Most of the Confederate government papers had been lost or destroyed, making it difficult to set forth the history of the fallen nation. For three long years they interviewed principal players, taxed their own memories, and worked side by side. Finally, the book was finished. It was four o’clock in the morning, and Varina had been taking dictation since eight in the evening.
Though never a financial success, the memoir accomplished the end for which they so long had labored: “setting the righteous motives of the South before the world,” Varina wrote later.
During these years Mrs. Dorsey had died in New Orleans, where she had moved to receive medical attention. Before she left, she sold Beauvoir to Jefferson and made him the executor of her estate.
Beauvoir proved to be the haven the Davises needed in their golden years. Son Jefferson had died and daughter Winnie, also settled at Beauvoir, was a constant companion to her father. Jefferson Davis never took his Federal oath of allegiance and never attempted to have his American citizenship restored (although during Jimmy Carter’s presidency he was at last restored as a citizen of the United States of America).
After Jefferson died in 1889, Varina lived on into the twentieth century. She wrote her own two-volume memoir, which was widely acclaimed. Ironically, she moved to New York, where she—predictably—soon became a grande dame in the social, cultural, and literary world. On October 16, 1906, she died there, far from the river country of Mississippi where she and a handsome, graceful rider twice her age had met so many years before—to begin a life together more dramatic than any fiction.
Mary Todd Lincoln: Troubled First Lady
BY THE TIME SHE WAS FIVE, SHE HAD LOST HER LILTING DOUBLE NAME TO A newborn sister, Ann. From now on, “Mary Ann” would simply be Mary… Mary Todd.
So began a lifetime of losses for perhaps the most troubled and certainly one of the most maligned first ladies ever to step across the White House threshold. Even as first lady, she would encounter truly crushing losses… along with bizarre reminders of the childhood difficulties that began with the loss of her name to a sibling. Unbelievably, in the midst of the Civil War, married to the president of the United States, commander in chief of the Union armies, she would find herself playing hostess—in the White House—to a much younger half sister who was the widow of a recently killed Confederate general!
Not only “politically incorrect,” the weeks-long visit of Emilie Todd Helm to the Lincoln White House, coming after her pleas for safe passage through Union lines, was a sharp reminder for Mary Todd Lincoln of her days as a little girl in the Todd home in Lexington, Kentucky—as a child who hardly had time to enjoy being the baby of the family. Baby brother Levi arrived barely a year after Mary. Then, a year after Levi, came Robert Parker Todd, but in fourteen months he died of natural causes. His death from a common childhood illness left “Mary Ann” with a deep sense of loss, aggravated only a short time later by the bestowal of half her name to a newborn sister.
Years later Mary, in her unforgiving way, described this unfavorite sister (named for a childless and favorite aunt) as “poor unfortunate Ann, inasmuch as she possesses such a miserable disposition and so false a tongue.”
Ironically, Mary herself would be the one to go down in the history books as having a sharp and even shrewish tongue, not always a fair judgment.
Meanwhile, after losing a baby brother at the tender age of four, and shorn of half her name at the age of five, Mary at age six encountered the worst loss yet—her mother died from childbirth complications after delivering another son, who was named George Rogers Clark Todd.
Compounding this loss, Mary was only seven when a stranger would claim the affections of her father—young Mary had to endure yet another upheaval as her father brought a new wife into the Todd family.
Like the wicked stepmother of fairy tales, Betsey Humphreys Todd was detested by all six of Mr. Todd’s children, but in age and temperament, Mary apparently was the most vulnerable to the effects of all this family trauma. Mary’s two older sisters, Elizabeth and Frances, had long ago bonded and would remain close friends throughout their lives, while Ann, the youngest sister, would be a favorite of Aunt Ann, who came to run the household for a while before Mary’s father, Robert Smith Todd, remarried. Mary’s two brothers, in an age that tended to honor boys more than girls, could expect to be treated as the future standard-bearers of the proud and prominent Todd name.
Betsey Humphreys came from the wealthy and prominent Humphreys family of Frankford, Kentucky. Her mother, Mary Brown Humphreys, absolutely ruled Frankford society. But Betsey, at age twenty-five, was well on her way to spinsterhood until she met the widower Robert Todd in 1826. Since she could be adept at hiding her age, some say she may have been as old as twenty-eight! Years later her five daughters would omit her birthdate from both her obituary and her tombstone.
Whatever her true age, Mr. Todd’s new wife demanded her own standards of order and elegance in the Todd home and would not be daunted by a household full of stepchildren. Though she would never endear herself to the first Todd children, it was not totally her fault. The children’s formidable grandmother, who lived in the big house on the hill above the Todd house, had prepared her grandchildren to reject any substitute for her daughter and their mother, Eliza Parker Todd, who was connected to the Todd clan not only by marriage but also through their other grandmother…who herself was a cousin of the Todds.
The Widow Parker, as the maternal grandmother was known, to distinguish her from the many Parker relatives of Lexington, often reminded her grandchildren of the patriotic exploits of their ancestors on both sides of the family. At the time of the Revolution, Robert Parker and Levi Todd, along with brothers Robert and John Todd, had come to the Kentucky wilderness and established the beginnings of a town that was little more than a fortification against the Indians. The year was 1775, and they named their newborn village after a distant battle just past in Massachusetts, the double battle of Concord and Lexington. As family legend would have it, these men served with valor in the Revolutionary War that followed. John in particular was a hero at the battle of Blue Licks, Kentucky, in 1782 as he joined Daniel Boone and fellow frontiersmen in a desperate fight against a marauding force of British soldiers and Chickasaw and Miami Indians. Riding on a white horse—family stories were always a bit bigger than life—he paid the ultimate price by laying down his life for country, for family, and for fellow Kentucky settlers.
After serving in the Revolution, Robert Parker and Levi Todd proceeded to promote their town with glorious and exaggerated accounts of the prospects in their frontierland. Both men accumulated vast land estates spread over three counties of Kentucky, but unlike the plantation owners of the Deep South, they did not create their wealth and prominence by planting crops and managing farms. Todd once emphasized his bent for other enterprises in a letter to a friend: “I believe you have as little taste for farming as myself.”
Much of Levi Todd’s wealth came about after Kentucky’s first governor, Isaac Shelby, appointed the younger brother of the hero of the battle of Blue Licks to the important position of clerk of the Fayette County Court. In this position from 1780 until his death in 1807, Levi Todd was keeper of all important records, from road surveys to deed registrations—in essence, he was a one-man government.
Robert Parker, meanwhile, was busy making his own mark as surveyor, miller, merchant, and clerk of the city’s governing body. According to Jean H. Baker’s biography Mary Todd Lincoln, in this capacity Robert Parker “collected four shillings every time a property exchanged hands in Lexington, just as Levi, in a similar annuity, collected a fee on all legal documents processed in Fayette County.”
Then, too, if ambition and hard work rewarded these two pioneers, so did their extensive family connections—Sisters marrying into prominent families, sons, brothers, and nephews also finding their way into important positions—all made the saying “first families” a truism. Thus, young Mary Todd’s grandfathers and gra
ndmothers represented two thriving branches of a leading Kentucky family.
In keeping with the family’s storied success, Robert Parker built the first brick house in Lexington, and Levi Todd built the first one in Fayette County. According to family legend also, Levi named his estate Ellerlie for the Scottish village of his sixteenth-century Todd ancestors.
Into this promising and secure world Robert and Elizabeth Parker’s daughter Eliza—later to become Mary’s mother—was born in 1794. When she was only six years old, her father died and her mother built a large two-story house near the center of town. Here, from the second-floor window, most of Lexington could be seen, wrote biographer Baker, adding that the view included “the expectant eighty-foot-wide Main Street, the brick-pillared courthouse, and Cheapside Market.” Even Lexington’s slave markets could be seen and heard from this vantage point. Here too, in this prominent house, the formidable Widow Parker would spend the rest of her long life.
Life was circumscribed for “little misses” in this town of Southern graciousness. Young girls had only one vehicle to success and that was to marry well. Known as a “rising beauty,” Eliza attended tea parties, cotillions, theater, and the inevitable round of gossip sessions with her girlfriends. Schooling for girls was not stressed even though the family had endowed the local university for men, Transylvania.
In the meantime Robert Smith Todd, the third of Levi’s six sons, lost his mother but soon acquired a young stepmother. He graduated from Transylvania and went on to study law under the famed jurist George Bibb. Then, with his law studies under his belt, he was ready to start out—some say “like a house afire”—to capture the lovely “Liza” Parker. But as new winds of war stirred the men of this frontier state to action against the British and their ally, the Indian chief Tecumseh, even before the official opening of the War of 1812, Robert was ready to serve. In the tradition of oft-told stories of father Levi’s role in the same fight at Blue Licks that cost the life of Uncle John Todd, young Robert now asked one of the Parkers to recommend him to U.S. Senator Henry Clay for a commission.
Many frontier families boasted oral histories that endowed each generation with a need to further serve the cause of patriotic glory. But the Todds and Parkers raised such historical imperative to rare heights. Even the women had their family stories of bravery in wartime roles. Eliza Parker’s own grandmother had brought food and clothing to her husband, Capt. Andrew Porter, during the terrible winter that George Washington and his men spent at Valley Forge, Pennsylvania. She often rode out with provisions to the log-hut encampment, “where one day she met an unfamiliar officer who led her to her husband, complimenting her, as they rode through the snow on a bitter cold day, on her devotion to her husband and, through him, the Republican cause.” The officer was none other than George Washington.
Meanwhile, Eliza Parker accepted her cousin Robert Todd’s proposal, and they were married in 1812. Despite the latest war and the fact that he would be away with Kentucky’s volunteer forces part of the time, they went to live with the Widow Parker, who gave them the lower half of her lot. There, in 1814, the newlyweds established their own home in the family compound.
Into their world a third daughter was born in 1818—Eliza and Robert named her Mary Ann, but she soon would be just Mary…Mary Todd.
With babies arriving every two to three years, Eliza often needed help running her household, and the Widow Parker sent her slaves down the hill to assist with the chores. One such slave, the house servant called Mammy Sally, became a parent-like presence for the little third daughter, a role that was even more pronounced after the death of Mary’s mother a few years later.
Mammy Sally was the archetypal Southern mammy whose terrifying stories of ghosts, spirits, devils, and phantoms, often invoked while also calling upon the good name of the Christian God, were certain to keep her wards on their good behavior. One of Mammy Sally’s especially terrifying stories was the West African myth about the jaybird who kept records of all the bad children and reported to the devil every night. For a sensitive and impressionable child like Mary, these stories loomed as entirely true. Mammy’s mix of Christian theology and transplanted African tales reinforced her little ward’s cherished hope that the dead, perhaps even her mother who had abandoned her, would return in spirit.
But it was to the affairs of the world, specifically political affairs, that Mistress Mary turned her thoughts as time passed. And here she hoped to gain her busy father’s ear. At the tender age of nine she joined his political party and as a Whig refused to attend a public rally in Lexington for the visiting Democrat Andrew Jackson on the eve of his election in 1828.
For this young miss to follow a political bent was most unusual. Proper ladies of her generation and her social standing, young or old, were expected to remain in the domestic sphere, and Mary, constantly surrounded by sisters, half sisters, stepmother, mammy, and other female servants, was expected to prepare herself accordingly. The women of Lexington, it should also be noted, were known for their high fashion. As the wife of the president of Transylvania, Mary Holley, a proper New Englander, once noted, after the ladies of town had paid their obligatory morning social calls, “I was astonished to see callers arrive in satin and silk as if they were going to an evening function.” Drawing a fetching word-picture of the same visiting ladies, she added that they would “adjust their flounces, scarcely touching their backs to the parlor chair lest they form a wrinkle or disturb a hair.”
The small demands on women, especially unmarried ones in Mary’s society, left plenty of time on their hands to indulge in idle gossip, parties, and pretty dresses, until such time as a husband would rescue them from the dread of spinsterhood. Politics and education were of the man’s realm.
For all of Mary’s own desire to fill her wardrobe with pretty clothes, she was also eager to fill her head with more than idle gossip. Fortunately, her father was of like mind that women should not be boring. Robert Todd, who probably had been exposed to many books in his father’s library, was aware of early feminist Mary Wollstonecraft’s revolutionary ideas that education was a natural right for girls. He saw to it that his daughters as well as his sons had a formal education. Accordingly, Mary at age nine entered Shelby Female Academy, or Ward’s’ as it came to be called after the Reverend Ward and his wife. Here, and later at Madame Mentelle’s boarding school, Mary excelled. While most of her contemporaries finished their schooling at about age fourteen, Mary stayed in school.
The eccentric Madame Mentelle and her husband had escaped with their heads from the excesses of the French Revolution and made their way to Lexington, where Madame opened her “select family school.” In this environment Madame made a lasting impression on her pupils. In addition to introducing Mary to a lifetime fluency in French, plus a love of reading and writing, Madame opened young Mary’s eyes to theater. Here, in school plays, Mary Todd became a “star actress,” as one cousin put it, and began to develop an uncanny ability later used to mimic friends and, most hilariously, her hated enemies. It was also Madame Mentelle, according to biographer Baker, who left Mary with “an unshakable fascination with royalty, indelible images of female independence, aristocratic snobbishness, and individual eccentricity.”
The year 1832, meanwhile, had brought about three major changes in Mary’s life. She entered Madame Mentelle’s boarding school, which was good. Soon afterward, her father, stepmother, and entourage moved to a new house in Lexington. This was painful for Mary, since she was losing the home that held memories of her earliest childhood, the very place where she had lived with her mother. And the third upheaval was the marriage of her favorite sister, Elizabeth, to the young lawyer Ninian Wirt Edwards, son of an Illinois governor. As a result, Elizabeth would be moving away, to his home in Illinois.
In the fall of 1839, seven years later, Mary herself left Lexington and moved to Springfield, the new capital of Illinois, to live with Elizabeth and her husband Ninian—a sensible arrangement if only because i
t meant escape from a home presided over by the stepmother Mary had not yet learned to like. Further, Mary’s sister Frances in an earlier visit with Elizabeth had had the good fortune to meet her own future husband, local physician and druggist William S. Wallace. As described in Ruth Painter Randall’s book Mary Lincoln, the convivial Edwards home was the “center of the aristocratic ‘Edwards clique.’” All the most distinguished visitors in town, “especially when the legislature was in session, found their way up the gentle slope to the house on the hill where hospitality was on a lavish, old-fashioned scale.”
Just in case Mary expected to match the matrimonial experience of sister Frances, the Edwards mansion was the right and proper place to be.
Mary quickly made friends with another visitor to this bustling capital city, Mercy Levering of Baltimore, also destined to be swept up in the “lively coterie,” as the younger set called themselves. Soon after Mercy’s arrival at a brother’s local home, she was being courted by a young lawyer, James Conkling, an arrangement that then blossomed into an engagement. “Dear Merce,” as Mary called her, had to return home temporarily in the spring of 1840, but the young women kept in touch by mail, with Mary filling in Mercy on the latest gossip and changes taking place since her departure.
Revealing a serious side, Mary responded to one of her friend’s letters by saying, “Would it were in my power to follow your kind advice, my ever dear Merce, and turn my thought from earthly vanities, to one higher than us all.”
Apparently feeling a bit guilty over the frivolity of the coterie, Mary continued, “Every day proves the fallacy of our enjoyments & that we are living for pleasures that do not recompense us for the pursuit.”
All well and good, but the fact was that Springfield, a little town so young, so vigorous, so fast growing as a new state capital, could itself at times ring with the sounds of excitement and frivolity. As historian Randall wrote, it was a burgeoning community “full of young people and their enthusiasms and love affairs.”
Best Little Stories from the Civil War: More than 100 true stories Page 38
