Chicago, May 19th, 1875. A woman is led through a side door of a courthouse. She has no warning, no lawyer. When she enters the room, she finds 17 witnesses already seated, and her only surviving son standing among them. By the end of that day, he would have her declared insane and sent to an asylum.
Her name is Mary Todd Lincoln. She was the wife of Abraham Lincoln, the man whose face is carved into a mountain. She believed in him before anyone else did. And this is what that cost her. Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to Behind the Throne. History has a habit of building monuments to the people it loves and quietly forgetting the ones who stood beside them.
We remember Abraham Lincoln. We carry his face in our wallets. We carved his likeness into a mountain in South Dakota. We have given his name to memorials, highways, and the kind of national mythology that makes a country feel it has a conscience. He is by almost every measure the most admired president the United States has ever produced.
But there was a woman who stood beside him for 23 years. She believed in him before anyone else did. When Abraham Lincoln was still an unglamorous circuit lawyer in Springfield, Illinois, rough-edged, unknown, and not particularly well regarded by the families who mattered in that town, she told her friends with complete conviction that he would one day be president of the United States.
They smiled at her. Some of them laughed. She was right. Her name was Mary Todd Lincoln. She served as first lady during the most violent years America had ever known. She sat in the presidential box at Ford’s Theater on the night of April 14th, 1865, holding her husband’s hand, laughing at the play when the gunshot came.
She was the last person Abraham Lincoln heard laugh. In the decades since, history has not been kind to Mary Todd Lincoln. The story most people know, if they know it at all, is the story of the difficult woman, the erratic spender, the unstable wife, the burden her husband bore with patience and grace.
Tonight we do not tell that story. Tonight we tell the one that came after, the 17 years that no monument acknowledges, the grief that had no name in her time and no champion in ours. It is a story about what it costs to love someone who belongs to history before they belong to you. About what power leaves behind when it finally lets go.
And about how a woman who had already survived more loss than most people endure in a lifetime was not in the end destroyed by war or poverty or tragedy. She was brought down by the one person she had left. When Abraham Lincoln gave Mary Todd a wedding ring, he had something engraved on the inside of the band. Three words that she wore on her finger for the rest of her life.
Through the funerals, through the court hearings, through the long years in the darkened room, three words she never removed. Tonight, we begin at the beginning. And by the time we reach the end, you will understand what those three words truly meant and what they cost her. This is the story of Mary Todd Lincoln. She was 6 years old when her mother died.
The household in Lexington, Kentucky, had been a prosperous one. Her father, Robert Smith Todd, was a banker and a wig politician, a man with standing, ambition, and 14 rooms in a house on West Main Street. By the standards of the early American Republic, Maryanne Todd wanted for nothing that could be purchased. What could not be purchased was her mother.
Eliza Parker Todd died in the summer of 1825, not long after giving birth to her seventh child. Mary was 6 years old. She would carry almost no clear memory of her mother’s face. What she would carry instead and what she would carry for the rest of her life was a particular quality of absence. The way a room feels when someone has just left it.
The way warmth disappears faster than it arrives. Within a year, her father had remarried. The new wife, Betsy Humphre, would go on to have nine more children with Robert Todd. She was not, by most accounts, a cruel woman, but she was not Eliza, and the house, which had been Mary’s house, was becoming someone else’s. Years later, Mary would describe her childhood in a single word.
She called it desolate. She was not without resources. She was educated at privatemies in Lexington, Ward’s Academy, then Mentels. 12 years of serious schooling at a time when most women in America received almost none. She studied grammar, literature, arithmetic. She became fluent in French. She learned to read a room the way a diplomat learns to read a treaty quickly and with attention to what was being concealed. She was sharp. She was funny.
She was, by the accounts of those who knew her in those years, the kind of person who made every gathering feel more alive. And she was restless. In 1839, at the age of 20, Mary Todd packed her things and moved to Springfield, Illinois to live with her married sister, Ninian Edwards. Springfield was not Lexington.
It was rougher, younger, still finding its shape. But it was also a place where things were happening. Careers were being built, names were being made. It was there that she met Abraham Lincoln. He was, by his own description, a poor nobody, a circuit lawyer from the backwoods of Indiana and Illinois, largely self-educated, nearly a foot taller than her, with a face that even his closest friends hesitated to call handsome.
He wore ill-fitting clothes. He told stories that went on longer than they should. He was not the kind of man that the Springfield social establishment, including Mary’s sister, had in mind for her. Mary paid the establishment very little attention. What she saw in Abraham Lincoln was not what others saw.
She saw the mind, the strange angular brilliance of it, the way he could take a room full of skeptical men and dismantle their certainty with a single question. She told friends more than once, before he was anything more than a moderately known lawyer, that Abraham Lincoln would one day be president of the United States. They smiled politely.
Some of them changed the subject. Their courtship was not a simple thing. There was a period in the winter of 1840 when the engagement was broken, apparently on his initiative, on a day Lincoln himself would later call the fatal 1st of January. The reasons for the rupture have never been entirely clear, his own doubts almost certainly, his sense of his own inadequacy against the world she had come from.
But they found their way back to each other. On November 4th, 1842, in the parlor of her sister’s house on Aristocracy Hill, Mary Todd became Mary Lincoln. She was 23, he was 33. The ceremony was small, arranged in a matter of hours. A minister was summoned. A few guests were gathered. There was no elaborate preparation.
There was no time. What there was on the inside of the gold band he placed on her finger that evening was an inscription, three words, “Love is eternal.” She never took it off. Their early years in Springfield were modest in the way that early years often are. a rented house on the corner of 8th and Jackson, a growing family, the ordinary difficulties of money and weather, and the ambitions of a man who was always, it seemed, preparing for something just beyond the horizon.
They had four sons, the eldest, Robert, born in 1843. Then Edward, Eddie, in 1846. Then William, who everyone called Willie in 1850. Then Thomas, who everyone called Tad, in 1853. The house filled with noise with children and laughter and the particular chaos of a family that was, by all evidence, genuinely happy.
Abraham Lincoln would say it plainly years later, watching his wife move through a White House reception, watching her put guests at ease, listening to her make people feel as though they were the most important person in the room. My wife is as handsome as when she was a girl, he said, “And I fell in love with her.
And what is more, I have never fallen out.” He meant it. and she in her own way had always been right. She had staked her life on a man that her family disapproved of, that Springfield society had raised its eyebrows at, that history had not yet noticed. And when Abraham Lincoln won the presidential election in November of 1860, defeating three other candidates and carrying the whole of the North with him, Mary Todd Lincoln had been living in the certainty of that moment for two decades.
She had packed their trunks for Washington. She had imagined in detail the house she would soon inhabit. She had not imagined what it would cost. The White House she had dreamed of, the White House she had believed in with a conviction that outlasted everyone’s skepticism was waiting for her.
But so was everything else. the war that was already beginning, the newspapers already sharpening their pens, the two small boys who had never known anything but Springfield and would soon live in a house with a weight of an entire country pressed against every door. She wore the ring on the train to Washington.
She would wear it for the rest of her life. Washington was not what she had imagined. The White House she arrived in in the early months of 1861 was not the grand stage she had pictured from Springfield. It was drafty and badly furnished. The carpets were worn through in places. The curtains were motheheaten.
Previous administrations had treated the public rooms with a kind of indifference that bordered on neglect, and the private quarters were not much better. Mary Lincoln, who had grown up in one of the finest houses in Lexington and had spent 20 years imagining this moment, looked at her new home and immediately set about changing it.
Congress gave her $20,000 for renovations. She spent more than that. The press noticed. In the newspapers of 1861 and 1862, Mary Lincoln was almost never given a charitable reading. She was too southern. Born in Kentucky with half brothers fighting for the Confederacy, she was suspected by northern critics of harboring rebel sympathies.
She was too extravagant. Her redecoration of the White House, her expenditure on gowns and gloves and jewelry in a time of war gave her enemies an easy target. She was too present, too opinionated, too visible in a role that the era had decided was meant to be ornamental. She had not come this far to be ornamental.
But the attacks accumulated. She could not grieve in public without being accused of theater. She could not spend without being accused of corruption. A letter was produced falsely, it was later established, claiming she had passed military information to Confederate agents. She was called a spy in the pages of newspapers that reached a 100,000 homes a week.
Abraham Lincoln said very little about it publicly. Privately, according to those close to him, he was pained by what his wife endured. watching her put guests at ease during state dinners. He had said she was as handsome as when she was a girl, that he had never fallen out of love with her. He had meant it then. He still meant it.
But the presidency was consuming him in ways that left very little room for anything else. The war was widening. The casualty lists were lengthening. The weight of the thing was visible on his face. They had less time together than either of them had anticipated. What they still had in the early White House years were their sons.
Willie was the one who seemed to have inherited something essential from both parents. He had his father’s gift for language, writing small poems, composing rhymes that made the household laugh, and his mother’s fierce attention to the people around him. He was 11 years old. He had dark eyes and a serious face that broke unexpectedly into something brilliant when he smiled.
In January of 1862, Willie fell ill. The doctors said typhoid. The White House was an old building sitting above drainage that had never been properly managed, and the winter that year was wet and cold. He was sick for several weeks. He died on February 20th, 1862. He was in the green room when they laid him out. The room had been arranged carefully.
White flowers, a small casket, the hushed formality of official death. Mary Lincoln could not bring herself to enter. She stood at the threshold and turned away. She could not go in. She would not go in again. Down the hall, Abraham Lincoln sat at his desk weeping. He had gone to his son’s room alone and wept there openly in a way that the men who worked for him had never seen before.
He was not a man who cried easily. He cried that day. What happened afterward is something that multiple biographers, including Gene H. Baker, have described in nearly identical terms. In the weeks that followed, Abraham Lincoln visited the crypt where Willy’s body was temporarily held, not once, but several times, going alone at night in private.
He sat with his son in the dark. Mary Lincoln did not know this for a long time. What she knew was that Willie was gone and that the world expected her to continue. She wrote to a friend in the months after Willy’s death. We have met with so overwhelming an affliction in the death of our beloved Willie, a being too precious for Earth that I am so completely unnerved that I can scarcely command myself to write.
She wore black everyday for nearly 3 years. The morning dresses became a kind of armor and also to those who did not understand her another source of criticism. She consulted spiritualists. She held seances in the White House. She was looking for Willie in the only places she knew to look. Abraham Lincoln watching this said to a doctor that he was worried that if she did not moderate her grief, he would have to send her to the government hospital for the insane.
the large white building on the hill overlooking the city. He had said it gently. He had meant it as concern. She did not forget the words. In April of 1862, she wrote a short line to a friend that has stayed in the record ever since. When we are in sorrow, she wrote, “Quiet is very necessary to us.
” She was asking in the only way she knew how to be left alone with what she was carrying. No one left her alone. The war continued, the casualty lists continued. The newspapers continued, and the White House, the house she had believed in, had campaigned for, had pinned her life to, went on asking things of her that she no longer had the reserves to give.
She had not yet hit the bottom. That was still coming. The war ended on April 9th, 1865. After four years, after 600,000 dead. After Gettysburg and Antidum and Cold Harbor and a hundred other fields that no one who was not there could fully imagine. after the Emancipation Proclamation and the re-election and the second inaugural address with its extraordinary closing plea for malice toward none and charity for all.
The war ended and Abraham Lincoln had won it. Washington celebrated for 5 days. On the evening of April 14th, Abraham Lincoln did not especially want to go out. He had been tired for weeks. tired in a way that went beyond sleep. The weight of four years had settled into him visibly. The photographs from 1865 show a man aged a decade beyond what the calendar should have allowed.
The deep lines around his eyes, the gauntness, the expression of a person who had been carrying something almost too heavy to carry and had not yet been permitted to put it down. Mary had arranged for them to attend a performance at Ford’s Theater that evening, a comedy called Our American Cousin.
The city expected the president to appear in public. It was a celebration of a kind. They had been expected. They went. The presidential box was on the upper right of the stage. They arrived late. The play had already begun. And when Lincoln appeared at the railing, the audience rose and applauded.
The orchestra played Hail to the Chief. Lincoln acknowledged the room with a small bow, the way he always did, a little awkwardly, a little warmly. Then he sat down beside his wife. Mary Lincoln leaned toward him. She would say later that she had been happy that night, that they had been laughing, that she had taken his hand.
At 10:13 in the evening, a single shot was fired from behind them. The bullet entered the back of Abraham Lincoln’s head and lodged behind his right eye. He slumped forward in his chair. Mary caught him. She screamed, a sound that cut through the noise and confusion of the theater and reached the street outside.
Major Henry Wthbone, seated with them, grappled with the assassin, John Wils Booth, who slashed his arm with a knife before leaping to the stage below. Lincoln was carried across the street to a boarding house, the Peterson House. They laid him on a bed in a back room. The bed was too short for him.
They had to position him diagonally. Mary Lincoln was not allowed to stay in the room. She sat in the parlor outside in a chair for 9 hours. She could hear him breathing through the wall. She was brought in once briefly and asked to leave when her distress became too loud. She sat back in the parlor. She waited.
At 7:22 in the morning of April 15th, 1865, Abraham Lincoln died. Secretary of War Edwin Stanton, who was in the room, is reported to have said, “Now he belongs to the ages.” Mary Lincoln, sitting outside the closed door, heard the silence that followed. What happened to her in the hours and days after has been recorded in fragments by friends, by attendants, by the men who worked for her husband’s administration, and found her presence in her grief inconvenient, and her grief itself excessive. She was helped back to the White House. She could not enter the room where her husband had slept. She lay in a guest bedroom, shaking for 2 days. The country was mourning. The country was doing it in the approved fashion. Flags at half mast, black crepe on the
buildings, solemn processions and official eulogies. Abraham Lincoln was already becoming a monument, a mythology, something larger than a man. Mary Lincoln was still just a woman in a room, a widow at 46 with three dead sons and one surviving child who kept a careful emotional distance with debts that she had only dimly understood the scale of with no pension, no official provision, no plan.
Congress in its initial response to her situation offered very little. She left the White House five weeks after the assassination. It took her that long to be able to move. By that point, the new president, Andrew Johnson, had been waiting for her to vacate long enough that the waiting had become its own kind of commentary.
She went to Chicago. She moved with Tad, her youngest, 12 years old and still her closest companion, into a series of hotels and rented rooms, trying to manage the arithmetic of a life that no longer added up. The money her husband had left was less than she had believed. The pension Congress would eventually grant her after years of public lobbying, after a campaign that required her to expose her finances to the judgment of the American press, would not come for three more years.
In the meantime, the newspapers, which had spent four years cataloging her flaws, did not stop when the war did. She had one friend in this period who stayed. Her name was Elizabeth Keckley. She was a formerly enslaved woman who had purchased her own freedom in 1855 and built a life as a dress maker in Washington.
An extraordinary dress maker whose client list included the wives of senators, cabinet members, and eventually the first lady of the United States. She had made Mary Lincoln’s gowns throughout the White House years. She had been in the room at the Peterson House. She had been one of the first people called to comfort Mary in the hours after Lincoln died.
By 1867, Mary Lincoln, in a moment of desperation that she would later describe as the worst mistake of her life, had written to Elizabeth Keckley simply, “I consider you my best living friend.” She meant it. She had no one else left to mean it to. That friendship and what happened to it belongs to the next chapter.
What matters now is this. For 2 years after Lincoln’s murder, Mary Todd Lincoln moved through the world as though the world itself had become hostile terrain. She was not wrong. Everywhere she turned, the story the country wanted to tell was the story of the great man who had died.
She was a footnote in that story, a difficult footnote. In 1867, in a decision that she believed was practical and that the public would receive as she intended it, she made a plan. She would sell her White House wardrobe, the gowns, the shawls, the silk and satin dresses that she no longer needed and could no longer afford to store, and use the money to clear her debts. She did it under a false name.
She called herself Mrs. Clark. It was not enough. In the summer of 1867, 2 years after her husband’s assassination, Mary Lincoln traveled to New York City with a plan. She had arranged to consign her White House wardrobe through a pair of brokers on Broadway. Silk evening dresses, velvet gowns, lace shawls, the finery of a life she had spent and could not get back.
The sale would raise money. It would reduce the debts that had been accumulating since Lincoln died without a will adequate to the scale of her obligations. It was, she believed, a sensible and private arrangement. She had registered at the hotel under the name Mrs. Clark. Within days, the brokers had leaked her identity to the press.
The story was everywhere before the week was out. Newspapers from New York to Chicago ran it on the front page. the widow of Abraham Lincoln, the martyr president, the savior of the union, the man whose face was already being proposed for monuments and statues and the sides of public buildings was selling off her dresses in a Broadway secondhand shop.
The coverage was not sympathetic. The Chicago Journal put it with the bluntness that the era considered journalism. The most charitable construction that Mary Lincoln’s friends can put on her strange course is that she is insane. That sentence printed in October of 1867 was the first time the word was used publicly about her.
It would not be the last. Mary Lincoln read the coverage in her hotel room. The plan she had believed was practical had become a national humiliation. The money she had hoped to raise was largely unrealized. Buyers stayed away from the broker’s shop, put off by the spectacle, by the idea of owning something that had become a symbol of a widow’s desperation rather than a relic of a presidency.
She returned to Chicago, having lost far more than she had hoped to gain. She had also lost Elizabeth Keckley, not immediately, not all at once. But the unraveling had begun. In 1868, Elizabeth Keckley published a memoir. It was called Behind the Scenes, or 30 Years a Slave and Four Years in the White House, an account of her extraordinary life from enslavement in Virginia to the Drawing Rooms of the Lincoln administration.
It was one of the first memoirs ever published by a black woman who had served in the White House. It was candid, intimate, and deeply sympathetic to Mary Lincoln. It had been written, in Keckley’s own words, to place her friend in a better light before the world. Mary Lincoln’s eldest son, Robert, did not see it that way.
Robert Todd Lincoln was 24 years old in 1868. He had survived the war, arranged through his mother’s insistence to serve on Grant’s staff in a position of relative safety rather than in the field, and had returned to build a law career in Chicago. He was already becoming the man he would remain for the rest of his life, meticulous, controlled, fiercely protective of his father’s legacy, and deeply uncomfortable with his mother’s visibility.
According to multiple contemporary accounts, Robert moved swiftly to suppress the Keckley memoir. He worked through channels, legal, social, reputational, to ensure the book was discredited and its distribution limited. He largely succeeded. The book disappeared from shelves within months. Elizabeth Keckley’s reputation suffered damage from which it did not recover in her lifetime.
Whether Mary Lincoln formally ended the friendship is a matter of some dispute. What is not disputed is that after 1868, the two women who had once been each other’s closest confidants never regained what they had lost. The woman Mary had called her best living friend was gone. She was not replaced.
In 1871, Tad Lincoln died. Thomas Lincoln had been 18 years old. He had traveled with his mother through Europe in the years after his father’s assassination. The two of them a drift together in German spas and French hotels, neither of them quite belonging anywhere. He had been her companion in every sense of the word, the last of her children still close to her, the one she had organized her days around.
He died of a respiratory illness in Chicago in July with his mother beside him. She was now the last one. She had outlived her mother. She had outlived Eddie, dead at three. She had outlived Willie, dead at 11 in the White House. She had outlived Abraham, shot in the theater. She had outlived Tad, dead at 18.
She had one surviving child. His name was Robert. He was a prosperous attorney. He had a wife and a daughter, and a life that was proceeding exactly as a life in that era was supposed to proceed. He visited his mother when propriety required it. He wrote to her when he felt he should. He also, beginning in the early 1870s, had her watched.
The behavior he was observing was, by several accounts, becoming increasingly erratic. She moved constantly from hotel to hotel, city to city, sometimes with trunks of belongings that filled entire suites. She spent in patterns that had no logic he could identify. She was afraid at times of things she could not name, convinced that strangers meant her harm, that her finances were worse than they were, that forces were gathering against her.
In 1873, she told her doctor that an Indian spirit was pulling wires from her eyes and bones from her cheeks. Robert hired Pinkerton detectives to follow her. He consulted physicians. He consulted lawyers. He spent the better part of two years building a case quietly and carefully the way a good attorney builds a case.
Gathering testimony, assembling witnesses, identifying the legal mechanism by which the state of Illinois permitted a family member to have a person declared legally insane and remanded into institutional care. He told almost no one was planning. In the spring of 1875, Mary Lincoln was in Florida taking the air by the water when she became convinced with a sudden and overwhelming certainty that her son Robert was ill.
She sent a panicked telegram to his law partner. She rushed back to Chicago. Robert was fine, but he had been waiting for her. On the morning of May 19th, 1875, a lawyer named Leonard Sweat arrived at the Grand Pacific Hotel in Chicago where Mary Lincoln was staying. Sweat was not a stranger to her. He had been a close friend of her husbands, one of the men who had known Abraham Lincoln on the circuit courts of Illinois, who had ridden the same roads and argued before the same judges, and shared the particular bond of men who had come up together. He was a trusted name, a familiar face. He told her he needed to take her somewhere. He did not tell her where. Mary Lincoln was reluctant. She did not want to go. According to the account that Sweat himself later put into
writing, she resisted calmly at first, then with increasing alarm, and he was forced to tell her plainly that if she did not come willingly, the police officers waiting outside the hotel would take her by force. He told her they could use handcuffs if necessary. She went.
The carriage took her to the Cook County Courthouse on North Clark Street. Sweat led her in through a side door, not the main entrance, not the way ordinary visitors entered, and brought her into a courtroom. She stopped when she saw it. There was a judge. There was a jury of 12 men. There were 17 witnesses already seated, physicians, hotel clerks, store attendants, her own personal servants, people from every corner of her recent life.
Her son, Robert, was in the room. He had been there before she arrived. There was also a defense attorney. His name was Isaac Arnold. He was like Sweat, a man who had known Abraham Lincoln. He had been in theory appointed to represent her. What Mary Lincoln did not know, what she would only learn afterward in pieces from letters and accounts that filtered to her over the following months, was that Isaac Arnold had been arranged for her by Robert, not to protect her, to manage her. His instructions, according to accounts that emerged from the trial record, were to offer no rebuttal and no cross-examination. He was not there to defend her. He was there to fulfill the procedural requirement that a defense attorney be present. She had come to her own trial with no one on her side. The proceedings lasted less than 3 hours. 17 witnesses
testified to her instability, her spending, her fears, her erratic movements, her strange statements about spirits and wires and bones. Each one was called by the prosecution. None were challenged. Isaac Arnold sat at the defense table and said almost nothing. The jury deliberated for 10 minutes. They returned a verdict of insanity.
Robert Todd Lincoln was appointed conservator of his mother’s estate. Her money, her bonds, her property, the financial remnants of a life effective immediately. Later, in a letter that has survived in the historical record, Leonard Sweat, the man who had escorted her to the courthouse, the man who had threatened her with handcuffs, would write to a colleague about what had happened that day.
He described Mary Lincoln’s response to the proceedings with a directness that is difficult to read without stopping. She believed, Sweat wrote, that I, who ought to be her friend, was conspiring with Robert and you to lock her up and rob her of her money. He did not, in the letter, argue that she was wrong.
Within hours of the verdict, Mary Lincoln left the courthouse and made her way alone to a pharmacy. She asked for ladum. It was a common remedy of the era, an opiumbased tincture used for pain, for sleep, for the ordinary miseries of 19th century existence. In sufficient quantities, it was lethal. She knew this. According to historian Jason Emerson, who uncovered letters pertaining to this period in 2005, she visited at least one pharmacy where the drugist recognized her and gave her what appeared to be the preparation she had asked for. She returned to the hotel and consumed it. She did not die. What the pharmacist had given her was a placebo. She was admitted to Belleview Place Sanitarium in Betavia, Illinois on May 20th, 1875,
the day after the trial. It was a private institution wellappointed by the standards of its time, set in quiet grounds outside the city. Dr. Richard Patterson, who ran it, had built his practice on the idea of gentle, progressive care. Mary Lincoln arrived with a trunk of belongings and immediately began writing letters.
She wrote to lawyers. She wrote to friends. She wrote to anyone she could think of who might help her make a case for her own sanity. A reporter from the Chicago Post and Mail came to interview her during her stay and left, convinced that she was entirely rational. He wrote as much in his newspaper. Nobody at the original trial read the article, but two people, a lawyer named James Bradwell and his wife Myra, one of the first women ever admitted to the Illinois bar, had read it.
They began working on her behalf quietly and persistently through the summer of 1875. They visited her. They wrote letters of their own. They pressed Robert through channels he found difficult to ignore on the question of whether his mother truly required continued institutionalization. On September 10th, 1875, Mary Lincoln walked out of Belleview Place.
She had been inside for less than 4 months. A second trial the following year formally overturned the insanity verdict and restored her legal independence. She left the United States shortly after and moved to France to a small town in the Pyrenees where she was not for the first time in many years recognized in the street.
She did not speak to Robert for 5 years. What she did not know, what none of them knew was that Robert had kept everything. the letters, the trial records, the private correspondence between himself and the lawyers and doctors he had assembled. He had kept it all and labeled it carefully in his own handwriting with a name that tells you everything you need to know about how he understood what he had done.
He called the folder the MTL insanity file. He put it in a cabinet. He closed the drawer. For decades, historians believed the file had been destroyed. Robert Todd Lincoln spent much of his later life burning documents, his father’s papers, his own correspondence, anything he felt should not outlast him.
It was assumed the insanity file had gone the same way. It had not. In 2005, a historian named Jason Emerson was going through a collection of papers that had belonged to Robert’s lawyer. boxes that had been stored in an attic for 40 years, untouched, forgotten. Inside, in a trunk that had not been opened since the 19th century, he found 25 letters.
20 of them were in Mary Lincoln’s handwriting. Most had been written from inside the asylum. She had been writing to the people she trusted, asking them to understand what had happened to her, asking them in the careful and measured language of a woman who knew her words might be used against her to help her get out.
She had been writing to anyone who might listen. She had always been writing. She came home the way people come home when there is nowhere else to go. She spent three years in France first in a small city called Po at the foot of the Pyrenees where the air was clean and the winters were mild and no one stopped her in the street to ask how she was bearing up.
She walked the prominade in the mornings. She took the waters. She lived for the first time since Springfield in something close to anonymity. It was not happiness, but it was quiet. She returned to the United States in 1880. She was 61 years old. Her health had been failing for years. The migraines that had plagued her since the White House, the joint pain, the accumulated weight of a body that had been asked to carry too much for too long. She needed to come home.
Home in the end was her sister’s house in Springfield. Francis Wallace, the last of the Todd sisters still close to her, had offered her a room. Mary Lincoln accepted. She arrived with her trunks. By some accounts, there were dozens of them, packed with the possessions of a life lived in transit, in hotels and rented rooms, and a sanatorium in Betavia, and an apartment in the Pyrenees.
The trunks filled the room so completely that there was barely space to stand. She kept the curtains drawn. Neighbors noticed. They knew who she was. The children in the street had grown up hearing the stories. The famous widow, the one who had been in the theater that night, the one whose son had taken her to court.
They pointed up at her window as they passed. They called her the crazy lady on the hill. She did not go outside. In those final years, she and Robert arrived at something that could not quite be called reconciliation, but was at least the absence of open war. He visited occasionally. She did not turn him away.
What passed between them in that curtained room has not been recorded. Perhaps very little passed at all. She died on July 16th, 1882. She was 63 years old. The cause was listed as a stroke. She was in her sister’s room when it happened in the same house on Aristocracy Hill from which 40 years before almost to the day she had walked as the bride of Abraham Lincoln.
The same house, the same street, the same town she had always been so certain was only the beginning. She was buried beside her husband at Lincoln’s tomb in Oakidge Cemetery. beside Abraham, beside Eddie, beside Willie, beside Tad. She was the last one in. The ring was still on her finger when they laid her down.
Love is eternal. She had worn it for 40 years through the White House and the war and the assassination and the gowns sold under a false name and the trial she had not known was coming and the asylum in Betavia and the years in France and the room with the curtains always drawn. Through every abandonment, through every verdict, she had never taken it off.
History would spend the next century and a half deciding what to make of her. Whether she was unstable or misunderstood, whether the grief that defined her later years was illness or simply the accurate response of a human being to an inhuman amount of loss. whether Robert had been a frightened son or something colder than that.
Whether the system that had taken 10 minutes to strip her of her freedom deserved a different name than the one it gave itself. These questions do not have clean answers. They were not meant to. What is not in question is this. She was the girl from Lexington who had believed in Abraham Lincoln before the world knew his name. She had been right, completely exactly right about who he was and what he would become.
She had paid for being right in ways that no monument has ever measured. And when they placed her in the ground beside him, after 40 years and four funerals, and one trial, and one asylum, and a room full of trunks in the dark, she was at last exactly where she had always said she would be.
