Did Lincoln Regret Marrying Mary?

[LincolnToddFan]

Gene C, I couldn't possibly agree more. Randall's book is admittedly rose colored glasses, but she does not paper over Mary's faults and low moments. In particular the City Point debacle a few weeks before the assassination.

Herndon, besides being completely without humor or empathy, is simply horrible. He even resents Lincoln's blameless young children, probably because Mary was their mother. At least one Lincoln biographer(Charles Strozier) opines that Herndon was possibly a little in love with the great man himself and saw Mary Todd as an(unworthy) rival. His fixation on Lincoln's sex life had me rolling my eyes, and the passages devoted to Ann Rutledge were more worthy of a cheap Harlequin romance novel than serious biography.

I have often wondered what Lincoln would have thought of Herndon's brutal treatment of the mother of his children after his death, when she was at her saddest and most vulnerable. He was truly merciless.

I think Lincoln would have been furious.