Mary Todd Lincoln Has Long Been Derided. Is Her Reputation Salvageable?

In these early years, Mary helped more often than she hindered, as when she steered Lincoln away from accepting the dead-end territorial governorship of Oregon. Like Nancy Reagan a century later, she carried her husband’s grudges for him, warning him about rivalrous colleagues with whom his own temperament often let him continue to do business. Romano points out that, when Lincoln emerged as a dark horse in the 1860 Presidential race, journalists covering the election sometimes found Mary more impressive than her spouse. That June, one newspaper contrasted her “lady-like courtesy and polish” with her husband’s “awkwardness,” noticing how she “converses with freedom and grace.”

The two of them were enough of a team that, on the night he won, Lincoln rushed home from the Springfield telegraph office to declare, famously, “Mary, Mary! We are elected!”

Harriet Lane, a niece of the departing bachelor President, James Buchanan, was the first woman routinely called the First Lady, but occupants of the position had long attracted the public’s interest. All the notice that came with the role was, Romano writes, a “dangerous elixir for an insecure woman who thrived on attention.” The scrutiny was unaccompanied by any real support from Washington’s female social élite. Elizabeth Blair Lee, a rare sympathetic member of that establishment, wrote to her husband, in 1861, “The women kind are giving Mrs. Lincoln the cold shoulder in the City.”

Within six weeks of Lincoln’s Inauguration, the Civil War had broken out and Mary was “drowning,” according to Romano, surrounded by “opportunists and rogues” as numerous as the rats skittering through the Executive Mansion’s walls. The Union’s hastily augmented army couldn’t get to the capital fast enough, and there was no guarantee that Mrs. Jefferson Davis wouldn’t soon be calling the White House home. On April 22, 1861, the National Republican reported that “employees of the General Post Office Department . . . were instructed to hold themselves in readiness to repair to the Department, where arms would be furnished them at a moment’s warning.” Weeks after the 7th New York Regiment arrived to secure the capital, Mary was off to New York and Philadelphia, where she made some morale-boosting public appearances.

But she had also gone north to shop. She quickly blew through a congressional allowance for the White House’s redecoration, purchasing extravagant wallpaper, chandeliers, and carpets. Between the election and the Inauguration, she had already amassed unsustainable personal debt for new clothes. “Compulsive shopping had not yet been identified as an affliction,” Romano notes, but it “fueled an emotional void” in Mary, even when it was being enabled by public funds. She would engage in dodgy financial behavior for much of her life, but it was more often a result of impulse and panic than the sort of methodical grift practiced, so far without consequence, by the current First Lady.

The press alternated praise of Mrs. Lincoln’s improvements to the Executive Mansion with scornful doesn’t-she-know-there’s-a-war-on cracks. Mary showed off the renovations at a number of parties, most conspicuously at an enormous ball given on February 5, 1862. Romano surveys the scene: “A Chinese pagoda bubbled with champagne. . . . The tables were decorated like a war-themed child’s birthday party. On display was a large helmet molded of sugar, as well as replicas of Fort Pickens and the frigate Union . . . surrounded by sugared guns, sails, flags and cherubs.” Cementing the First Lady’s identification with this excess, the Marine Band struck up the new “Mary Lincoln Polka.”

That night, both the President and his wife periodically fled upstairs to check on their most beloved son, the eleven-year-old Willie, sick with a fever that would kill him two weeks later. His death plunged his parents into prolonged, disabling grief—Mary’s so clamorous that Lincoln had to point through a window toward Washington’s insane asylum, insisting that she try to remain out of it.