Courting Mary Todd
The Mary Owens affair also reveals Lincoln’s extraordinary passivity in dealing with women and his scrupulous determination to carry out promises, even bad ones. These traits resurfaced when he became involved with the temperamental, headstrong, volatile Mary Todd. Two years after Mary Owens disappeared from Lincoln’s life, he met Miss Todd, another well-educated Kentuckian from a prosperous family and the cousin of his law partner John Todd Stuart. Evidently, she believed that if her much-admired cousin had chosen Lincoln as a partner, the young attorney must also be an admirable fellow. Mary was short, plump, and, though not pretty, had striking blue eyes and a fine complexion. Friends recalled that she was “impulsive & made no attempt to conceal her feeling, indeed it would have been an impossibility had she desired to do so, for her face was an index to every passing emotion.” She had “an unusual gift of sarcasm” and “now and then indulged in sarcastic, witty remarks, that cut like a Damascus blade.”34
While in Springfield to visit her eldest sister, Elizabeth, who had married Ninian W. Edwards—son of the former governor—Mary Todd met eligible bachelors aplenty at the Edwards home, a social center for the city’s elite. Illinois was a promising hunting ground for a woman in search of a husband. A surfeit of unmarried men so longed for mates that a transplanted Kentuckian, John J. Hardin, urged young women from his native state to migrate northward if they wanted to be married. In 1840, Sangamon County had 24 percent more men than women. Catherine Bergen Jones of Springfield recalled that “nearly every young man in town would ask a young lady to take his arm in the evenings and promenade in a long procession down the muddy paths. Girls were in the minority and even those in their early teens were in demand.”35
In the capital’s social whirl during legislative sessions, Mary Todd was a belle. Young men liked her wit and older men her cultivation. She was “the very creature of excitement,” a Springfielder reported in 1840; she “never enjoys herself more than when in society and surrounded by a company of merry friends.”36 One such friend was Joshua Speed, who brought Lincoln along to events at the Edwards home. Lincoln began seeing Mary in the winter of 1839–1840. According to a relative of Ninian Edwards, Lincoln admired her “naturally fine mind and cultivated tastes,” for she was “a great reader and possessed of a remarkably retentive memory,” was “quick at repartee and when the occasion seemed to require it was sarcastic and severe.” Her “brilliant conversation, often embellished with apt quotations,” made her “much sought after by the young people of the town.”37
Initially, her sister Elizabeth encouraged the romance, for she realized that Lincoln was a man on the way up and that Mary should therefore wed him. In time, however, she came to recognize his social deficiencies, which she described to an interviewer: “L. Could not hold a lengthy Conversation with a lady—was not sufficiently Educated & intelligent in the female line to do so—He was charmed with Mary’s wit and fascinated with her quick sagacity—her will—her nature—and Culture—I have happened in the room where they were sitting often & often and Mary led the Conversation—Lincoln would listen & gaze on her as if drawn by some Superior power, irresistably So: he listened—never Scarcely Said a word.” Mrs. Edwards withdrew her earlier support for Lincoln and prophetically told her sister that they were not “Suitable to Each other.” Mary “was quick, lively, gay—frivalous it may be, Social and loved glitter Show & pomp & power.”38
Elizabeth Edwards, like others in Springfield, realized that Lincoln was “a mighty rough man,” “uncouth,” “moody,” “dull in society,” “careless of his personal appearance,” “awkward and shy.”39 He avoided church, he once confessed to Mary Owens, because “I am conscious I should not know how to behave myself.”40 Herndon recalled that “Lincoln had poor judgment of the fitness and appropriateness of things. He would wade into a ballroom and speak aloud to some friend: ‘How clean these women look!’ ”41 At Springfield social gatherings, young ladies avoided Lincoln. “We girls,” Catherine Bergen Jones recollected, “maneuvered so as to shift on each other the two awkward, diffident young lawyers, Abraham Lincoln and Samuel H. Treat. We preferred the jovial Robert Allen, Stephen A. Douglas, William Black, or the Jones brothers, John Albert and Edward, for our escorts.”42 The girls may have shunned Lincoln in part because of his ineptitude on the dance floor. When asked why he did not dance, he explained that “my feet weren’t made that way.”43 At a party in Jacksonville, Lincoln reportedly approached Mary Todd, saying: “I want to dance with you in the worst way.” Afterward she told him: “Mr. Lincoln I think you have literally fulfilled your request—you have danced the worst way possible.”44
Early on, Mary became aware of Lincoln’s gaucheries, which irritated her. When she teased him about a social indiscretion, he found it hard to understand why she cared so much about something so unimportant. Her cousin, Stephen T. Logan, warned Mary that Lincoln “is much too rugged for your little white hands to attempt to polish.”45
(Mary never reconciled herself to Lincoln’s lack of polish, even after years of marriage. A Springfield resident, who called Mrs. Lincoln “haughty,” said “it hurt her that Lincoln was so plain and dressed so plain.”46 Her half-sister Emilie reported that “she complained because L. would open [the] front door instead of having [a] servant do so and because L. would eat butter with his knife she raised ‘merry war.’ ”47 (When a friend remarked, “Mary if I had a husband with a mind like yours [has,] I wouldn[’]t care what he did,” she admitted: “It is very foolish. It is a small thing to complain of.”)48 It maddened her when he answered the door in his shirtsleeves and told callers that he would “trot [the] woman folks out.”49 As president, whenever he read in his stocking feet, Mary Lincoln would order a servant to fetch his slippers. Extremely clothes-conscious, she criticized him for having shirt cuffs too frayed for a man in his exalted station. She asked Ward Hill Lamon to show her husband how to remove his hat properly, but despite the best efforts of Lamon and Secretary of State William Henry Seward, the president never mastered that social grace.)
Just how Lincoln courted Mary Todd is unclear.50 When in Springfield, he regularly spent Sundays at the Edwards home. Ninian Edwards recalled that “Mr. Lincoln and Mr Speed were frequently at our house—seemed to enjoy themselves in their conversation beneath the dense shade of our forest trees.”51 But Lincoln could not have visited that home often in the winter and spring of 1840, for politics and his law practice frequently took him out of town. He would not have seen much of Mary Todd in the summer, which she spent with relatives in Missouri. When she returned, Lincoln was busily campaigning throughout southern Illinois. He did not mention her in any of the surviving letters he wrote in 1840, nor does her correspondence or that of their friends refer to any romance between them that year. Joshua Speed said that they courted through the mails that fall: “In 1840 Lincoln went into the Southern part of the State as Elector Canvasser debator Speaker—Here first wrote his Mary— She darted after him—wrote him.”52
Others confirmed Speed’s suggestion that Mary Todd took the initiative in the courtship. In 1875, Orville H. Browning told an interviewer: “I always thought then and ever since that in her affair with Mr Lincoln, Mary Todd did most of the courting.” Browning added that “Miss Todd was thoroughly in earnest [in] her endeavors to get Mr. Lincoln” and stated flatly that there “is no doubt of her exceeding anxiety to marry him.” Browning reported that in “those times I was at Mr. Edwards’ a great deal, and Miss Todd used to sit down with me, and talk to me sometimes till midnight, about this affair of hers with Mr. Lincoln.”53 William Butler’s sister-in-law, Sarah Rickard, thought that Mary Todd “certainly made most of the plans and did the courting” and “would have him [Lincoln], whether or no.” Rickard alleged that “it was the talk of Springfield that Mary Todd would marry him in spite of himself.”54 Herndon believed that “Miss Todd wanted L. terribly and worked, played her cards, through Mrs. [Simeon] Francis’s hands.”55 In pursuing her quarry,
“she read much & committed much to memory to make herself agreeable,” according to Mrs. Benjamin S. Edwards.56
Despite their differences and their failure to spend much time together, Lincoln and Mary evidently became engaged some time in the fall of 1840. Lincoln’s matrimonial impulsiveness recalls his abrupt acceptance of Betsy Abell’s 1836 proposition that he wed Mary Owens.
Why they decided to marry is difficult to understand, for they were, as Elizabeth Edwards and many others noted, quite different. Howard M. Powel, a Springfield neighbor, recalled that “Mr. and Mrs. Lincoln were not a congenial couple; their tastes were so different that when a boy I often wondered why they were married.”57 William Herndon concluded that she was “the exact reverse” of her husband in “figure and physical proportions, in education, bearing, temperament, history—in everything.”58 Mary Lincoln herself referred to “our opposite natures.”59
Their backgrounds could hardly have been more dissimilar. Almost ten years after Lincoln was born in the Kentucky backwoods, Eliza Parker Todd, descendant of friends of George Washington, and Robert S. Todd, son of the eminent General Levi Todd, had their fourth child—a daughter they named Mary. The Todds lived in a very different Kentucky from the one inhabited by Thomas Lincoln, occupying as they did a prominent social position in Lexington, self-identified as “the Athens of the West.” In contrast to young Abe’s all-too-brief formal schooling, Mary Todd was sent to Lexington’s best private schools, among them Madame Victorie Charlotte Leclere Mentelle’s Academy, where French was spoken exclusively; there she studied social graces such as conversation, dancing, and letter writing. Soon after Lincoln’s sister died bearing a child to a frontiersman in Indiana, Mary Todd’s sister Elizabeth wed the son of Illinois’s governor. When Lincoln left his father’s cabin for New Salem, Mary Todd visited the stately mansion of Henry Clay to show off her new pony.
Abraham Lincoln and Mary Todd did share one important childhood experience: the premature death of their mothers. Mary was 6 when Eliza Parker Todd succumbed to a postbirth bacterial infection; Lincoln was 9 when milk sickness cut short Nancy Hanks’s life. From these painful losses, both children sustained debilitating psychological wounds that contributed to the marital problems they would face later.
Mary Todd called her privileged childhood “desolate” not only because of the actual death of her mother but also because of the metaphorical death of her father.60 With the passing of his first wife, Robert Smith Todd paid little attention to Mary and her siblings. A scant few weeks after his wife’s burial, he traveled to nearby Frankfort and courted young Elizabeth Humphreys, whom he wed a year later and with whom he would sire nine half-siblings for Mary over the next fifteen years. Mary evidently felt betrayed, abandoned, and rejected by her “impetuous, high-strung, sensitive” father.61 Deep-seated anger at him and his second wife apparently smoldered in her unconscious.
According to Elizabeth Todd, Mary “left her home in Kentucky to avoid living under the same roof with a stepmother.”62 Mary’s siblings shared her disaffection. Younger brother George “complained bitterly” about Betsy Humphreys’ “settled hostility” and alleged that he had been forced to leave “his father’s house in consequence of the malignant & continued attempts on the part of his stepmother to poison the mind of his father toward him.” George claimed that his father was “mortified that his last child by his first wife should be obliged, like all his other first children, to abandon his house by the relentless persecution of a stepmother.”63 All of Eliza Parker Todd’s daughters quit Lexington when of age. After Elizabeth married Ninian W. Edwards and settled in Springfield, she brought over her sisters one-by-one, introduced them to society, and gave them weddings. Robert and Betsy Todd rarely visited these offspring, who seldom returned to Kentucky. Exacerbating family tensions was the hostility of Eliza Todd’s formidable mother toward her son-in-law and his second wife.64
Mary Todd had legitimate grievances against her stepmother. She confided to a friend that her “early home was truly at a boarding school,” Madame Mentelle’s Academy.65 Since Mary was willful and mischievous, she frequently clashed with her prim and proper young stepmother. At the age of 10, Mary had a row with Betsy Todd when the youngster awkwardly deployed willow branches to transform her narrow frock into a hoop skirt. Upon seeing the clumsy result, her stepmother declared, “What a fright you are,” and ordered Mary and her niece, Elizabeth, to “take those things off, & then go to Sunday school.” Elizabeth remembered that “we went to our room chagrined and angry. Mary burst into tears, and gave the first exhibition of temper I had ever seen or known her to make. She thought we were badly treated, and expressed herself freely on the subject.”66
As an adult, Mary continued to have difficulties with her stepmother. In the late 1840s, while Lincoln attended Congress, his wife and their two young boys, Robert and Eddie, stayed with the Todds in Lexington. One day Eddie Lincoln brought in a kitten, much to his stepgrandmother’s dismay. Mrs. Lincoln reported the sequel to her husband: “in the midst of his happiness Ma [Betsy Todd] came in, she you must know dislikes the whole cat race, I thought in a very unfeeling manner, she ordered the servant near, to throw it out, which, of course, was done, Ed—screaming & protesting loudly against the proceeding, she never appeared to mind his screams, which were long & loud, I assure you.” Significantly she added: “Tis unusual for her now a days, to do any thing quite so striking, she is very obliging & accommodating, but if she thought any of us, were on her hands again, I believe she would be worse than ever.”67 Mary Lincoln underscored now a days, implying that such unfeeling treatment of children was common earlier. Betsy Todd’s indifference to Eddie’s sensibilities may well have reminded Mary of similar episodes in her own childhood.
Mary Todd may also have disliked Betsy Humphreys Todd for bearing nine rivals for paternal favor. During the Civil War, all but one of these half-siblings supported the Southern cause, and Mary did not conceal her hostility toward them.68 In 1862, she shocked a confidante by expressing the hope that her brothers in Confederate uniform would be captured or slain. “They would kill my husband if they could, and destroy our Government—the dearest of all things to us,” she declared, shortly after her half-brother Samuel had died at the battle of Shiloh.69 When her half-brother Alexander was killed in 1863, she said “it is but natural that I should feel for one so nearly related to me,” but Alexander had “made his choice long ago. He decided against my husband, and through him against me. He has been fighting against us; and since he chose to be our deadly enemy, I see no special reason why I should bitterly mourn his death.”70 When the press condemned her sadistic half-brother David, chief of Richmond’s prisons during the war, she told a reporter that “by no word or act of hers should he escape punishment for his treason against her husband’s government.”71
Although such evidence of Mary Todd’s attitude toward her family is not conclusive, it does suggest that she harbored a rage she was unable to vent directly. It also suggests that she might seek a surrogate father; indeed, she may have married Lincoln in part because she saw in him a benevolent paterfamilias who would indulge her and fill the void created in her life when Robert Smith Todd began a second family. More than a foot taller and nearly ten years Mary’s senior, he radiated the quality of being old. During Lincoln’s early years in Springfield, one observer said that the lanky attorney called to mind “the pictures I formerly saw of old Father Jupiter, bending down from the clouds, to see what was going on below,” especially when Lincoln conversed with young women at parties: just “as an agreeable smile of satisfaction graced the countenance of the old heathen god, as he perceived the incense rising up—so the face of L[incoln] was occasionally distorted into a grin as he succeeded in eliciting applause from some of the fair votaries by whom he was surrounded.”72 Among such “fair votaries” was Mary Todd, a young woman likely to be attracted to a man resembling Father Jupiter, a man who would take care of her like a kind father.
Mary T
odd’s youthful qualities may have appealed to Lincoln. A woman in Washington during the Civil War believed that the president saw in his wife, “despite her foibles and sometimes her puerileness, just what he needed.” Those foibles included “natural want of tact,” “deficiency in the sense of the fitness of things,” “blundering outspokenness,” and “impolitic disregard of diplomatic considerations.”73 That very puerileness was perhaps what attracted him to her; with his deep paternal streak, he enjoyed children and child surrogates. Mary Todd fit that role well; as Helen Nicolay put it, Lincoln’s “attitude toward his wife had something of the paternal in it, almost as though she were a child, under his protection.”74 Thus, when Lincoln proposed to Mary Todd, he did so because, in all likelihood, he believed she wanted him to do so and because he desired a “child-wife.”
Mary certainly needed a great deal of protection, or at least looking after, for she had mental problems, including manic depression. Orville H. Browning, who thought her “demented,” recalled that she “was a girl of much vivacity in conversation, but was subject to … spells of mental depression.… As we used familiarly to state it she was always ‘either in the garret or cellar.’ ”75 A childhood friend, Margaret Stuart, testified that Mary in her Kentucky years was “very highly strung, nervous, impulsive, excitable, having an emotional temperament much like an April day, sunning all over with laughter one moment, the next crying as though her heart would break.”76 Manic depression is not the only diagnosis that seems to fit Mary Lincoln’s condition; she exhibited many symptoms associated with narcissism and with borderline personality disorder.77 In later life, after Lincoln’s death, her instability grew very marked. Her nephew, Albert Stevenson Edwards, believed that she “was insane from the time of her husband[’s] death until her own death.”78 In 1875, an Illinois court adjudged her insane and had her confined in a mental hospital.79 But even before the tragedy of the assassination, David Davis, alluding to her conduct as First Lady during the Civil War, called her a “natural born thief” for whom “stealing was a sort of insanity.”80 In fact, he thought she was “deranged” as far back as the 1840s.81
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