“The path of life has become very rough to me since the most loving and devoted husband and children have been called from my side,” wrote the widowed Mary Todd Lincoln to a friend in 1875. “In the great hereafter . . . we will then know why the gracious Father has caused such deep affliction.”
To this day she remains, according to historians’ informal polls, our most disliked first lady. She was excoriated by a press and public that found her (in Fawn Brodie’s words) “an erratic and tactless shrew and spendthrift” whose memory was an embarrassment to the sainted Lincoln. Biographers no less than her contemporaries have generally found it necessary to either love Mary or hate her, it being impossible to do anything in between. The life of Lincoln written by his law partner William Herndon and published in 1889 might have been named The Naming of the Shrew, for it was Herndon who drew the portrait of Mary as the harridan who used Lincoln as the vehicle for her own social ambitions. Herndon’s Mary still lives, most recently in the pages of William Safire’s Civil War novel, Freedom, whose treatment of Mary was found by knowledgeable Lincolnists to be “scornful” and “surprisingly harsh.”
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One of the innovations the Turners brought to the Mary business was to focus only on her. Previous books had viewed Mary through the distorting mirror of Lincoln. Whichever Lincoln one believed in, scholars had a Mary to match it. As Baker puts it, “If the great Abraham assures his wife’s tainted immortality, the maligned Mary guarantees her husband’s nobility,” something that helps explain the durability of Herndon’s Mary. Similarly, the improved Lincoln requires a dutiful Mary as evidence (if not spur) to his rise. Neither view does credit to the complexity of wife or husband, which demanded a new, full-length treatment.
Thus Baker’s Mary. If it is not in every way the biography Mary deserves, it is the biography she was almost certain to get. It shares with Randall’s version thorough scholarship; Baker is a published historian of U.S. politics of the 19th century, a teacher at Maryland’s Goucher College presently spending a year as a visiting professor at Harvard. Like the Turners, Baker tells the story of Mary Todd Lincoln, not Mrs. Abraham Lincoln. But instead of their misunderstood matron, Baker offers us Mary as unliberated woman.
Mary Todd was 24 when they wed, late for a Todd, though, surprisingly, not for the times. Lincoln’s reluctance to commit himself in the face of her family’s disapproval and his own financial uncertainty is understandable. But Mary had her own reasons for hesitating. Marriage was, Baker explains, “a comprehensive arrangement involving sex, companionship, affection, childbearing and raising, economic support, and work”–comprehensive and crippling, lived out entirely within and through the life of the husband. For Mary, “It was hard to surrender the specialness of being a Todd, of living apart from parents, of being educated, and, mostly, of needing to be different.”
Willie’s death drove Lincoln to a saving identification with parents left childless by the war; it drove Mary into the company of phony mediums. This earned her no friends. Christian doctrine as well as social convention demanded that women grieve circumspectly, for to do otherwise suggested disbelief that the dead had traveled to a better world. After Lincoln’s murder Mary was never seen in public wearing anything other than widow’s weeds. “Like Victoria,” Baker writes, “Mary made mourning a permanent condition.” Her sorrow was real, if self-indulgent, and she never abandoned it. Baker notes, “She came to prize her bereavement for the very reason that it made her special.”
For her transgressions Mary was pummeled by the press, by some of her husband’s male advisors, by the male-dominated medical and legal systems. But even one’s natural sympathies for the heroine don’t stifle the suspicion that argument gives way to advocacy more than once. At one point Baker observes, quite correctly, “Lunacy, eccentricity, and male-disapproved behavior [have] to be distinguished.” Biographers are under a similar obligation to distinguish carefully between sexism, malice, and social convention. Baker sometimes resorts to deck-stacking; one suspects for instance that the editors of the small-town south, one of whom Baker quotes in criticism of Mary, were no more representative of national opinion on the woman’s role in 1867 than they are today.
