Mary Todd Lincoln

Mary Todd Lincoln was the wife of Abraham Lincoln and first lady of the United States during the Civil War. Born in Lexington, Kentucky, in 1818 into a prosperous and politically connected family, she received an extensive education for a woman of her generation and moved to Springfield, Illinois, where she met Lincoln. They married in 1842 and had four sons. Her knowledge of politics and social networks accompanied Lincoln’s rise from Illinois lawyer and congressman to the presidency.

As first lady, Mary faced extraordinary pressure: several of her Kentucky relatives supported the Confederacy, critics attacked her spending and temperament, and her son Willie died in the White House in 1862. Abraham Lincoln’s assassination in 1865 compounded years of grief. Mary later lived in Europe and struggled with financial and emotional instability. In 1875 her son Robert initiated proceedings that resulted in her temporary institutionalisation, though she later regained legal control of her affairs. She died in Springfield in 1882.

Ann Rinaldi’s An Unlikely Friendship follows Mary Todd Lincoln and Elizabeth Keckley from radically different childhoods to the White House relationship in which Keckley becomes Mary’s dressmaker and confidante. Gore Vidal’s Lincoln views the Civil War administration through Mary as well as Seward, Chase, Stanton and John Hay, placing her social and family pressures inside the political life of the presidency. Barbara Hambly’s The Emancipator’s Wife makes Mary the central consciousness across courtship, war, bereavement and the later struggle over her sanity and reputation. Jeff Shaara’s The Unfinished Work returns to the Lincoln household through the emotional and political consequences of assassination and the unresolved work of reunion and emancipation.