Did Mary Lincoln need committal?

[Eva Elisabeth]

(09-03-2013 02:52 PM)My Name Is Kate Wrote:  And did I read somewhere, possibly in this thread, that he stalked and ambushed her in order to bring her to trial and commit her...? Maybe he should have been arrested for kidnapping. It makes ones wonder where and how he acquired such cold-blooded traits.)

My name is Kate, I had posted that, but deleted the post. I thought it was irrelevant since the focus was on the (not existing) trial transcripts. My source was a book I've started reading a few days ago: “The Trials of Mrs.Lincoln”, by Samuel Schreiner (1987), which is based on and quotes newspaper accounts and papers and correspondence marked in Robert’s hand “MTL Insanety File”, found in Hildene in 1975 and since located at the Louis A. Warren Lincoln Library and Museum in Fort Wayne, Indiana (at least till the book was released). I should have read the preface more carefully because it says: "The court was not required to keep a verbatim transcript." Schreiner also writes: "If possible, letters, newspaper accounts and the like are quoted with the original spelling, punctuation and structure intact." (So, make up your own opinion whether you consider the following reliable!)

According to Schreiner, Robert stated in court: "In fact, I have had a man from the Pinkerton agency watching her for the last three weeks, whose sole duty was to watch after her when she went on the street. She knew nothing about it....Although she has been exceeding kind to me, my mother has really been irresponsible for the last ten years. She has been eccentric and unmanageable..."

Regarding Robert's and his allys' further course of action, these were the medical witnesses they had gathered:

- Dr. Ralph N Isham, who had been treating her ever since she had returned from Forida; he advised Robert to contact
- Dr. R. J. Patterson, who had never met Mary before the trial;
- Dr. Wilis Danforth, who had treated Mary in ‘73+’74 and, on Robert’s request, in early ’75;
- Drs. Charles Gilman Smith and Hosmer Allen Johnson, whom Mary herself had hired to try to safe Tad’s life;
- Dr. Nathan Smith Davis, famed for papers on the nervous system and professor of physiology and pathology at Rushmore College; and
- Dr. James Steward Jewell, editor of the “Chicago Journal of Nervous and Mental Diseases”.

Prior to the trial, Leonard Swett got written affirmative answers from all of them to two questions he posed: a) did they think that Mrs. Linoln was insane; and b) did they think she should be confined to a mental institution? Some, e.g. Dr. Jewell, just scribbled “aye” to each question.

Dr. Davis, who had never met Mary, wrote:”From the facts and circumstands detailed to us on the 15th inst., I am decidely of the opinion that Mrs. Lincoln is insane. The character of her insanety is such that she may at times appear perfectly sane in ordinary conversation and yet she is constantly subject to such mental hallucination as to render her entirely unsafe if left to herself.”