Towering Termagant

There are over 15,000 books about Abraham Lincoln; a tower made of less than half of them was 8 feet in circumference and 34 feet high, three-and-a-half stories.¹ The only person to have more biographers is Jesus Christ. Mary Magdalene comes off badly in the vast majority of those, but not as badly as Mary Lincoln does in this one. There are also, of course, thousands of books about Adolph Hitler, and I’ll venture a guess that he comes off no worse in some of them than Mary Lincoln does here.

One of Mary Lincoln’s historical problems is that she married a man who became a secular saint, whose biographies are still more often hagiographic than critical; dispassionate accounts of Abraham Lincoln’s life remain no easier to find than they are for Christ or Hitler. Not that Lincoln lacked critics in life or has avoided them in death, but post-martyrdom critical distance became and remains elusive. There are several schools of thought on Mary and the marriage but not many, so Burlingame’s story about the Lincolns’ marriage fits within the oft-told ones. These boil down to psychotic Mary, mourning Mary, scheming Mary, feminist Mary, and maligned Mary, none of which humanize her or plumb the depths of her relationship with her husband. To Burlingame, Mary is the perpetrator and Abe the victim in a brutal, loveless marriage.

There have been advocates for Mary who write off her problems to feistiness, along the lines of the title character in Jane Eyre (1847). Anne Firor Scott criticized the feminist approach to Mary for diminishing the accomplishments of such historical heroines as Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, who were clearly ahead of their time (p. 272). Mary was indeed headstrong, but that is an insufficient explanation for her life or the marriage, although it would be a beginning if the analysis did not stop there. Others have been sympathetic to Mary and her union with Abe by focusing on the tremendous challenges the Lincolns faced—the toll taken by the Civil War on him; the burden of the deaths of their sons on them both (two of the four died during his lifetime, yet another before her death); and his assassination on her. Recognizing the role of intense grief, as George Saunders has recently imagined for Abe, is essential to understanding the marriage and Mary’s place in it.² A third sympathetic approach highlights the mental health problems in her family, and she does seem to have suffered from those as well. Burlingame acknowledges the effect of all three—personality, grief, and mental health—on the Lincolns’ marriage, but he has only sympathy for the husband and blame for the wife.

There are also, of course, source problems, and not just with the retrospective views of the Lincolns’ marriage. To say the least, journalists were vicious in the Lincolns’ day, more so than today, Prince Harry’s and Duchess Meghan’s wounds notwithstanding. Likewise, truth seldom slowed a popular story, and misogyny ruled in a venomous political scene. People said and believed the worst about each other, especially in the years leading up to the Civil War, and the higher one’s standing, the better the target provided for the slings and arrows of the popular press. If there were pizza parlors in Civil-War-era Washington, the partisan periodicals could have reported pedophile rings of opposition politicians in their basements whether they had basements or not, and many readers would have believed them. It is not surprising, then, that stories were cast and repeated in the most salacious versions imaginable and no one in public life escaped the onslaught. Families were not off limits in journalistic canings and First Ladies were frequently conked.

All that is to say that there is no shortage of Mary Lincoln stories and the problem, no less today than then, is sorting out the true from the...