The Truth About Mary Todd Lincoln |
The Truth About Mary Todd Lincoln
Ms. Romano is the author of the forthcoming book “An Inconvenient Widow: The Torment, Trial, and Triumph of Mary Todd Lincoln.”
The Tony-winning Broadway show “Oh, Mary!,” which portrays Mary Todd Lincoln as a chaotic, resentful alcoholic former cabaret singer, has thrust America’s former first lady back into the public imagination over the past year. One might expect that a comedic character written (and originally played) by the playwright Cole Escola, who did, by their own admission, deliberately “less than no research” into Mary’s life, would be seen as hilariously preposterous. And yet, for audiences, the play’s burlesque can ring a little true, largely because it embodies a cultural image of Mary as crazy that has endured for 160 years and is familiar to them from decades of distorted scholarship.
She has existed in the historical record as largely a one-dimensional caricature created by men — biographers, political rivals, physicians — who failed to understand her. Early male writers often disparaged Mary as an intolerable shrew or filtered her through the prism of her husband’s greatness, turning her into a nuisance at best and a national embarrassment at worst. Some falsely suggested she was a spy for the Confederacy during the Civil War. Prime among those who distorted her legacy was William Herndon, Abraham Lincoln’s former law partner, who despised her for, among other reasons, refusing to invite him to dinner. Critics interpreted her anxiety over a war in which members of her immediate family were fighting for the enemy, and her unrelenting public grief over losing three children and her husband, as evidence that she was weak, rather than resilient.
It is true Mary suffered from mental illness and could have a temper. It is also true that her husband, who himself struggled with depression, may well have never become president without her. Even her harshest critics acknowledged that her ambition, political instincts and force of will helped propel him to the White House.
She was undoubtedly harmed by the era’s gender expectations. Even after women amassed greater liberty and power, few male historians made an effort to understand Mary’s pain or motives, choosing instead to typecast her as superficial and insane. One notable exception was a 1932 biography by a physician, William A. Evans, who uncovered a history of mental illness in Mary’s family and made an effort to understand her volatility.
By then, the die had been cast. And once a narrative takes hold, it can be repeated and embellished for generations before being dislodged.
Only in the past 60 years — thanks largely to the work of female historians such as Ruth Painter Randall, Jean Baker and Stacy Pratt McDermott — has a fuller picture emerged. In their works, Mary Lincoln appears not as a distortion but as a politically engaged partner who helped elevate her husband while navigating extraordinary personal loss in a patriarchal society. These historians viewed her battles with mental illness and her erratic personality in the context of her entire life. As the first lady, she made significant contributions: She used her position to support the Union effort, routinely visited encampments, tended to wounded soldiers at Washington hospitals, threw open the doors of the White House for large public receptions to lift morale and donated money and food to refugees from slavery. But her accomplishments were minimized in the historical telling of her story, leaving only a negative narrative that persists to this day.
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