Mary Todd Lincoln's faux pas (plural), worse, and much worse

[LincolnToddFan]

(06-13-2014 07:00 AM)BettyO Wrote:  Very well said, Joe!

I'm coming in late to this very interesting discussion and I'm of the very same opinion. These folk lived 150 years ago. Unless something was written down in a diary/journal by individuals, it's near impossible to pin down what they thought/said in a particular circumstance. People seem to avoid or miss the fact that the 19th Century held different values than do current times. People were different - yes, they were still people, but values and morals were strikingly different and a lot of modern writers/researchers/historians sometimes miss that.

It's extremely difficult to write when very little is recorded or written.

This is so true. I often think about my parents, who had a marriage that seemed incompatible to most of their friends and family, to use an understatement. Growing up in our home I saw a lot of dysfunction, chaos, yelling. I rarely witnessed any manifestation of affection or tenderness between them and I often wondered why they married at all. It was a cross between Al and Peg Bundy on "Married With Children" and Martha/George of "Who's Afraid of Virginia Wolf?." I am not exaggerating.

Just like Abe and Mary Lincoln,they could not have been more different. Dad was cerebral, bookish, undemonstrative. Mom was impulsive, frivolous, often abrasive, self-absorbed, obsessed with fashion and style. There was an 8/9 year difference of age.

Sound familiar?

Dad died prematurely at age 50 in 1982. Shortly before her own death four years ago she told me that on the last night of Daddy's life she sat by his hospital bed and they talked about their marriage from the beginning. From about 9pm until 3am when he lapsed into the final coma they discussed all the ways they had hurt one another for 23 years, speaking as honestly as they ever would to one another. They made amends, and the next day he died.

My mother seemed okay at first but was never really the same. I could never understand it. She was now free from the man who she had impulsively married at age 19. He had left her financially comfortable. She was, at age 42, young enough to make a better life with someone else. But she never remarried.

She died calling for him, according to the hospice nurse.

On the morning of her death one of their oldest and closest friends called me and said "Toia, you must never believe that your parents did not love one another. They did. I don't care how bad it looked to others, I was there in the beginning. I know for a fact they were crazy for one another. Don't try to understand it. Accept what I am telling you and move on".

I was stunned, but I have tried to do just that. This friend was a woman who's judgment and opinion I always valued.

I feel the same about the Lincolns. None of us shared their bed in Springfield or the WH. None of us-certainly not Burlingame-were privy to their innermost thoughts and feelings for each other. None of us know the secret of what made them love one another under circumstances most of us would find intolerable. But it's wrong to assume that because we can't accept something it isn't real.