First Ladies: Influence and Image

[Sally]

This is a great series. I've seen every episode so far. I'm really looking forward to the MTL installment. I also like that they are rerunning many episodes of the "Lives of the Presidents" series from 1999. Mr. Lincoln is supposed to be featured this Sunday night, but it's not listed on C-Span's schedule yet.

On Monday, the "First Ladies" program featured Jane Pierce and Harriet Lane (James Buchanan's niece). I was interested to learn that Jane Pierce was similar to Mary Lincoln in several ways. She, too, experienced great loss--all three of her sons died at a very young age. Many of you probably know that the last surviving son, Benjy, was killed in a train derailment only a few weeks before Pierce's inauguration, and both parents witnessed his death. Terrible! As a result, Jane was (understandably) a virtual recluse for the first two years of the administration. She did very little official entertaining and pretty much stayed in her rooms on the second floor of the White House. She was also involved, at least to some extent, with spiritualists. Evidently, Pierce found it so difficult to be around her inconsolable grief that he had her family members come to Washington so he wouldn't have to deal with it alone. Also, some of Pierce's friends, (including Nathaniel Hawthorne) didn't care much for Jane. They thought she was the "wrong wife" for Pierce. Even before the loss of her children, she was always sick with a chronic "cold" and often feigned illness when she wanted to get out of things. Unlike Mary Lincoln though, she supposedly hated politics and wanted nothing to do with it. She was angry at Pierce for getting elected president, and blamed him for their son's death, considering it God's retribution for his high ambitions. Also unlike Mary, she was never supportive of Pierce, politically speaking.

I think this illustrates that Mary Lincoln's "issues" were not so unique. Granted, she seems to have been a difficult person with many emotional problems. But the excessive flack she's gotten over the decades has always seemed unfair to me. No doubt if she had been married to one of the country's worst presidents instead of its greatest (I know, I know--we have dissenters who will disagree with my opinion, but whatever!) history--i.e. writers like Messrs. Herndon and Burlingame--would not be so unkind to her.