The Lincolns’ marriage had gotten off to a shaky start in the Globe. She regularly complained about her husband’s failure to come to bed on time; when she retired for the night, he often excused himself to fill a water pitcher, and while downstairs doing so, he would sit on the porch and relate stories to anyone who cared to listen. She would cough to signal that she wanted him to return to their room; sometimes he ignored her coughing till after midnight. She would occasionally retaliate by entertaining gentlemen callers in their room with the door locked, hoping to annoy her neglectful spouse.
Mary Lincoln had been unpopular at the Globe, where the women boarders liked to hold small get-togethers in their rooms. Never wishing to invite her to join them, they would creep upstairs to the designated meeting site, fearful that she might guess where they were headed. They were especially careful to tread lightly as they passed her door, for they did not wish to arouse her anger.
Life at the boardinghouse worsened after August 1, 1843, when Robert Todd Lincoln was born. (That day Lincoln jestingly told a friend that he had worried that the infant “might have one of my long legs and one of Mary’s short ones, and he’d have a terrible time getting through the world.”)31 Baby Robert wailed loudly, much to the dismay of the other boarders, who threatened to leave the Globe if the Lincolns remained. The delicate Robert suffered from a respiratory problem known as “summer complaint.” Mrs. Albert Taylor Bledsoe, who was then staying at the Globe, did not like Mary Lincoln but nevertheless each day for several weeks she helped wash and dress baby Robert. Mrs. Bledsoe’s 6-year-old daughter Sophia, who was fond of infants, also helped care for him. She delighted in carrying the rather heavy Robert about, frequently taking him to a vacant lot next to the Globe and placing him on the ground, where he lay peacefully in the tall grass. In later years Sophia Bledsoe “wondered how Mrs. Lincoln could have trusted a particularly small six-year-old with this charge” and expressed amazement that “at that early age I missed doing him any damage.”32
Lincoln would occasionally help out with the infant. One day as baby Robert was shrieking, Lincoln picked him up and carried him around the room while Mary sat by, quietly crying. The proprietress of the Globe assured the couple that their child merely had colic and was in no danger. “Does it do any good to pack him round this way?” Lincoln asked. When told it did not, he looked over at Mary and said “in a manner as though he expected her to protest”: “If it don’t do him any good, I’m damned if I don’t put him down.”33 Mary Lincoln often asked her husband to care for Robert, whom he would wheel about in a baby carriage. When a neighbor criticized him, remarking “that is a pretty business for you to be engaged in, when you ought to be down to your law office,” he replied simply: “I promised.”34
Lincoln performed other domestic chores. His wife, having grown up in a prosperous home with slaves to tend children, cook, and clean, felt that such duties were beneath her. According to a neighbor, she “was quite disposed to make a servant girl” of Lincoln, compelling him “to get up and get the breakfast and then dress the children, after which she would join the family at the table, or lie abed an hour or two longer as she might choose.”35 Another Sangamon County resident testified that “Lincoln would start for his office in the morning and she’d go to the door and holler: ‘Come back here now and dress those children or they won’t be tended today. I’m not going to break my back dressing up those children while you loaf at the office talking politics all the day.’ ”36 In 1860, a visitor to the Lincoln home heard her cry out, “Abraham! Abraham! come and put this child to bed!”37
While washing dishes one day in the mid-1840s, she was heard to sigh: “What would my poor father say if he found me doing this kind of work.”38 When Robert was old enough, she delegated dishwashing to him. In addition, she had her husband do the breakfast dishes and sometimes, wielding a piece of stove wood, drove him out of their house to fetch some breakfast meat. Page Eaton remembered that Lincoln “always used to do his own marketing … and before he went to Washington I used to see him at the baker’s and butcher’s every morning with his basket on his arm.”39 Lincoln would rise early to buy fresh bread from Jim Hall. The day after his election as president in 1860, Lincoln, accompanied by a black boy, called as usual on Hall and said: “I am not ashamed to carry a loaf of bread home under my arm, but my wife says it is not dignified for a president-elect to carry bread under his arm through the streets, so, hereafter, this boy will come in my place.”40 (At that same time she also thought it undignified for her husband to milk their cow. A servant recollected that in the winter of 1860–1861, Lincoln insisted on performing that duty “because he did not think I ought to expose myself. His wife, however, used to object to his doing the milking.”)41
Mary Lincoln found herself overwhelmed by the demands of motherhood as she gave birth to three more sons (Edward in 1846; William in 1850; and Thomas, better known as Tad, in 1853). Her cousin, Elizabeth Todd Grimsley, recalled that Mary was “always over-anxious and worried about the boys and withal was not a skillful nurse” and “was totally unfitted for caring for them” when they became sick.42 If anything untoward happened to her children, she became hysterical. One day in 1844 she overreacted to the illness of young Robert and sent the maid to fetch a doctor, shouting after her, “Charity! Charity! run for your life and I’ll give you fifty dollars when you get back.” Mrs. Frederick S. Dean, who lived across the street from the Lincoln home, took pity on the distracted newcomer and gently quieted her down when her hysterics threatened to disturb the neighborhood. Another neighbor, Elizabeth Lushbaugh Capps, recalled that it was not unusual “to see her standing out on their terrace in front of the house, waving her arms and screaming, ‘Bobbie’s lost! Bobbie’s lost!’ when perhaps he was just over in our house. This was almost an every day occurrence.” Mrs. Capps remembered a time “when Robert could just barely walk Mrs. Lincoln came out in front as usual, screaming, ‘Bobbie will die! Bobbie will die!’ My father ran over to see what had happened. Bobbie was found sitting out near the back door by a lime box and had a little lime in his mouth. Father took him, washed his mouth out and that’s all there was to it.” Mary Lincoln’s frequent outbursts so frightened the neighborhood children that they feared her; rather than playing with Bob at his house, they would invite him to their homes.43
Lincoln developed an immunity to his wife’s alarmist cries of distress. One summer day on the courthouse square, while he was regaling friends with a story, young Robert rushed up exclaiming that his mother insisted that Lincoln come home and rescue young Tad, who had fallen into the cistern. To the surprise of his cronies, Lincoln refused, noting that Tad had done this before.
The Lincolns’ unpretentious house at Eighth and Jackson Streets was modestly furnished. Lincoln was not a fastidious homeowner. Illinois Congressman William A. Richardson recalled that “his fences were always in need of repair, his gate wanted a hinge, the grass in his yard needed cutting, and the scene around his home betrayed a reckless indifference to appearances.”44 In November 1860, a visitor observed broken panes of glass by the front door and broken blinds on the side of the house.
Mary Lincoln wanted to expand the upstairs of the house into a full second story. Lincoln, who opposed the idea, allegedly had conspired with local carpenters to have an inflated estimate of the cost prepared so that he could reasonably claim that it was too expensive. In 1856, while he was on the circuit, Mary had the job done anyway. The contractors she hired agreed to complete the work in the few weeks that he would be absent. Upon his return, he pretended not to recognize his home, asking his neighbor Abner Wilkinson, “Wilkie can you tell me where old Abe Lincoln lived around these parts?”45 The neighbors, anxious to see how Lincoln would react, observed his conduct with amusement. His wife, however, was not amused. “Come in, you old fool,” she ordered. “Don’t you know your own house when you see it?”46 After scolding her for spending too much, Lincoln teased: “Mary, you remind me of the story of the fellow who w
ent to California and left one baby at home and when he returned three years later, found three. The fellow looked at his wife and then at the children and said, ‘Well, Lizzie, for a little woman and without help, you have raised thunder amazingly.’ ”47 (Mary Lincoln may have paid for the improvements herself, for two years earlier she had sold an 80-acre lot that her father had bequeathed her and realized a profit of $1,200. The expansion cost $1,300.)
Some residents of Springfield were puzzled by this remodeling job. Mrs. John Todd Stuart, who did not care for Mary Lincoln, told her daughter that far from needing space, “Mary seldom ever uses what she has.”48 In fact, the expansion added so much space that the Lincolns took in a boarder, Stephen Smith, the brother of Mary’s brother-in-law, Clark M. Smith. He slept at the Lincoln home but ate elsewhere. According to the woman whom Stephen Smith later married, the Lincolns had a boarder “because Mr. Lincoln, riding the circuit at that time, was away from home a great deal and Mrs. Lincoln was afraid to be alone.”49
Mary Lincoln had decided on the addition soon after a successful tailor acquired an impressive house in their neighborhood; she was displeased that a mere tailor should have a more handsome residence than one of the city’s more eminent lawyers. John E. Roll, who had helped remodel the house in 1849, reported that “Mrs. Lincoln decided their means justified a more pretentious house.”50 In the 1840s, a house with a two-story back was a status symbol that she “was consumed with a desire” to have.51 The alteration did make the house stand out, dwarfing adjacent homes. Mary Lincoln’s nephew termed it “one of the more pretentious residences of Springfield.”52 An architectural historian classified the remodeled house as “purely transitional,” blending “both the Greek Revival and the succeeding Parvenu” styles.53
Whereas nearly every house in Springfield was landscaped carefully with trees, shrubbery, and neat flower gardens, the Lincolns did little to improve the appearance of their yard. Mary Lincoln’s sister Frances said that neither of the Lincolns “loved the beautiful—I have planted flowers in their front yard myself to hide nakedness—ugliness &c. &c. have done it often—and often—Mrs L never planted trees—Roses—never made a garden, at least not more than once or twice.”54 James Gourley, who lived next door to the Lincolns for many years, remembered that “Lincoln was a poor landscape gardener and his yard was graced by very little shrubbery. He once decided to plant some rosebushes in the yard, and called my attention to them, but in a short time he had forgotten all about them.” Lincoln, Gourley added, “never planted any vines or trees of any kind; in fact seemed to take little, if any, interest in things of that kind. Finally, however, yielding to my oft-repeated suggestion, he undertook to cultivate a garden in the yard in back of his house; but one season’s experience in caring for his flowers and vegetables sufficed to cure him of all desire for another.”55 The house’s bare appearance moved one observer to criticize its “almost unbecoming absence of taste and refinement.”56
Lincoln avoided this house as much as possible because, according to William Herndon, “his home was Hell” and “absence from home was his Heaven.”57 So much did he enjoy life on the circuit each spring and fall that he rejected a job offer from a Chicago firm that paid much more than he could earn in Springfield. Rather than return home on weekends like the other circuit riders, he stayed over in the little county seats by himself, even though, as one of them put it, “nothing could be duller than remaining on the Sabbath in a country inn of that time after adjournment of court. Good cheer had expended its force during court week, and blank dullness succeeded.” Nevertheless, Lincoln “would entertain the few lingering roustabouts of the barroom with as great zest, apparently, as he had previously entertained the court and bar, and then would hitch up his horse … and, solitary and alone, ride off to the next term in course.”58 David Davis and the other attorneys “soon learned to account for his strange disinclination to go home.” Lincoln “never had much to say about home, and,” Davis recalled, “we never felt free to comment on it. Most of us had pleasant, inviting homes, and as we struck out for them I’m sure each one of us down in our hearts had a mingled feeling of pity and sympathy for him.”59 To Davis and others it was obvious that Lincoln “was not domestically happy.”60 Herndon remembered that “while all other lawyers, every Saturday night after court hours, would start for home to see wife & babies,” Lincoln “would see us start home and know that we were bound to see good wife and the children. Lincoln, poor soul, would grow terribly sad at the sight, as much as to say—‘I have no wife and no home.’ None of us on starting home would say to Lincoln—‘Come, Lincoln, let’s go home,’ for we knew the terrors of home to him.”61
In addition to being the only lawyer on the circuit to avoid his home on the weekends, Lincoln was one of the few who attended every circuit court. In 1860, his good friend Leonard Swett asserted that “for perhaps five years Lincoln and myself have been the only ones [i.e., lawyers] who have habitually passed over the whole circuit.”62
Unlike David Davis, Richard Yates, and other attorneys and politicians who wrote home regularly, Lincoln seldom corresponded with his wife. (Herndon said his partner “hated” to write letters.)63 Nor did she write often to him. In 1850, Davis reported that Lincoln had not received word from Mary since he left Springfield seven weeks earlier. Two years thereafter, Davis said that Lincoln, while on the circuit, had not heard from home in six weeks. Adeline Rossiter Judd, wife of Norman B. Judd, once asked Lincoln, then traveling the circuit, about his spouse. When he replied that he had received no word from her since he had started out three weeks earlier, Mrs. Judd rhetorically asked, “But Mr. Lincoln, aren’t you married?”
“No, no,” he protested, “if there was anything the matter Mary would write.”
Mrs. Judd, who received letters from her husband every day when they were separated, was dumbfounded.64
The tone of the few surviving letters between the Lincolns is notably cool compared with the loving warmth expressed by other couples in their circle—the Judds, the Lyman Trumbulls, the David Davises, the Jesse W. Fells, the Richard Yateses, the John M. Palmers, the Stephen T. Logans, the Joseph Duncans, the Orville H. Brownings, and the John Todd Stuarts. Trumbull wrote to his beloved spouse every other day when they were apart. Palmer told his mate: “Men are charged with indifference to their wives and perhaps it is true of many but I declare to you that all my thoughts and feelings and love is far more ardent towards you than they were on the night when I first called you my own dear wife.”65 Richard Yates told his wife: “Caty I am desperately in love with you.”66 When away from his “Dearest Eliza,” Orville H. Browning wrote her twice weekly. In 1844 he declared to her: “oh, how I wish you were with me.… No man on earth owes more to the devotion of a wife, and I hope God will give me the means to repay it in kindness and affection.”67 His letters from the circuit contained what she called “Such beautiful poetry, Such Sighing, and Loveing, dearing, and all that kind of thing.”68 Writing from Washington in 1841, Jesse W. Fell exclaimed to his wife: “How often, and with what absorbing interest have I thought of thee, since we parted. How frequently have I wandered in imagination to the ‘Far,’ ‘far West,’ and then fancied myself one of a little group, with my wife and boy by my side.… How often, and how fondly have I wished that my person could keep pace with my imagination, that I could again behold you, that I could once more be surrounded by those objects, the nearest and dearest in life, my wife and boy.”69 In 1860, David Davis assured his spouse that “All the honors of the world pale before my undying love for you.”70 Nothing of this sort appears in Lincoln’s letters to his wife. Those letters, among other things, cast doubt on Mary Lincoln’s claim that “my darling husband … worshipped me so greatly, that often he said, that I was his weakness.”71
Lincoln’s habit of staying away from home began early in the marriage. In the first year, when Mary was pregnant, he was gone nearly ten weeks. (David Davis’s wife “was a little critical of Lincoln, whom she ado
red, for staying out on the circuit when Mary was expecting.”)72 Although he suffered from homesickness while on the circuit in early 1843, as the years went by he remained away more and more until finally he was absent from Springfield more than four months a year. In 1854, David Davis said that “Mr. Lincoln is so much engaged here [on the circuit] that he will not find time to go home—so that before he gets home again he will have been absent six (6) weeks.”73 Robert Todd Lincoln recalled that during his childhood and early youth, his father “was almost constantly away from home.”74 In 1858, Lincoln wrote that “I am [away] from home perhaps more than half my time.”75 Two years later, a Springfield minister informed a colleague that Lincoln was frequently absent on the Sabbath because “for the last three or four years he has been away from home much of the time and engaged in very exhausting labors.”76 Even when not on the road, Lincoln rarely passed the evening at his house. According to Herndon, he frequently left home between seven and eight A.M. and returned at midnight or even later.
To a neighbor Mrs. Lincoln complained “that if her husband had Staid at home as he ought to, that She could love him better.”77 If their separations were painful to her, it is hard to understand why she regularly absented herself from Washington during Lincoln’s term in Congress (1847–1849) and during his presidency, when she left him for months at a time.
Presidential Politicking
In 1844, Lincoln campaigned passionately for the Whig presidential standard-bearer, Henry Clay, whom he said he “almost worshipped.”78 Lincoln could easily identify with Clay, for, as he observed at Clay’s death in 1852, the Kentucky statesman had—like Lincoln—been born to “undistinguished parents” in “an obscure district,” had only a “comparatively limited” formal education, and “added something to his education during the greater part of his whole life.” His political philosophy, as Lincoln interpreted it, reflected Lincoln’s own views. Clay’s eloquence, Lincoln thought, manifested itself not in “elegant arrangement of words and sentences” but rather (like Lincoln’s) in a “deeply earnest and impassioned tone, and manner, which can proceed only from great sincerity and a thorough conviction.” Like Lincoln, Clay believed that “the world’s best hope depended on the continued Union of these States.” Like Lincoln, Clay “loved his country partly because it was his own country, but mostly because it was a free country” and “burned with a zeal for its advancement, prosperity and glory, because he saw in such, the advancement, prosperity and glory of human liberty, human right and human nature.” Like Lincoln, Clay “desired the prosperity of his countrymen partly because they were his countrymen, but chiefly to show to the world that freemen could be prosperous.” Like Lincoln, Clay was “in principle and in feeling, opposed to slavery.”79 (Few other eulogists of Clay mentioned his anti-slavery views.)
Abraham Lincoln: A Life, Volume 1 Page 40
