Lincoln Letter to John Stuart

[Liz Rosenthal]

(01-29-2013 08:02 PM)antiquefinder Wrote:  [quote='Liz Rosenthal' pid='12029' dateline='1359500126']

I will give you that we don't know 100% if Mary was a nurturing wife or not; however, the stories that were told from their neighbors and people who did witness Mary throwing stuff at Lincoln and having fits at Lincoln doesn't seem very nurturing to me. I'm not saying that Lincoln was an angel and didn't have his faults, but he certainly didn't deserve to be abused by his wife. And to be quite frank, if she did those things in public imagine what went on that people didn't see. I believe the both of them needed some serious counseling to get through their depression. And as far as Herndon goes, how do you know that Lincoln didn't talk to Herndon about his marriage? Just because he was never in the Lincoln home doesn't mean he didn't know what was going on. I've had people talk to me about their marital problems and I was never in there homes but I knew what was going on.

Lincoln probably did not talk to Herndon about his marriage because, if he had, Herndon would have reflected such conversations in his bio of Lincoln or in his correspondence or in the essays he wrote about Lincoln. But there is nothing to suggest in his Lincoln bio or in his published correspondence or essays that Lincoln ever confided in him about his marriage. Admittedly, as far as I know, the only published volume of Herndon's correspondence and essays remains The Hidden Lincoln (edited by Emanuel Hertz, in 1938!), and this collection is apparently far from comprehensive.

Then there is Lincoln's Herndon, the bio of Herndon written by David Herbert Donald 10 years after publication of Hertz's collection, which questions the accuracy of Herndon's secondhand information about the Lincolns' marriage. While I do think there are bones to pick with some of Donald's other statements about Herndon in this book - and even Donald's now anachronistic opinion about the importance of the Kansas-Nebraska Act to the spread of slavery - I think he makes sense here in pointing out that Herndon lacked firsthand knowledge of the Lincolns' marriage.

For the sake of argument, one could say that, just because none of Herndon's writings include any references to conversations with Lincoln about his relationship with Mary does not mean that such conversations did not happen. And I would respond that Herndon was one person who, bearing such knowledge, would not have held it back. He said and wrote time and again that his aim was to tell everything he knew about his former law partner. It didn't matter if it was disturbing, embarrassing, sensitive, or strange, Herndon's mission was to tell the world the "truth" about Lincoln. Given his 1866 lecture in which he argued that Ann Rutledge had been Lincoln's only true love (a very insensitive thing to say publicly given that Mary and her two surviving sons were still around to read of this!), I doubt he would have shied away from intimate facts about the Lincolns' marriage if he had had any.

But I totally agree that, if anyone deserved a loving, doting wife, it was Abraham Lincoln.