Mary's Reputation

[LincolnToddFan]

Hi guys-
Here is what MTL biographer Ruth Painter Randall has to say about the alleged tantrum incident as conveyed by Villard on pgs 174-175 of "Biography of a Marriage"-

".....As Villard's version of that story is told in Lincoln on the Eve '61, Lincoln was delayed in arriving at the depot on the morning of February 11, and Kreismann was sent to see what was wrong. Kreismann went to Lincoln's room and "opened the door in response to Lincoln's 'Come in'. Mrs. Lincoln was lying on the floor, evidently quite beside herself." The account continues: "....with his head bowed and a look of utmost misery, Lincoln said: 'Kreismann, she will not let me go until I promise her an office for one of her friends.'" Lincoln is said to have yielded, and have started for the station with his family. There is good reason to believe that Kreismann was not even in Springfield at this time.

There is an inconsistency in this account as to Lincoln's conduct. For him, kind husband and astute public-relations man that he was, to call out in answer to a casual knock on the door by an unknown person, 'Come in", when his wife was in the condition described, is uncharacteristic in the extreme. Likewise one who guarded his utterances as President-elect with almost superhuman caution would never have made to a casual politician so damaging a statement as to say that his wife was forcing him to appoint a man he did not want to appoint.

Villard makes unfavorable statements about Mrs. Lincoln that can be proved untrue. Later mentioning in Washington she regularly visited the Union soldiers in camps, he wrote "....the truth was, that she had no liking for them at all, being really, as a native of Kentucky, at heart a secessionist." The rumor that Mrs. Lincoln was disloyal was part of the whispering campaign during the war. It will be shown later how completely she was for the Union in thought and in action. She was never a secessionist; a native of Kentucky yes, but for that matter Kentucky did not secede. Villard's statement is ignorant in more respects than one.

The account of the Kreismann story as happening on the day of Lincoln's departure from Springfield is not acceptable. Mary was doubtless in a highly emotional state then, with rumors of danger to her husband and with her determination to be at his side on the journey. If she was begging for anything that morning, it was possibly his consent that she join him next day in Indianapolis, which is, of course, what she did.

But the Kreismann story as it appears in the Herndon-Weik manuscripts is not placed on the day of Lincoln's departure. According to a letter of Horace White, written Jan 26, 1891(thirty years after the event) Norman B. Judd and Herman Kreismann went to Springfield after Lincoln's election and made an appointment to see him. When Lincoln was late for the interview, Kreismann was sent to his home to find out what was wrong and a servant ushered him into the room where Mrs. Lincoln was having hysterics. According to Kreismann's story, she was trying to persuade Lincoln to make a certain appointment in which case she was to receive a diamond brooch as a reward for using her influence. The story rests entirely upon the word of one man, into whose mind and motives one cannot look fully. We do know, however, from his letter already quoted, that Kreismann was unfriendly to Mrs. Lincoln and was accepting and repeating gossip about her. A good deal hinges on the point as to where he got that detail about the brooch; that part of the story smacks of certain fabricated rumors that circulated later in Washington and we do not know at what time Kreismann told his tale. By the time Horace White wrote Herndon in 1891, Kreismann had gone back to Germany to live. Realizing the dubiousness of the story, White cautioned Herndon not to use it on his(White's) narration, adding justly that it would be best not to use it at all.

Herndon, of course, seized eagerly on the tale, saying "....I will venture all I have that the story is correct"......

A second-and third-hand story told thirty years after the event under these conditions cannot be accepted as reliable evidence.