First Ladies (17 page)

But very quickly the reports changed. Hundreds of thousands of men took up arms for either the blue or the gray. Battlefield casualties climbed, and Mary Lincoln had her own personal grief in addition to concern for her relatives who were fighting for the “rebels.” In February 1862, her eleven-year-old son, Will, died at the White House. Mary purchased costly mourning clothes and special mourning jewelry. Families who had lost sons and husbands in the war were dismayed by her extravagance, and they began to raise questions about the sincerity of her grief. How could she mourn her son and yet direct so much attention to spending money? But she had shown signs before of spending money as though that could help her forget her problems.

Stories began to spread that Mary threw tantrums to get her way, and because several of the accounts originated with her best friends, they could hardly be discounted. Julia Taft, a teenager who spent a great deal of time at the White House because her two younger brothers shared a tutor with the Lincoln boys, told how the First Lady had appropriated a part of another woman's hat for herself. At a concert one evening, Mary Lincoln had eyed the bonnet of Julia's mother and then asked for the ribbons from it. Mary explained that the fashionable French milliner whom both women patronized had been unable to find more of the black and white satin ribbon he had used on Mrs. Taft's hat and Mary wanted that ribbon for herself. In the end Mary got the ribbon, the milliner replaced Mrs. Taft's ties with some of a different color, and Julia concluded that “Mrs. Lincoln wanted what she wanted when she wanted it and no substitute! And as far as we know she always had it, including a President of the United States.”
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Other stories had the First Lady threatening merchants who refused to humor her and deliver some item she demanded although it had already been bought by somebody else.
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Mary Lincoln's dressmaker, who was devoted to her employer, described how the president's wife would kick and scream, sometimes lying on the floor, when costumes were not delivered on time or in quite the condition that she expected.
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Julia Grant, wife of the general who commanded the Union troops after 1863, related other examples of Mary's irrational behavior. On one occasion Julia calmed Mary who insisted that another officer's wife was maneuvering to catch Abraham's interest. Mary became “annoyed” and could not “control her wrath,” Julia reported, although there were no grounds for jealousy.
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These stories, added to those about her spending and the rumors of her southern loyalties, reached a peak during the reelection campaign in 1864, causing Mary considerable worry. She had neglected to share the extent of her extravagance with her husband and now she desperately needed him to win so she would not have to pay up. Merchants had extended credit, sometimes requesting her intercession with the president in return, and Mary had no illusions about how quickly her credit would be cut off if her husband lost the election. Reassured by the victory of November 1864, she quickly resumed her buying spree and spent in the first three months of 1865 several thousand dollars on non-essentials such as jewelry and silverware. She admitted to a friend that her unpaid clothing bills amounted at that time to $27,000
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—more than her husband earned in a year—but she actually owed much more.
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Mary might have deflected some of the criticism by retreating to her room upstairs, as so many of her predecessors had done, but she refused all offers to substitute for her as hostess. Kate Chase, daughter of the secretary of the Treasury, coveted the White House for her father and would have relished a social leadership role for herself in the Lincoln administration. Other members of the cabinet volunteered to help, too, and when Prince Napoleon came for a visit, Secretary of State Seward offered to host a major event. But Mary Lincoln, proud of the French she had learned in Kentucky, insisted she could handle the arrangements herself; and at the end of the evening when “mostly French was spoken,” she reported with some pride that the prince had turned to her and remarked with some surprise: “Paris is not all the world.”
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If Mary Lincoln had diverted her attention from parties and clothes (subjects that appeared frivolous to many war-sufferers) and concentrated on appearing supportive and protective of her husband, she might have disarmed her critics. Instead, she badgered him more than she helped. According to one White House employee, she interrupted the president's work at the slightest whim,
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and invited favor-seekers to meals without the president's knowledge. Then, when he appeared “sad and harrassed,” she lobbied openly for whatever the guest had come to ask.
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According to one of Mary's relatives, who had accompanied her to Washington, Mary was constantly being flattered by people who wanted to gain access to the president, and Abe's announcement that “women have no influence in this administration” did little to stop them.
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With so many rumors of power on the distaff side of the White House, it is not surprising that Mary received an unusual gift from an anonymous donor. It made its point more clearly
than any words could—it was a bonnet with the president's photograph attached to each of the strings.
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Charges that a First Lady influenced her husband were nothing novel—they went all the way back to the first Adams administration. But Mary Lincoln's brand of self-centered manipulation appealed to no one. People who championed strong women and respected their opinions had found heroines in the partisan Abigail Adams and the astute Sarah Polk, but Mary Lincoln's influence was negative—petty, unpredictable, and self-serving.

Some of Mary's critics blamed her selfishness for exposing the president to danger, including that at Ford's Theater on April 14, 1865. The president had been aware of the possibility of personal harm during his entire first term, and special guards had been assigned to protect him. Mary insisted, however, that her husband needed relaxation, too, and she sometimes arranged for him to ride around the capital with her. On the last day of his life, they had gone out driving and she later said that she had rarely witnessed her husband so content as on that afternoon. General Lee had just surrendered the armies and ended the long war. Taking this move as initiating a new, more tranquil period for themselves personally, the Lincolns resolved to put behind them their grief over their son Will's death and move on to better times.

That evening Abraham accompanied his wife to the theater and she was seated beside him when the assassin struck. Mary, who never attended funerals of any member of her family, did not go to this one and delegated all the arrangements to her son Robert. Five weeks later, she rallied enough to pack and leave the White House, thus beginning a long, tortured pilgrimage to find a place to spend the rest of her life. She was forty-seven years old.

Of the two sons still living (of the four she had borne), Mary felt closer to Tad, the youngest, than to Robert, then at Harvard Law School. Tad required special attention because of learning problems and a speech impediment that made him difficult to understand.
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Although generally cheerful, he could sometimes be hard to manage, throwing tantrums until his mother had to have him removed from the room. She had been indulgent with him, indeed with all the boys, taking as her motto “Let the children have fun,”
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but now she determined to substitute strictness and to enroll Tad in a school in Germany. Her motive held more than a little self-interest—she had never traveled in Europe and believed she could live there more economically than in the United States.

Money so occupied Mary Lincoln's thoughts after 1865 that it may well have been the most important consideration in her move to
Europe. Although her husband's estate left about $35,000 to her and to each of her sons, she thought the amount inadequate. Congress had traditionally paid a year's salary to the widow of any president who died in office, but Abraham Lincoln had been the first to be assassinated and Mary thought the wife of a martyr deserved more. Others agreed that the different circumstances somehow required a larger compensation for the family.

In a controversy that lasted until her death and beyond, Congress divided over the country's obligation to presidents' widows. As long as she lived, Mary Lincoln stayed at the center of the discussion, fueling it with exaggerations of her poverty. She arranged to auction her old clothes and jewelry in a New York hotel, and although she acted under an assumed name, word leaked out, increasing the suspicion that she was either poorer than anyone realized or slightly crazy.

The final blow in the long string of misfortunes that hammered away at Mary's natural instability came from her husband's old law partner, William Herndon. While the men worked together in the 1850s, Mary and Herndon made no secret of their dislike for each other. He had compared her dancing to that of a serpent, but her disapproval of him went beyond such tasteless but harmless comments. Herndon lacked the polish that Mary Lincoln required in her husband's associates, and she excluded him from her dinner parties. He retaliated by attributing Abraham's moodiness to pressures caused by Mary's unreasonableness.

After Abraham Lincoln's assassination in 1865, Herndon began a biography and requested interviews with anyone who had known the president. In the process of taking down notes, he gave currency to many stories that were patently false or enormously exaggerated. Although he did not publish his book until much later, his speeches on the subject received newspaper coverage, and his claims gained publicity in the works of other authors.

By far the most sensational of the Herndon material argued that Abraham Lincoln had never loved anyone but Ann Rutledge, a young woman who died before he met Mary. This was the first time that Mary Lincoln had heard the story, and although she had plenty of reason to doubt its truth, she was unprepared emotionally to deal with its implications. As headlines carried the news across the country, she became more and more distraught.

Herndon's evidence was shaky at best. Abraham knew Ann Rutledge but only as the young daughter of the boardinghouse keeper where he stayed. At the time the future president met her, Ann was already engaged to be married and gave no indication of breaking off the
agreement when Abraham appeared on the scene. But evidence that the martyred president had never loved Mary appealed to people who wanted to believe the worst, and the Rutledge connection gained currency.

By going to Europe, Mary hoped to get away from the stories. She enrolled Tad in a Frankfurt school and went to take the waters at fashionable spas, never neglecting to follow news accounts of what was happening in the United States, particularly attempts in Congress to get her more money. Two other presidents' widows figured in the picture but each from a slightly different angle. Julia Tyler negotiated from a disadvantaged position since her husband had sided with the South in the Civil War; and Sarah Polk, who lived quietly in apparent comfort in Nashville, seemed in no great need.

After learning that Congress had granted her a pension of $3,000, Mary returned in the spring of 1871 to Illinois.
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She thought it a niggardly sum but had decided to try living in her own country again. A few months later all her resolution fell away when Tad, her youngest son, died at eighteen. Of all her sorrows, she later said, this cut the deepest.

On all sides, Mary felt besieged. She continued to worry about money, although what she had was ample for her needs, and she was humiliated by the stories about her husband and Ann Rutledge. She felt estranged from her one remaining son, the rather cold and distant Robert, who had a promising government career. His marriage to the daughter of a prominent judge had not pleased Mary and the fact that the young couple named their daughter for her hardly evened things out.

By early 1875, Robert asked for a court decision on his mother's sanity. He knew she carried her life savings sewed into her clothes, and when suspicious-looking characters began calling on her, he feared she would lose everything. In May 1875, Mary Todd Lincoln sat quietly in an Illinois court and heard her son and old friends describe her erratic behavior.
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Some talked of her heavy spending and others of her dabblings in spiritualism, a popular pastime involving supposed communication with dead relatives. The judge listened and then committed her to the care of Robert who promptly arranged for her to enter Bellevue. A private mental institution near Chicago, Bellevue catered to “a select class of lady patients of quiet and unexceptionable habits.”
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Mary, one of twenty patients, had freedom to wander about the grounds. Doctors prescribed very little medication, and she had a private room and her own attendant.

But confinement under the best of circumstances did not appeal to Mary Lincoln, and she became less cooperative as time passed.
Hospital records show that she would order one dish for breakfast, then change her mind and refuse to eat it; she requested a carriage and then would not get in it. Such “lying and deceit should be put down to insanity,” a hospital attendant reported with considerable overstatement.
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Evidence pieced together later shows that Mary spent a good deal of her time plotting how to regain her freedom. When Robert came for one of his weekly visits, she discussed her wish to live with her sister, and when he left, she asked to accompany him into town in order to mail a letter. Hospital attendants, who agreed to the trip, later learned that she mailed several letters, including one to a former congressman and another to an attorney, asking for their assistance in securing her release. Both the congressman and the attorney came for visits. The latter, Myra Bradwell, the first woman to be admitted to the bar in Illinois, pronounced Mary Lincoln “no more insane than I am.”
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