Did Lincoln Regret Marrying Mary?

[LincolnToddFan]

His first wife died, then he married a much younger woman who was reportedly very beautiful. I think David Herbert Donald wrote an extensive bio of Herndon in the 50's.

As for his Mary hate, I suspect it's the same with a lot of biographers-primarily males-who tend to lionize Lincoln at the expense of his wife. And nobody hero-worshipped AL like Herndon did.

Author Montgomery Lewis(Legends That Libel Lincoln) wrote that the more these biographers admire and idealize AL, the more they tend to dislike Mary and to feel that she was not worthy of him. If they could not imagine loving a woman like her, then of course their hero must have felt the same way. Lincoln is a god-myth, so of course there is no way that he could have loved a mere flesh and blood woman who was all too human. Not coincidentally this is also probably why it's so easy for some to seize upon the Ann Rutledge legend. This pure, saintly paragon is more "worthy". Even better, she died young and spotless making it even easier to put her on a pedestal with AL.

Another writer has posited something even more interesting...the more happily married biographers tend to be more charitable to MTL. Dale Carnegie loathed his former wife and had a dreadful marriage, which he described as a miserable inferno of hell.

Three guesses on how he described the AL/MTL marriage in his AL biography??