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

[David Lockmiller]

(07-02-2014 03:28 AM)LincolnToddFan Wrote:  Eva...I have searched online and in my many books, and I can find no mention of any April 1865 or even May 1865 newspaper mentioning the First Lady and her friends committing any such egregious faux pas as chattering over the president's historic speech that night.

How very convenient that this information only found it's way into a newspaper years later when her husband was dead and she was under fire for yet another scandal. I wish just once Mary had fought back against the "vampire press" as she called it, but I guess that wasn't done in her day...at least not by a woman.

Well, "this information did find its way into a newspaper [TWO] years later when . . . she (Mary Todd Lincoln) was under fire for yet another scandal," as you so ably describe the context for the publishing of the article.

Perhaps the last paragraph of this article may explain somewhat why this incident, which you describe correctly above as "such [an] egregious faux pas as chattering over the president's historic speech that night," was not printed by the newspapers at that time. The last paragraph of this Boston newspaper story in 1867 reads:

"This little incident has some suggestions which recent developments make oppotune just now, so apparent that we need not direct attention to them more explicitly. The wife and widow of the President may do things which shock the public taste, as they would have grated upon the heart of her husband; but respect for the memory of one of the best loved and most worthy of the sons of the republic, requires that no more notice than is unavoidable should be taken of unpleasant displays of a lack of discretion for which he, at any rate, was not responsible."