the past eight years. My gratitude, too, to Lincoln College in Lincoln, Illinois, for awarding me an honorary doctorate in humane letters, and to Pat Newman, Willard Bunn III, Christopher N. Breiseth, Daniel R. Weinberg, Harold M. Hyman, James T. Hickey, Gabor S. Boritt, Charles B. Strozier, and my many other friends in the Lincoln community for enlightening conversation and past kindnesses. Members of the Amherst Creative Biography Group, including Dorothy Clark, Peter Eddy, Sandra and Bill Katz, William Kimbrel, Elizabeth Lloyd-Kimbrel, Ann and Michael Meeropol, Will Ryan, and Leslie Stainton, heard part of this book during our biweekly readings, and I appreciate their helpful criticism. Finally, I want to offer a special thanks to the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, for supporting my efforts at creative biographical writing and research.
REFERENCES
Part One: Myth
1: MAN OF THE PEOPLE
The quotation “Myths tell us” is from X. J. Kennedy, Literature: An Introduction to Fiction, Poetry, and Drama (Boston, 1983), 610. On the Christ-like Lincoln, the quotation “Oh, friends” is from Lloyd Lewis, Myths after Lincoln (paperback ed., New York, 1957), 95; the quotation “We mourn for the loss” from James M. McPherson, The Negro’s Civil War (paperback ed., New York, 1967), 308; the quotation “To the deeply emotional and religious slave” from David Donald, Lincoln Reconsidered (paperback ed., New York, 1956), 148. For the Holland school of mythology, see Holland’s own work, The Life of Abraham Lincoln (Springfield, Mass., 1866), and Donald, Lincoln Reconsidered, 148-54; Lewis, Myths after Lincoln, 333-34; and Roy P. Basler, The Lincoln Legend (reprint ed., New York, 1969), 8-9. My discussion of Herndon draws from David Donald, Lincoln’s Herndon (New York, 1948), 218-41, 296, 303-4, 306-7, 316-20, 344-73; Donald, Lincoln Reconsidered, 154-57, 160-61; and Lewis, Myths after Lincoln, 334-35. Donald’s biography of Herndon also has an excellent discussion of Ward Hill Lamon’s Life of Abraham Lincoln (1872), which drew from Herndon’s materials. For further discussions of the Ann Rutledge myth, see Basler, Lincoln Legend, 147-63; and J. G. Randall, Lincoln the President: From Bull Run to Gettysburg (paperback ed., New York, 1945), 321-42. Quotations “cause a squirm” and “Atheist! Atheist!” are from Lewis, Myths after Lincoln, 336, 303; the quotation “composite American ideal” from Donald, Lincoln Reconsidered, 163.
For the background and historical context of Carl Sandburg’s Abraham Lincoln: The Prairie Years, see Herbert Mitgang (ed.), The Letters of Carl Sandburg (New York, 1968), 225-37; Alfred Harcourt, “Forty Years of Friendship,” Journal of the Illinois State Historical Society, XLV (Winter, 1952), 395-97; North Callahan, Carl Sandburg: Lincoln of Our Literature (New York, 1970), 23, 75-95; and Alfred Haworth Jones, Roosevelt’s Image Brokers: Poets, Playwrights, and the Use of the Lincoln Symbol (Port Washington, N.Y., 1974), 7-37. I also benefited from Robert W. Johannsen’s unpublished paper “The Poet as Biographer: Carl Sandburg’s Prairie Years,” read at a symposium on Carl Sandburg as a Lincoln biographer, Jan. 21, 1978, at Knox College in Galesburg, Ill. The quotation “Like him” is from Callahan, Sandburg, 101; the quotation “both poets withall” from Sherman, “Carl Sandburg’s Lincoln,” New York Herald Tribune Books, Feb. 7, 1926.
The best accounts of Whitman and Lincoln are in Justin Kaplan, Walt Whitman: A Life (New York, 1980), 28-30, 258-61, 271-72, 300-1, 308-9, and Kaplan’s unpublished paper “After Whitman,” which was also read at the Knox College symposium and which is excellent on the connection between Whitman and Sandburg. The quotation “only distinguished epic poet” is from Kaplan’s paper. For more on Whitman’s Lincoln, see Basler, Lincoln Legend, 267-71, and Daniel Aaron, The Unwritten War: American Writers and the Civil War (New York, 1973), 69-72.
As for Sandburg’s own comments about his work, the quotation “In Lincoln” is from Sandburg, Abraham Lincoln: The Prairie Years (2 vols., New York, 1926), 1: viii; the quotation “take Lincoln away from the religious bigots” from Wayne Gard, “Carl Sandburg Interprets Young Lincoln,” The Literary Digest International Book Review, IV (Feb., 1926), 189; the quotation “felt as if in a trance” from Mitgang, Letters of Carl Sandburg, 255-56; the quotations “All-American” and “democracy can choose a man” from Sandburg, Abraham Lincoln: The War Years (4 vols., New York, 1939), 2: 332-33.
For the critical reaction to Sandburg’s Lincoln, see Johannsen, “The Poet as Biographe
r”; and Jones, Roosevelt’s Image Brokers, 51-62. The Benét quotation is from the Atlantic Monthly (Dec., 1939), 22; the Hill quotation from the Kansas City Star, Dec. 2, 1939; the Commager quotation from the Yale Review, XXIX (Winter, 1940), 374; the Sherwood quotation from the New York Times Book Review, Dec. 3, 1939. Another favorable appraisal is Benjamin P. Thomas, Portrait for Posterity (New Brunswick, N. J., 1947), 285-310.
There were negative reactions, of course. Historian Milo Quaife, in the Mississippi Valley Historical Review, XIII (Sept., 1926), 287-91, thought the Prairie Years sheer fiction, “a literary grab bag” that could never be accepted as history. For Edmund Wilson, Sandburg’s biography was the “cruellest thing that has happened to Lincoln since he was shot by Booth.” Wilson, Patriotic Gore: Studies in the Literature of the American Civil War (New York, 1962), 115. In my book, Our Fiery Trial: Abraham Lincoln, John Brown, and the Civil War Era (Amherst, Ma., 1979), 101-9, I discuss the errors, apocrypha, and fictionalizing that mar Sandburg’s work as biography.
The sources of my discussion of the Prairie Years are as follows: the quotation “He suggests a bard” is from Roscoe C. E. Brown, North American Review, CCXXIII (June, 1926), 33; Sandburg’s folk tales about young Lincoln and his quotations about Lincoln and Ann Rutledge, all from Sandburg’s Lincoln: The Prairie Years, 1:50, 51-52, 73, 138, 140-41, 189-90 (see also 12, 16, 33, 40, 41-42, 43, 56-59, 71 ff., 187, and 290 for other fictional passages); the Wilson quotation in Patriotic Gore, 116; Sandburg, Lincoln (one-volume ed., New York, 1954), 38-40, 45-46; Sandburg’s statement that he was sorry he had fallen for the Rutledge legend, Johannsen, “The Poet as Biographer”; quotations “two shifting moods,” “stubby, homely words,” “the Strange Friend,” “something out of a picture book for children,” and “a mind, a spirit, a tongue” from Sandburg, Lincoln: The Prairie Years, 1:177, 2:105, 284, 428, and 1:480; quotation “fabulous human figure” from Sandburg, Lincoln (one-volume ed.), 296.
My discussion of the War Years draws from the following sources: the Sherwood quotation from the New York Times Book Review, Dec. 3, 1939; Sandburg’s Lincoln as a people’s hero from Lincoln: The War Years, 2:562, 587, 589-92, 646, also 3:300, 383, 391, 567-68, and 4: 216-17; Sandburg’s Lincoln and the Emancipation Proclamation from ibid., 3:20, 22, 25, and 4:216-17; Sandburg’s Lincoln, the so-called radicals, and the South and reconstruction from ibid., 4:217, also 2:-559-60, and 3:82, 642; quotations “To a deep river” and “greatest general” from ibid., 4:297, 376-77; quotation “baffling and completely inexplicable” from Mitgang, Letters of Carl Sandburg, 490.
2: ARCH VILLAIN
See in particular Don E. Fehrenbacher, “The Anti-Lincoln Tradition,” Papers of the Abraham Lincoln Association, 4 (Springfield, Ill., 1982): 7-28, from which I extracted the quotation “bad man.” The quotation “scholarly, ringing” is from Lewis, Myths after Lincoln, 99; the quotation “hundred years hence” from the New York Herald, Apr. 17, 1865.
My account of the secessionists’ and Confederates’ Lincoln draws from Michael Davis, The Image of Lincoln in the South (Knoxville, Tenn., 1971), 41-104; my own With Malice Toward None: The Life of Abraham Lincoln (New York, 1977), 187; and Thomas Reed Turner, Beware the People Weeping: Public Opinion and the Assassination of Abraham Lincoln (Baton Rouge, La., 1982), 90-99. The quotation “the most execrable measure” is from Dunbar Rowland, Jefferson Davis, Constitutionalist: His Letters, Papers, and Speeches (Jackson, Miss., 1923), 5: 409-11; the quotation “All honor to J. Wilkes Booth” from John Q. Anderson (ed.), Brokenburn: The Journal of Kate Stone, 1861-1868 (Baton Rouge, La., 1955), 333; the quotation “God’s judgment day” from the Houston Tri-Weekly Telegraph, Apr. 25, 1865.
For the countermyth in the postwar and new South: the quotation “Is it insanity” is from George Edmonds [Elizabeth Avery Meriwether], Facts and Falsehoods concerning the War on the South (Memphis, Tenn., 1904), 49-50; the quotation “whole story of his career” from the Southern Magazine 11 (Sept., 1872), 374; the quotation “gawky, coarse” from Basler, Lincoln Legend, 57; the quotation “amounts to a patent perversion” from Davis, Image of Lincoln in South, 169; the quotation “The real monument” from Fehrenbacher, “Anti-Lincoln Tradition,” Papers of the Abraham Lincoln Association, 4: 22.
For the countermyth outside the South, see Masters, Lincoln: The Man (New York, 1931), passim. Masters wrote at a time when it was popular for biographers to use psychology to debunk their subjects. The California political scientist to whom I refer is Dwight G. Anderson, whose Abraham Lincoln: The Quest for Immortality (New York, 1982) is a modern rerun of Masters and typical of the kind of fanciful psychologizing that infests recent historical literature. See, for example, George B. Forgie, Patricide in the House Divided: A Psychological Interpretation (New York, 1979), which argues that Lincoln both revered and resented the Founding Fathers (they had garnered all the glory) and deliberately brought on the crisis of the Union in order to escape his dilemma. As a friend of mine said, “If you believe that, you’ll believe anything.”
Vidal’s syphilitic Lincoln is in Vidal, “Lincoln: His Ambition Was a Little Engine That Knew No Rest,” Los Angeles Times, Feb. 8, 1981.
3: WHITE CHIEF AND HONKY
For Lincoln as White Chief: Davis, Image of Lincoln in South, 148-52, has a trenchant discussion of Dixon’s Lincoln, but see also Basler, Lincoln Legend, 47, 220-21, 240. The Vardaman quotations and his excerpts from Lincoln’s Charleston speech are in the Congressional Record, 63d Cong., 2d sess., 51 (Jan. 22-Feb. 6, 1914), 3036, 3038-40, and 65th Cong., 1st sess., 55 (July 24-Aug. 29, 1917), 6061-64. For Martin Luther King’s hate mail citing Lincoln: the quotation “It should do you lots of good” is from “A disgusted White Man” to King, Aug. 5, 1960, Martin Luther King., Jr., Collection, Mugar Memorial Library, Boston University; quotation “I don’t believe in lynchings” from “KKK” to King, May 2 [no year], ibid.
For King’s views of Lincoln, see my own Let the Trumpet Sound: The Life of Martin Luther King, Jr. (New York, 1982), 120, 159, 207-9, 256-57, 263, 272, and Builders of the Dream: Abraham Lincoln and Martin Luther King, Jr. (the Fifth Annual R. Gerald McMurtry Lecture, Fort Wayne, Ind., May 20, 1982). Like historians Franklin and Quarles, King did not share the anti-Lincoln attitudes of many modern black intellectuals. The quotation “overwhelmed me” is from James Forman, The Making of Black Revolutionaries (New York, 1972), 47; the quotation “one of the most far-reaching pronouncements” from Quarles, Lincoln and the Negro (New York, 1962), 150. See also Franklin, The Emancipation Proclamation (paperback ed., New York, 1965), particularly 13, 29, 98-99, 131-32, 143, 145.
Malcolm X was also part of the 1960s black backlash against Lincoln. “He probably did more to trick Negroes than any other man in history,” Malcolm said. See Robert Penn Warren, Who Speaks for the Negro? (New York, 1965), 262. The Lester quotation is from his Look Out Whitey! Black Power’s Gon’ Get Your Mama! (New York, 1968), 58; the Bennett quotations from his article “Was Abe Lincoln a White Supremacist?” Ebony (Feb., 1968), 35-42. Bennett’s assertion that the Emancipation Proclamation had “all the grandeur of a real estate deed” is a loose paraphrase of Richard Hofstadter’s description of it as having “all the moral grandeur of a bill of lading.” Hofstadter, The American Political Tradition and the Men Who Made It (New York, 1948), 131. Echoing Bennett, black scholar Nathan Irving Huggins, Slave and Citizen: The Life of Frederick Douglass (Boston, 1980), 77, even denied that Lincoln was an antislavery man. The Harding quotations are from There is a River: The Black Struggle for Freedom in America (New York), 220, 223, 225, 226, 231-32, 234-40, 255, 256, and xix. The Frye quotation is from Kennedy, Literature, 610.
Part Two: Many-Mooded Man
1: RESURRECTING LIFE
The Michelet quotation is in Norbert Guterman, A Book of French Quotations (New York, 1963), 277.
2: A MATTER OF PROFOUND WONDER
Lincoln’s looks: the quotation “lay floating” and “howdy” from James G. Randall, Mr. Lincoln (New York, 1957), 30, 2
8; the quotation “I have never seen a picture” from Richard N. Current, The Lincoln Nobody Knows (New York, 1958), 5; the quotation “His face is certainly ugly” from Lillian Foster, Way-Side Glimpses (New York, 1860), 221.
On Lincoln’s personality, the quotation “many mooded man” is from Donald, Lincoln’s Herndon, 305; the quotation “He was, take him all in all” from Holland, Life of Lincoln, 241, and also The Southern Review (Apr., 1873), 328; the quotation “Lincoln’s nature” from Emanuel Hertz, The Hidden Lincoln (New York, 1938), 159; the quotation “He was the most reticent” from Reinhold H. Luthin, The Real Abraham Lincoln (Englewood Cliffs, N.J., 1960), 122; the quotation “he was not, a demonstrative man” from Justin G. and Linda Levitt Turner, Mary Todd Lincoln: Her Life and Letters (New York, 1972), 293.
For Lincoln and his parents and frontier background, see the excellent analysis in Charles B. Strozier, Lincoln’s Quest for Union: Public and Private Meanings (New York, 1982), 3-30, 50-65. The quotation “my mother is a bastard” is from Current, Lincoln Nobody Knows, 22, but see also Paul M. Angle (ed.), Herndon’s Life of Lincoln (paperback ed., New York, 1961), 46-47; the quotation “never did more in the way of writing” from Abraham Lincoln, Collected Works (ed. Roy P. Basler and others, 9 vols., New Brunswick, N.J., 1953-55), 4:61, hereafter CW.
For Lincoln’s reading, literary bent, and way with words, see Roy P. Basler, “Abraham Lincoln’s Rhetoric,” American Literature, 11 (1939): 170-71; Edmund Wilson, Patriotic Gore: Studies in the Literature of the American Civil War (New York, 1962), 120-23; Louis A. Warren, Lincoln’s Youth: Indiana Years (Indianapolis, Ind., 1959), 10-14; and Paul M. Angle, “Lincoln’s Power with Words,” Papers of the Abraham Lincoln Association, 3 (Springfield, Ill., 1981): 9-25. The quotations “the absence of all business” and “Let reverence for the laws” are from Lincoln, CW, 1:265 and 112; the Wilson quotation in Patriotic Gore, 117; the quotation “By nature a literary artist” from Albert J. Beveridge, Abraham Lincoln, 1809-1858 (2 vols., Boston, 1928), 1:302; Lincoln’s poem in CW, 1:378-79; the Stowe quotation in Herbert Mitgang (ed.), Abraham Lincoln: A Press Portrait (Chicago, 1971), 377; the quotation “moved by some great & good feeling” from Randall, Mr. Lincoln, 31; the quotation “he was given to raising” from Paul Simon, Lincoln’s Preparation for Greatness (Norman, Okla., 1965), 213. The quotations about the frontier influences on Lincoln’s manner of speech are from Beveridge, Lincoln, 1:53-54; George Templeton Strong, Diary, 1835-1875 (ed. Allan Nevins and Milton H. Thomas, 4 vols., New York, 1952), 3:188, 204-5; and Benjamin P. Thomas, “Lincoln’s Humor: An Analysis,” Papers of the Abraham Lincoln Association, 3:33-34.
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