Lincoln & Herndon

[LincolnToddFan]

(07-08-2014 12:43 PM)Angela Wrote:  

(07-08-2014 10:42 AM)LincolnToddFan Wrote:  If she was so awful as so many people seemed to believe, what does it say about AL that he was attracted to her and decided to marry her?

That I have wondered about as well!

I came to the conclusion that he was, at the time, under some pressure to end his bachelor life and wanted to marry "up" (after all, he certainly was no demi god but an aspiring politician and lawyer).
And I'm also pretty sure that Mary did not show all her negative sides until some time into the marriage.

Hi Angela,

Mary no doubt wanted to marry well, but AL was not her only option. There was a well-to-do bachelor lawyer named Edwin Webb, and of course there was future Senator and presidential candidate Stephen Douglas. She chose Lincoln because not only did she see his potential, she fell in love with him and said many times that she would only marry for love. "My heart can never be his"(referring to Edwin Webb in a letter to her best friend Mercy Levering, June 1841..MTL Life and Letters pgs#25-26)..."My hand will never be given where my heart is not" (letter from MTL to a Springfield friend July 23, 1840...pg#6 The Lincolns: Portrait of a Marriage by Daniel Mark Epstein)

As for only showing AL her most positive side during their courtship, Mary was doing what all men and women have always done and continue to do. Lincoln did it too. I am willing to bet he did not show up to court Mary at the Edwards home telling smutty jokes and acting distant, moody and distracted, which was a side of him that she would learn about only after she had married him. Instead, he presented himself to her as the most attentive of suitors:

"Mary led the conversation-Lincoln would listen and gaze on her as if drawn by some Superior power". (Elizabeth Todd Edwards, quoted in Herndon's Informants, auth. Douglas Wilson pg#443)

Abraham Lincoln rose to power and prominence in no small part thanks to his gifts of insight and emotional intelligence. He successfully navigated a difficult, emotionally fraught relationship with his father.

As president he managed a scheming backstabbing Cabinet full of clashing egos with the skill of master violin impresario, playing them all like chess pieces.

Once in office, he walked a tightrope between abolitionists on one side, secessionists on the other, and borderline traitorous Copperheads in the middle, all hating him and braying for his head at once.

He outwitted and out-maneuvered the best brains the Confederacy had to offer...brilliant and talented men like Jefferson Davis and Judah Benjamin.

He triumphed over all of the above, yet we are to believe that he was successfully duped, manipulated and then destroyed by a psychologically fragile Southern belle a decade younger than himself??

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(07-08-2014 12:51 PM)L Verge Wrote:  Has anyone ever delved into Mary's disposition before she married Mr. Lincoln? From what I have read, she seems to have been popular and even the belle of the ball. Has anyone ever considered that the sharp turn her life took once she married the wandering prairie lawyer (loneliness, raising children alone, economic problems that she had not had before, maybe being around a different class of people) caused her to change emotionally?

I still recommend Crowns of Thorns and Glory - comparing Mrs. Lincoln with Varina Davis - as a good book.

Laurie,

You raise excellent points. Daniel Mark Epstein, in his wonderful book The Lincolns: Portrait of a Marriage, posits that Mary was always a volatile personality. Part of it was the painful childhood of emotional abandonment that she endured by losing her mother as a very little girl, then acquiring a stepmother almost immediately afterward who did not want her around and made no secret of it. Mary was sent away to boarding school and later said she considered Madame Mentelle's school in Lexington her only real home as a girl. In fact, bonding over desolate childhoods might have been something that attracted her to AL initially.

After she married AL there is reason to believe(confirmed by her letters) that she looked upon him partly as a replacement for the father who had emotionally abandoned her. Her seamstress confidante Keckly wrote in her memoirs that nothing delighted MTL more than when AL called her his "child wife", something that might have annoyed most other women. And I have already quoted the letters she wrote after his death, describing him as her lover, husband AND father.

His frequent absences, his emotional withdrawal from her when he was home, all could have contributed to triggering the rages and meltdowns she became notorious for in their Springfield years. She probably saw it as one more parent figure rejecting her.

In fact any time someone she loved died she would interpret it as a personal abandonment, and would emotionally go to pieces. This first happened when toddler Eddie Lincoln died in 1850. She had only just begun to recover from the death of Willie in 1862 when the husband she called "Father" was shot in the head while holding her hand.

According to Epstein, biographer Jean Baker, and Ruth Painter Randall, it was the experience of the Civil War White House that was the straw that broke the camel's back and unleashed her latent mental illness full force.

She was probably not an easy person to love or even like, but I have great sympathy and compassion for Mary Lincoln.

Thanks SO much for mentioning "Crowns". I was absolutely impressed by that book. It was a very sympathetic dual biography that did justice to both Varina Davis and Mary Todd Lincoln. I knew absolutely nothing about Varina D. before I read that book. What a woman. Jeff Davis was very lucky to have her. In fact, I am not sure he deserved her!