Abraham Lincoln: A Life, Volume 1

by Michael Burlingame

  Mary Lincoln took a dim view of her in-laws. When Eleanor Gridley interviewed neighbors, friends, and relations of Lincoln, she “found verified evidence that Mrs. Lincoln would neither permit her children to see the old stepmother, of whom Mr. Lincoln was fond, nor allow her to visit them at her home. But, Mr. Lincoln never spoke disparagingly of his wife. ‘Mary is so busy,’ or ‘she cannot be parted from her children for a day.’ None of them, however, believed his excuses, but forgave him for the act.”319 According to Herndon, “Mrs. Lincoln held the Hanks tribe in contempt and the Lincoln family generally—the old folks—Thomas Lincoln & his good old wife. Mrs. Lincoln was terribly aristocratic and as haughty & as imperious as she was autocratic: she was as cold as a chunk of ice. Thomas Lincoln and his good old wife were never in this city [Springfield].”320 Mary Lincoln “refused furiously” her husband’s request to let the adolescent son of his stepbrother, John D. Johnston, live at their home and attend Springfield schools.321

  Mary was scarcely more kind to some of her own kin. Dr. Albert A. North of Springfield once hired a relative of hers to conduct some business for him. When the young man arrived in the Illinois capital, he called to pay his respects to Mrs. Lincoln, who “told the young gentleman in coarse, cruel, and brutish language that she did not wish her poor relatives to pile themselves on her and eat her up.” He then “tried to explain to her that out of respect he had called to see her, said he had plenty of money and had a good position and did not need her charity and did not deserve her coarse, savage, and brutal language; he quickly left the house, deeply mortified, leaving Mrs. Lincoln in one of her haughty, imperious, and angry states.” After Lincoln apologized and offered to help the young man out, he allegedly called Lincoln “one of the noblest of men” and his wife “a savage.”322 Another relative who offended Mary Lincoln was the daughter of her cousin Dr. Lyman Beecher Todd. According to Harriet Hanks Chapman, who was living with the Lincolns at the time, Mrs. Lincoln excluded the young woman when inviting guests to a party because Miss Todd “had intimated that Robert L.… was a sweet child but not good looking.”323

  Mary Lincoln was angry at her husband in part because he made comparatively little money. Charles Arnold, a Springfield neighbor of the Lincolns, said Elizabeth Edwards “was the social leader of Springfield and she gave fine parties. Mrs. Lincoln was poor and she resented the way people passed her by. She was hurt and envious.”324 In 1857 Mary Lincoln complained to her half-sister Emilie that when in New York she saw passenger steamers about to sail for Europe, “I felt in my heart, inclined to sigh, that poverty was my portion, how I long to go to Europe.”325 J. G. McCoy recalled that Mary Lincoln “was ambitious to shine in a social way, beyond Mr. Lincoln’s inclination or financial ability to sustain, and was given to scolding and complaining of Mr. Lincoln in a manner and to a[n] extent exceedingly unpleasant to him.”326 William T. Baker described her as “a woman whose tastes and desires demanded larger finances than Mr. Lincoln could arrange for” and was therefore “dissatisfied with the progress that Mr. Lincoln was making.”327

  Preston H. Bailhache, a physician in practice with Mary Lincoln’s brother-in-law, recalled that she “was very desirous of having a carriage to take herself and packages home, but was unable to persuade Mr. Lincoln to purchase one.” Intent on shaming him, she one day called at his office and informed him that she had arranged for a vehicle to carry him home. Giving no signs of surprise, he calmly descended the stairs and beheld “an old fashioned one-horse dray,” to which Mrs. Lincoln pointed and said, “There is your carriage.” He smiled and clambered aboard, urging her to follow his lead. She did not appreciate the joke and refused his offer. Lincoln then instructed the driver to convey him to Eighth and Jackson.328

  Lincoln gladly ceded control of the household to his spouse. He once said, “I myself manage all important matters. In little things I have got along through life by letting my wife run her end of the machine pretty much in her own way.”329 When a workman hesitated to chop down a shade tree before their house, Lincoln asked: “Have you seen Mrs. L?” Told that it was her idea, he exclaimed: “Then in God’s name cut it down clean to the roots!”330 One day Mary Lincoln “casually observed at the breakfast table that she was without a cook.” Although she had not specifically requested him to hire one, Lincoln did so anyway, only to have her reject the person he chose. After several such incidents, Lincoln quietly bowed out of household affairs and, probably with some relief, let her have her way.331

  Mary Lincoln was not well regarded as a cook or hostess. She had been raised in a house full of servants who prepared all the meals. A slave called Aunt Chaney, “well trained by Mrs. Todd’s mother,” was “an autocrat in the kitchen, resenting any intrusion into her domain.”332 Dennis Hanks’s daughter Harriet, who spent a year and a half in the Lincoln home during the mid-1840s, recalled that the family table “was usually set vary Sparingly. Mrs. Lincoln was vary economical So much so that by Some She might have been pronounced Stingy.”333 Elizabeth Edwards said that her sister Mary “loved fine clothes and was so close or economical at the kitchen [so] that she might have money for luxuries” and was “economical, even requiring Robert to wash dishes.”334 According to Herndon, “Mrs. Lincoln was a very stingy woman” whose “table at home generally was economized to the smallest amount.” On top of Mary’s unpredictable temper, the likelihood of a disappointing meal made Lincoln reluctant to ask friends to his home. David Davis told Herndon “that Lincoln never invited him to his house,” and Herndon “heard many others of Lincoln’s best friends say the same thing.” For his own part, however, Lincoln did not mind that she “set a poor table,” for, as Herndon put it, he “ate mechanically” and “filled up and this is all: he never complained of bad food nor praised the good.”335

  Mary Lincoln could be as tightfisted as her husband was generous. Herndon maintained that Lincoln could “never say ‘No’ to any one who puts up a poor mouth, but will hand out the last dollar he has, sometimes when he needs it himself, and needs it badly.”336 The Lincolns quarreled about the wages of servants, including a young woman who wanted a raise from $1.25 per week to $1.50. Mary refused, telling the girl to leave if she could not accept the smaller salary. Lincoln very much wanted the servant to stay, so when he failed to persuade Mary, he tried to make a clandestine deal with the girl to feign accepting the $1.25 on the condition that he would surreptitiously make up the difference. Mary overheard this and barged in, exclaiming, “What are you doing—I heard Some Conversation—Couldn’t understand it—I’m not going to be deceived—Miss[,] you Can leave[,] and as for you Mr L[,] I’d be ashamed of myself.’ ”337 Lincoln himself hired Margaret Ryan, promising her a 75¢ bonus and instructing her “not to fuss with Mrs. L.”338

  Another domestic dustup occurred when young John F. Mendosa and his father were selling blackberries to Mrs. Lincoln, who balked at the asking price of 15¢ per pint. She “started to run them down because they were so small” and refused to pay more than 10¢. When Lincoln observed this haggling, he gave the lad a quarter for a pint, much to his spouse’s dismay. According to Mendosa, she “scolded Mr. Lincoln for taking them. Mr. Lincoln spoke up and told me to tell father that it was cheap enough, that he had earned every cent of it, and more too.”339

  Sometimes Lincoln used guile to cope with his wife’s penuriousness. A young man once asked him to contribute to the fund drive of the local fire department. “Well,” replied he, “I’ll go home to supper and ask Mrs. Lincoln what she has to say. After supper she will be in good humor, and I will ask her if we shall give fifty dollars. She will say, ‘Abe, when will you learn some sense? Twenty dollars is enough.’ Come around in the morning and get your money.” This approach worked.340

  Always able to laugh at himself, Lincoln relished jokes about henpecked husbands. He probably identified with the hapless Mr. Jones whom he described as “one of your meek men” with “the reputation of being badly henpecked.” A few days after Mrs. Jones “was seen s
witching him out of the house,” a friend told him that a “man who will stand quietly and take a switching from his wife, deserves to be horsewhipped.” Jones responded, “why, it didn’t hurt me any; and you’ve no idea what a power of good it did Sarah Ann!”341

  Lincoln was “much amused” when Henry C. Whitney read him a story about two fellows who met after a long separation.

  “Where have you been, Jim?”

  “Oh! It was so quiet at home, I ’listed and have been in the war since I saw you—and where have you been?”

  “Oh! Susie made so much war on me at home that I went out timbering in the woods to get a little peace.”342

  During the Civil War, when asked if Clement L. Vallandigham, a banished Democratic critic of the administration, should be captured and tried if he returned from exile, Lincoln responded: “Perhaps the best way to treat him would be to do as the man did who had been annoyed with a very troublesome wife, and who had been relieved by her absconding, and who by no means desired her return, and who therefore advertised one cent reward for her return.”343 Lincoln told Chauncey Depew the story of a farmer who consulted him about obtaining a divorce after he and his wife had quarreled over the color to paint their new house. His client explained, “I wanted it painted white like our neighbors’, but my wife preferred brown. Our disputes finally became quarrels. She has broken crockery, throwing it at my head, and poured scalding tea down my back, and I want a divorce.” Lincoln urged the couple to compromise their differences for the sake of their children. A month later the farmer reported that he and his wife had reached a compromise: “we are going to paint the house brown.”344 Lincoln was fond of quoting from his favorite poet, Robert Burns, these lines: “Sic a wife as Willie had, / I would no gie a button for her.”345

  Milton Hay pitied Lincoln. In 1862 he said of the president: “Poor man! I think some woman ought to talk kindly to him, and I suppose he has got to go from home to hear it.”346 Lincoln regarded that home with understandable misgivings. When he came back to Eighth Street from work, he usually entered the kitchen, inquired about his wife’s mood, and only then passed through the front door.347

  Herndon alleged that Lincoln usually paid his wife no heed when she was enraged but that occasionally he would flare up. Remorsefully, Lincoln admitted to Herndon one Monday that the previous day, when Mary “had annoyed him to the point of exasperation,” he “lost his habitual self-control.” She “was in a tirade so fierce” that he grabbed her, “pushed her through the door,” and exclaimed: “If you can’t stop this abuse, damn you, get out.” Lincoln told Herndon “that he was deeply sorry for this act. He was not accustomed to lose his temper.… Lincoln thought it possible that some people on their way to church had seen the incident, and he was greatly depressed that he had permitted himself to do and say what he had done and said.”348

  Mary Lincoln may have suffered from what a Springfield neighbor called “monthly derangements” (which later came to be known as premenstrual stress). Frederick I. Dean, whose family lived directly across Eighth Street from the Lincolns, said that as a boy he “noticed strange vagaries on the part of Mrs. Lincoln.” He informed a historian that from overheard conversations he got the idea that the vagaries were regular, brief, and stemmed from “a functional derangement common alone to women.” Shortly after Lincoln’s assassination, when Dean spoke to William Herndon about these matters, the attorney “said they corresponded exactly with his own ideas, and exactly in line with what Mr Lincoln had frequently himself told him, with broken tearful voice.”349

  Mary Lincoln suffered from many anxieties. She panicked at the first sign of a thunderstorm, prompting Lincoln to leave his office “to quiet her fears and comfort her until the storm was over.”350 When he was out of town, she would become frightened and turn to neighbors for relief. James Gourley recalled one such occasion: “Mrs Lincoln had a bad girl [servant] living with her: the boys & men used to Come to her house in L[incoln’]s absence and scare her: She was crying & wailing one night—Called me and said—‘Mr Gourly—Come—do Come & Stay with me all night—you can Sleep in the bed with Bob and I.’ ”351 While her husband was away, she hired neighborhood boys to spend the night in her house. Fred I. Dean recalled that Mrs. Lincoln “had me, young as I was, to sleep in the house, with some of the other neighbors’ boys.”352 After Robert Todd Lincoln went off to boarding school in 1859, Josiah Kent stayed with Mary Lincoln in her spouse’s absence. “I spent many a night at the house, sleeping usually in the same room which Robert had occupied,” Kent recollected.353 While on similar duty in the early 1850s, Howard M. Powel noticed that “Mrs. Lincoln was very nervous and subsequently easily scared.” One night “some miscreant came and made a hideous noise against the weatherboarding of the house and Mrs. Lincoln promptly fainted.”354

  Another Springfield neighbor, Elizabeth A. Capps, reported that “Mrs. Lincoln was a bright woman, well educated, but so nervous and crazy acting she was the laughingstock of the neighborhood.”355 Mrs. Capps recalled a day that neighbors came running to Mary’s cries of “fire!” only to find fat burning in a pan. On another occasion Mary screamed “Murder!” because an old, bearded umbrella repair peddler was loitering on the back porch waiting for her. On departing, the umbrella man mumbled, “I wouldn’t have such a fool for my wife!”356 A Springfield man heard a peddler one day describe how he had “knocked at Mrs. Lincoln’s door, as at any door, and had stepped in when she answered the knock and had started to open his pack.” Mary Lincoln began “to scream and carry on” and repeatedly yelled “for him ‘to leave, to leave, to leave.’ ” The peddler sought out Lincoln and told him: “If you have any influence over your wife in God’s world, go home and teach her some sense.”357 To her neighbor John B. Weber, Mary Lincoln once screamed: “Keep this little dog from biting me.” Weber described the canine as “a little thing” that was “too small and good natured to do anything.”358

  For all the misery she caused Lincoln, creating what his law partner aptly called “a domestic hell on earth,” Mary Todd proved a useful goad to his ambition.359 John Todd Stuart told an interviewer that she “made him Presdt.” She “had the fire—will and ambition—Lincoln[’]s talent & his wife[’]s Ambition did the deed.” Stuart heard Joshua Speed say that “Lincoln needed driving—(well he got that.)”360 Mary Lincoln’s friend James Bradwell thought that she “made Mr. L. by constantly pushing him on in his ambition.”361 Charles Arnold, who lived across the street from the Lincolns, declared that she was “very ambitious for her husband” and “kept nagging her husband on.”362 Her sister Elizabeth testified that “Mrs. Lincoln was an ambitious woman—the most ambitious woman I ever saw—spurred up Mr. Lincoln, pushed him along and upward—made him struggle and seize his opportunities.”363 A law student in the Lincoln and Herndon office stated that “there is no doubt that she was constantly spurring him on for she was very ambitious.”364 Herndon less charitably likened her to a toothache that “kept one awake night and day.”365

  During her courtship, Mary allegedly described “the man of her choice, mentioning his unprepossessing appearance and awkwardness, and with a merry appreciation of the humor of the prediction, again said: ‘But I mean to make him the President of the United States all the same. You will see that, as I always told you, I will yet be the President’s wife.’ ”366 In the late 1840s, she predicted to Ward Hill Lamon that Lincoln “is to be President of the United States some day; if I had not thought so I never would have married him, for you can see he is not pretty.”367

  Mary Lincoln’s ambition for her husband became a byword in central Illinois. In 1856, when friends urged Lincoln to seek the gubernatorial nomination, Democratic Congressman Thomas L. Harris of Petersburg remarked that he “never will be dunce enough to run for governor—(unless his wife makes him.)”368 She “made no effort to conceal her belief that her gifted husband would some day be President.” Over his objections, she would at social gatherings “talk confidently of his future, predic
ting his nomination and election.”369

  In another way Mary Lincoln indirectly stoked her husband’s ambition. According to Milton Hay, she made “his home tolerably disagreeable and hence he took to politics and public matters for occupation. If his domestic life had been entirely happy, I dare say he would have stayed at home and not busied himself with distant concerns.”370 Joshua Speed believed that with a kindly wife “Lincoln would have been a devoted husband and a very—very domestic man.”371 An unidentified close friend of Lincoln’s maintained that his domestic misery “operated largely in his favor; for he was thereby kept out in the world of business and politics. Instead of spending his evenings at home, reading the papers and warming his toes at his own fireside, he was constantly out with the common people, was mingling with the politicians, discussing public questions with the farmers who thronged the offices in the court-house and state house, and exchanging views with the loungers who surrounded the stove of winter evenings in the village store. The result of this continuous contact with the world was, that he was more thoroughly known than any other man in his community. His wife, therefore, was one of the unintentional means of his promotion.” If Lincoln had married Ann Rutledge or some other woman more agreeable than Mary Todd, “the country would never have had Abraham Lincoln for its President.”372 Herndon agreed, insisting that Lincoln “was by nature a domestic man, a lover of home and children.”373

  Lincoln’s friend and political ally Carl Schurz, who spent time with Mary Lincoln during the Civil War, summed up the feelings of many when he wrote: “it was no secret to those who knew the family well, that his domestic life was full of trials. The erratic temper of his wife not seldom put the gentleness of his nature to the severest tests; and these troubles and struggles, which accompanied him through all the vicissitudes of his life from the modest home in Springfield to the White House at Washington, adding untold private heartburnings to his public cares, and sometimes precipitating upon him incredible embarrassments in the discharge of his public duties, form one of the most pathetic features of his career.”374 In an interview, Schurz put it even more strongly, calling the marriage “the greatest tragedy of Mr. Lincoln’s existence.”375