Mrs. Abraham Lincoln: A Study of Her Personality and Her Influence on Lincoln

Foreword

Biographical studies of Abraham Lincoln began immediately after his assassination in April 1865; the life and influence of his wife, Mary Lincoln, was obscured and ignored until the early twentieth century. And still, more than eighty years after the first full biography about her was published, Mary Lincoln remains a misunderstood and maligned woman. Scholarship on her life and her contributions to her husband ’s life has increased over the past twenty years, but the articles on her are by necessity limited to specific topics, and the recent books about her fall far short of achieving any lasting success in illuminating her life in a fair, balanced, and comprehensive way. Most of the books published about Mary over the past half century have tended toward egregious apology and overt political revisionism, casting her as a mythic feminist icon that Mary herself would never have recognized, nor accepted. Many of the articles about her over the same time period tend toward vilifying her as a terrible wife, a reprehensible First Lady, and an embarrassing widow—likewise descriptions alien to those who knew Mary. Of course, the real Mary Lincoln lies somewhere in between those two conflicting versions. I don’t know why finding an objective balance about Mary Lincoln’s life has been so elusive for writers and historians for so long, but whichever way the interpretation tends, it seems always to overreach and ultimately corrupt whatever new facts may have been discovered. Interestingly, it is one of the first biographies of Mary Lincoln published that remains probably the best book about her: Mrs. Abraham Lincoln: A Study of Her Personality and Her Influence on Lincoln by W. A. Evans, published in 1932. The book has been out of print and overlooked for decades, and its absence has left a huge gap in current Mary Lincoln research and understanding. A reprint edition is long overdue, and hopefully this volume by Foreword Jason Emerson ix FOr EWOr D x Southern Illinois University Press will foster a new appreciation of Evans’s outstanding scholarship by a new generation of readers. William Augustus Evans was born on August 5, 1865, in Marion, Alabama, where his father had been head of that town’s Confederate Army Hospital. Evans grew up in Monroe County, Mississippi, both in his family’s house in Aberdeen and at their plantation near Prairie. He graduated from Aberdeen High School and completed his B.S. at the Mississippi Agricultural College in 1883. He earned his M.D. from Tulane University in New Orleans in 1885 and completed his postgraduate studies at the Pasteur Institute in Paris, France. Evans moved to Chicago in 1891 and, for the next fortythree years, had a distinguished career as a physician, public health authority, newspaper columnist, and historian. He was on the staff of Cook County and Alexian Brothers hospitals and also taught pathology at the University of Chicago and Northwestern Medical School. He was president of the Chicago Medical Society in 1902 and 1903 and became Chicago’s first Public Health Commissioner in 1907. During his four years as commissioner, Evans established new methods for the city to fight tuberculosis, initiated the study of the problems of air hygiene, improved public health education, and was a strong proponent of the pasteurization and refrigeration of milk. Of his advocacy of the latter, the Chicago Tribune later wrote, “It is no exaggeration to say that many thousands of people who are walking the streets today owe their lives to the plans he formulated and the rules he enforced for combating infant mortality thru safeguarding a city’s milk supply.”1 Evans seems never to have been comfortable unless moving forward. In 1910, he received his LL.D. from Tulane, and in 1911, he received his doctorate in public health from the University of Michigan. When he resigned as city health commissioner in 1911, Evans became the health editor for the Chicago Tribune. He wrote his medical advice column “How to Keep Well” for twenty-three years, during which time he received more than one million letters from readers.2 FOr EWOr D xi After Evans retired in 1934, he left Chicago to prospect for gold in New Mexico, then traveled through Central and South America, Asia, and Africa. He returned to his hometown of Aberdeen , Mississippi, where his main interest became researching and recording the history of Monroe County. In 1939, he gave the city...