Editor's Note: This
article is excerpted from Jason Emerson's book, The Madness of Mary Lincoln
(2007, Southern Illinois University Press), recently named "Book of
Year" by the Illinois State Historical Society, and appears here
through the courtesy of the author and his publisher.
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Mary Todd
Lincoln in mourning dress following the death of her son Willie
in February, 1862.
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On Wednesday April 12, 1865,
President Abraham Lincoln wrote a playful yet tender note to his
wife notifying her that he would join her daily carriage ride on
Friday the 14th. It was a pleasant spring day and the Lincolns, who
rode alone at the president’s request, discussed their plans for
life after his presidency. They would travel across America to visit
California, then to Europe, and Lincoln wanted to visit Jerusalem.
They considered whether or not they would return to their house in
Springfield, Illinois or live in Chicago upon Lincoln’s retirement
from the White House. “During the drive he was so gay,” Mary said,
“that I said to him, laughingly, ‘Dear Husband, you almost startle
me by your great cheerfulness,’ he replied, ‘and well I may feel so,
Mary, I consider this day, the war, has come to a close.” The
Lincolns continued the blissful closeness of their afternoon
carriage ride at Ford’s Theatre that night, watching a performance
of Our American Cousin in the company of Clara Harris and Major
Henry R. Rathbone. Mary was supremely happy, and smiled and leaned
onto her husband several times. “What will Miss Harris think of my
hanging on to you so?” she whispered contentedly to her husband.
“She won’t think anything of it,” the president replied. When John
Wilkes Booth fired the fatal shot into Lincoln’s brain during Act 3
Scene 2, Mary Lincoln was holding her husband’s hand.
“The president is shot!” she
shrieked as Booth leaped to the stage from the twelve-foot-high box
and cried “Sic semper tyrannis!” As soldiers, civilians and
physicians crowded into the presidential box, Mary Lincoln pleaded
with Dr. Charles Leale, “Oh, Doctor, do what you can for my dear
husband, do what you can for him.” Lincoln’s body was carried across
Tenth Street to the Petersen house, while the stunned First Lady
followed. Twenty-one year-old Captain Robert Lincoln, just returned
from the surrender at Appomattox Courthouse and visiting with his
friend John Hay in the White House, was sent for, and he arrived at
the Petersen house not long after. While Secretary of War Edwin M.
Stanton directed the machinations of the government manhunt from a
side room of the Petersen house, Mary Lincoln was alternating
between weeping at her husband’s side and wailing in the front
parlor. “Why didn’t he shoot me?” she shrieked when she saw one
acquaintance, “Why didn’t he shoot me?” Clara Harris, covered in her
fiancée’s blood from his arm wound caused by Booth’s dagger, tried
to comfort the First Lady, but every time she approached, Mary would
look on her with horror and scream, “Oh! My husband’s blood, my dear
husband’s blood!” Robert comforted his mother during this period,
and at times stood vigil in the death room, seeking his own comfort
from Senator Charles Sumner. When Lincoln finally breathed his last
at 7:22 a.m. on April 15, Mary Lincoln’s grief was inconsolable.
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Robert Todd
Lincoln at 21, about the time of the assassination of his
father. Robert would be the only Lincoln child to survive into
adulthood, dying in 1926 at the age of 83.
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Robert escorted his mother back to
the White House, where they reunited with youngest Lincoln boy Tad,
who had been at the National Theater that night watching a
children’s play. “Returning to Mrs. Lincoln’s room, I found her in a
new paroxysm of grief,” Mary’s seamstress, Elizabeth Keckly, later
wrote. “Robert was bending over his mother with tender affection,
and little Tad was couched at the foot of the bed, with a world of
agony in his young face.” Keckly was with the Lincolns in the White
House during those dark post-assassination days. She watched as the
First Family became adjusted to their new reality, especially the
relationship and reactions of Robert and Mary. “Robert was very
tender to his mother in the days of her sorrow. He suffered deeply,
as his haggard face indicated, but he was ever manly and collected
when in the presence of his mother.” President Andrew Johnson
allowed Mary Lincoln much latitude in her bereavement as to when she
would move out of the White House. She did not vacate the house
until more than one month after the assassination. On May 22, 1865,
Mary and her boys left to begin a new life in Chicago.
In the audacity of John Wilkes
Booth’s act and the aftermath of Reconstruction, Americans often
overlook the very deep impact that Lincoln’s assassination had on
his immediate family. Not only did it leave eleven-year-old Tad
without a father and twenty-one-year-old Robert as head of the
family, but it left Mary Lincoln a shattered widow. Many family
friends, contemporaries and subsequent historians attribute the
breaking point of Mary Lincoln’s tenuous mental state to that “very
dreadful night,” as Robert later called it. Robert considered his
mother’s derangement the direct result of it. Mary Lincoln herself
wrote only seven months after the assassination, “When I reflect, as
I am always doing, upon the overwhelming loss, of that, most
idolized boy [her son Willie in 1862], and the crushing blow, that
deprived me, of my all in all of this life [Abraham], I wonder that
I retain my reason & live.” Yet upon a deeper look into Mary
Lincoln’s life, it becomes evident that her peculiarities and
peccadilloes began long before that fateful Good Friday in 1865….
Abraham and Mary were wed — despite
one broken engagement and an eighteen-month hiatus in their
relationship — in November 1842. Lincoln had inscribed on the inside
of Mary’s wedding band the phrase “Love is Eternal,” and the
marriage was, by most accounts, based on a foundation of love. “My
wife is as handsome as when she was a girl, and I, a poor nobody
then, fell in love with her; and what is more, I have never fallen
out,” Lincoln is reported to have said during the White House years.
General Daniel Sickles, who knew the Lincolns on a personal level
during the Civil War, stated he had “never seen a more devoted
couple;” while abolitionist Jane Grey Swisshelm noted their devotion
in the way that Mary “completely merged herself in her husband….”
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Mary Todd
and Abraham Lincoln in 1846, four years after marrying
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Of course, the Lincoln marriage was
not perfect, and both Abraham and Mary had their faults. Mary
Lincoln was intelligent, witty, vivacious and cultured, but she also
was spoiled, petulant, selfish nervous and excitable. This duality
of personality can be traced all the way back to her childhood.
Mary’s cousin once wrote that, as a child, Mary was “very highly
strung . . . having an emotional temperament much like an April day,
sunning all over with laughter one moment, the next crying as though
her heart would break.” During the Springfield years, it was
familiarly stated that Mary was “always either in the garret or the
cellar.” In the White House, presidential secretary William O.
Stoddard wrote, “It was not easy, at first, to understand why a lady
who could be one day so kindly, so considerate, so generous, so
thoughtful and so hopeful, could, upon another day, appear so
unreasonable, so irritable, so despondent, so even niggardly, and so
prone to see the dark, the wrong side of men and women and events.”
This emotionalism dominated Mary, shaped her personality and formed
the background for her later hysteria and self-indulgence following
the deaths of her husband and children, according to one
psychologist and biographer. “No other [trait] was more potent in
changing [her personality] from the grade termed ‘abnormal’ to that
termed ‘pathologic,’ and in changing her mentality from balanced to
unbalanced.”
One of Mary’s most memorable traits
was her “unusually high temper . . . that invariably got the better
of her,” and made her many enemies. When offended or antagonized,
“her agreeable qualities instantly disappeared beneath a wave of
stinging satire or sarcastic bitterness.” John Hay and John Nicolay,
President Lincoln’s White House secretaries, dubbed Mary the
“Hellcat;” Herndon later called her a “she-wolf,” and “the female
wildcat of the age,” and stated that her irascible nature caused
Lincoln a lifetime of trouble and unhappiness. Yet her temper was
mercurial and she nearly always was regretful when her anger passed.
In fact, Mary suffered from severe migraine headaches her entire
adult life, which may have had some impact on her temper as well.
James Gourley, a Springfield
neighbor, said the Lincolns had their ups and downs, like all
families, but got along as well as anyone. “Lincoln yielded to his
wife — in fact, almost any other man, had he known the woman as I
did, would have done the same thing.” Lincoln sometimes would ignore
his wife’s hysterics, Gourley stated, and frequently he would laugh
at her. If Mary did not calm down, Lincoln would simply pick up one
of the children and leave the house. Gourley’s reminiscences are in
accord with others from the White House years. Mary’s seamstress,
Elizabeth Keckly, wrote in 1868 that Lincoln “was a kind and
indulgent husband, and when he saw faults in his wife he excused
them as he would excuse the impulsive acts of a child.” Most
accounts of their married years in Springfield, collected after
Lincoln’s death in 1865, coincide with the statements that Mary was
mercurial and often difficult, while Lincoln was often detached, yet
ever patient.
Abraham Lincoln, however, was not a
model husband. He was away from home riding the eighth judicial
circuit for six to eight months a year, leaving Mary alone with the
children. This terrified Mary, as she was constantly in dire fear of
house fires and burglars, and either she or her husband often
arranged for a neighbor boy to sleep in the house with her as
protection. As Lincoln’s political career ascended he also spent
time away to give political speeches and attend campaign rallies.
For Mary, who was not only lonely, but also afraid of being by
herself in the house (and was especially terrified of thunder and
lightning storms) such travel was not ideal. Mary resented Lincoln’s
time on the judicial circuit because he was the only lawyer who
stayed away from home the entire circuit. Also, as the senior
partner in the law firm of Lincoln and Herndon, Mary felt Lincoln
should have stayed in Springfield and sent Herndon out to traverse
the state each term. In fact, Mary once told a neighbor that if
Lincoln stayed home as he should, she could have loved him better.
But even when Lincoln was home, he
still was a difficult husband for Mary. Lincoln was busy and often
distracted by politics and work; he eschewed normal social graces
such as wearing appropriate attire both in and out of the house; he
often said inappropriate things in public. Lincoln also was
disrespectful to Mary as a homemaker. Lincoln often arrived late, or
not at all, for dinner; he would bring friends home for dinner with
him without notifying Mary; he was indifferent to food and never
complimented her on her cooking. As Joshua Wolf Shenk characterized
in his acclaimed study of Lincoln’s melancholy, “the Lincolns’
marriage had barrels of difficulties, exacerbated by her volatility
and his withdrawal.”
Abraham Lincoln’s psychological
influence on his wife cannot be ignored. His love and patience were
the perfect anodynes for her volatile temper and erratic
emotionalism. When once teased about his wife’s tantrums, Lincoln
replied, “If you knew how little harm it does me, and how much good
it does her, you wouldn’t wonder that I am meek.” Lincoln was not
weak in this regard, simply indulgent and patient, even parental. As
Michael Burlingame has shown, Lincoln assumed the role of “father
surrogate” to Mary, someone to indulge, love and protect her. In
fact, Mary’s White House seamstress stated that nothing pleased Mary
quite so much as when Lincoln referred to her as his “child wife.”
This was the essence of Lincoln’s influence on Mary: he played
multiple roles in her life, satisfying multiple needs. “He was . . .
from my eighteenth year — Always — lover — husband — father & all
all to me — Truly my all,” she wrote in 1869. Lincoln was the buffer
between her and the rest of society that she sorely needed, and the
absence of his restraining influence after 1865 would have dire
consequences….
Once Lincoln attained the
presidency, Mary felt she had arrived at her true and entitled
destiny. Yet the great stress and consternation of the White House
years, one could argue, only pushed her mind closer to the edge of
what was later called insanity. From the time of her husband’s
election, Mary was in constant fear of his assassination and
therefore of her own loss. She constantly asked about better
protection for his life, although he always rebuffed her
suggestions.
Washington society disliked Mary
Lincoln. They openly scoffed at her western uncouthness, and
simultaneously resented her sense of regal entitlement and haughty
air, which led her on huge spending sprees and lavish partying in
the midst of war. Mary also was disparaged for her “inordinate
greed, coupled with an utter lack of sense of propriety,” which
manifested itself in her easy willingness to accept gifts for her
influence with the president, and through her susceptibility to the
most obvious flattery. One psychiatrist called this Mary’s
“narcissistic lavishness,” about which he succinctly explained, “She
thrived on adulation, required attention, reveled in adornment, and
was sensitive to snubs.” Northerners considered her a rebel, since
she was from Kentucky; southerners considered her a traitor; and she
was therefore derided by the presses of both sections of the
country.
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The
Lincoln's third son, Willie, at about five. It was Willie's
death at the age of eleven in 1862 (probably of typhoid fever) that seemed to trigger Mary's emotional decline.
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A major turning point for Mary’s
emotional and mental states came with the next loss in her life, the
death of eleven-year-old Willie in February 1862. Of all the Lincoln
boys, Willie was the most like his father — precocious, honest, kind
and thoughtful — and today is considered the favorite son of both
parents. Willie was “an amiable good hearted boy,” who “had more
judgment and foresight than any boy of his age that I have ever
known,” wrote Horatio Nelson Taft, father of Tad and Willie’s daily
playmates. “He was so bravely and beautifully himself,” eulogized
family friend and editor N. P. Willis. “A wild flower, transplanted
from the prairie to the hothouse, he retained his prairie habits,
unalterably pure and simple, till he died.” Both the Lincolns felt
this loss grievously, but for Mary, who always was an extremely
emotional woman, her sorrow at Willie’s death was incapacitating.
She stayed confined to her room for weeks, prompting Robert Lincoln
to request Mary’s older sister, Elizabeth Edwards, to come stay at
the White House. When she left two months later, the president
arranged for a nurse. Mary could not look at anything connected with
Willie. She removed all his clothes and possessions and never again
invited Willie and Tad’s daily playmates, Bud and Holly Taft, to the
White House.
Commissioner of Public Buildings
Benjamin French wrote in his diary that Mary “was terribly affected
by her loss, and almost refused to be comforted.” Elizabeth Keckly,
Mary’s seamstress, wrote, “Mrs. Lincoln’s grief was inconsolable. In
one of her paroxysms of grief the President kindly bent over his
wife, took her by the arm, and gently led her to a window. With a
stately, solemn gesture, he pointed to the lunatic asylum. ‘Mother,
do you see that large white building on the hill yonder? Try and
control your grief, or it will drive you mad, and we may have to
send you there.’”
Mary’s few mentions of Willie in
extant letters she wrote over the ensuing year reveal she created an
apotheosis for her son, calling him “too precious for this earth,”
and their “idolised” and “sainted” boy. Her letters also attest to
the weakness of her emotional state, for in May 1862 she stated how
she was “so completely unnerved, that I can scarcely command myself
to write.” While in July she wrote, “the anguish of the thought
[that Willie is gone] oftentimes, for days overcomes me.” By the
one-year anniversary of Willie’s death, Mary still was crushed,
showing what psychiatrists call an “exaggerated grief reaction” in
her hyper-sensitive and sustained response to her son’s death. “Only
those, who have passed through such bereavements, can realize, how
the heart bleeds at the return, of these anniversaries,” she wrote.
This last statement is interesting, since it was on the ten-year
anniversary of Lincoln’s assassination that Mary had her most
dramatic break with sanity.
It is important to note that
Keckly’s reminiscence is not the only reported instance of Abraham
Lincoln commenting on his wife’s mental state. William Herndon,
Lincoln’s law partner, stated in 1882 that “Mr. Lincoln held his
wife partly insane for years, and this shows his toleration of her
nature — his great forbearance of her outlandish acts, otherwise not
understood by the great world.” William P. Wood, superintendent of
the Old Capitol Prison, said in 1887 that Lincoln confided in him
during the war that his wife’s caprices, “I am satisfied, are the
result of partial insanity.”
These two statements may be true,
but are troublesome since there is no corroboration and they were
written seventeen and twenty-two years after Lincoln’s death,
respectively. Herndon called Lincoln “The most shut-mouthed man I
ever knew,” and made mention of “Lincoln’s reticence, secretiveness,
his somewhat unsocial nature, his somewhat retired disposition.”
Mary said that Lincoln “was not, a demonstrative man,” even with
her; “When he felt most deeply, he expressed, the least.” To think
Lincoln would comment on something as intensely private as his
wife’s “insanity” to a mere acquaintance such as Wood is, therefore,
doubtful; and to trust any statement of Herndon about Mary, whom he
avowedly despised, is problematic. Keckly’s story, however,
published in 1868, long before Mary’s 1875 insanity trial, is well
known and generally accepted. It produces an interesting historical
irony that for all the opprobrium toward Robert for committing his
mother to a sanitarium, it was in fact Abraham Lincoln who was the
first recorded family member to suggest that Mary may need
hospitalization.
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Abraham
Lincoln with his youngest son, Tad who survived his father, but
only for six years, dying at the age of eighteen in 1871,
probably of pneumonia upon returning from a 2 1/2 year stay in
Europe with Mary.
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Lincoln, however, was the reason
Mary retained her sanity after Willie’s death in 1862. Besides his
calming influence, and despite all her physical and emotional pain
during those first two years in the White House, she knew she must
be strong for the overwhelming burdens her husband had to bear as
president of a divided nation. Mary told her sister that after
Willie’s death she felt she had “fallen into a deep pit of gloom and
despair without a ray of light anywhere. If I had not felt the spur
of necessity urging me to cheer Mr. Lincoln, whose grief was as
great as my own, I could never have smiled again.” In early 1865,
Robert marveled at what a “brave front” his mother put on even
though they all knew she was suffering. “Most women would be in bed
groaning, but not mother! She just straightens herself up a little
more and says, ‘It is better to laugh than be sighing.’ Tad would go
all to pieces if she reversed the words of that opera, and so would
my father.” Robert’s statement was made about his mother’s physical,
rather than emotional, health, but it serves as an interesting
juxtaposition to the personal self-pitying of her letters.
The suffering Robert alluded to
came from Mary’s July 2, 1863 carriage accident, during which, while
riding into Washington from the Soldier’s Home, the driver’s seat of
the presidential carriage became detached, throwing the driver to
the ground. The frightened horses began a frantic run along the Rock
Creek Road, near the Mount Pleasant Hospital, and Mary leaped from
the carriage to save herself. The news reports of the incident
stated that Mary was stunned, bruised and battered, but no bones
were broken and her injuries, which were immediately administered by
surgeons from the nearby hospital, did not appear serious. She did
suffer a bleeding wound on the back of her head caused by a sharp
stone, which doctors at the nearby hospital quickly stitched up. The
president telegraphed Robert at Cambridge not to worry, “Your mother
very slightly hurt by her fall.”
Mary took to her bed and Lincoln
sent for Rebecca Pomroy, the nurse who cared for Mary and Tad after
Willie’s death, to attend her. Unfortunately, as was common during
the Civil War era, Mary’s seemingly benign wound became infected. It
was three weeks before Mary was up and about, and her recovery seems
to have been incomplete. Mary Lincoln, who had suffered severe
migraine headaches her entire adult life, had them with greater
frequency after the accident. Robert Lincoln later told his aunt
that his mother never fully recovered from her head injury, which
implied, but did not explicitly state, that it had an impact on her
mental health as well.
Besides the physical aspect of the
injury, there also was an emotional one. Mary’s nurse wrote in her
diary the accident was really an assassination attempt on the
president as the driver’s seat was sabotaged. This undoubtedly
deepened Mary’s existing fear for her husband’s life. On a family
level, the president spent little time with his injured wife as he
was busy coordinating and monitoring the ongoing battle of
Gettysburg. Robert also did not come immediately to see his mother
and even ignored his father’s telegrams about it. These
circumstances must have furthered Mary’s sense of loss of connection
with her own family, for with Willie dead, Robert away at college
and Abraham busy with the war, Mary had only Tad to give her
undivided attention.
Mary’s intense grief over Willie’s
death, coupled with the effects of her head injury, did not cause
her to go mad, but did bring her nearer the breaking point. Emily
Todd Helm, Mary’s half-sister, noticed in 1863 that Mary was
nervous, excitable and wrought-up, and that she seemed in constant
fear of more sorrows being added to her life. “I believe if anything
should happen to you or Robert or Tad it would kill her,” Emily told
the president. Emily also recorded in her diary a most disturbing
and now-famous event in which Mary came into her room at night,
smiling and with eyes full of tears, to tell her that Willie visited
her at night to comfort her sorrow:
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The
Lincoln's second son , Eddie, at about three, a year before his
death in 1850, probably of tuberculosis.
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‘He lives Emily!’ she said with a
thrill in her voice I can never forget. ‘He comes to me every night,
and stands at the foot of my bed with the same sweet, adorable smile
he always had; he does not always come alone; little Eddie is
sometimes with him and twice he has come with our brother Alec, he
tells me he loves his Uncle Alec and is with him most of the time.
You cannot dream of the comfort this gives me. When I thought of my
little son in immensity, alone, without his mother to direct him, no
one to hold his little hand in loving guidance, it nearly broke my
heart.’ Sister Mary’s eyes were wide and shining and I had the
feeling of awe as if I were in the presence of the supernatural. It
is unnatural and abnormal, it frightens me."
These visions could have been mere
dreams, products of Mary’s unconscious mind, or, what sounds more
likely, hallucinations. If the latter, they were Mary’s first truly
psychotic symptoms. In either case, they show Mary exhibiting
complex defenses to help ease the burden of her overwhelming loss.
Indeed, in later years, at the end of her life, Mary would sleep
only on one side of her bed, saving the other side as “the
president’s place.” And again, in 1880, even though she had cut
Robert from her life, still she reveled in newspaper speculations of
her oldest son for president, a momentary reprieve of the loss of
her son and her own loss of social position, which would be
re-affirmed by her offspring. “I never in my life saw a more
peculiarly constituted woman. Search the world over, and you will
not find her counterpart,” Mary’s White House seamstress declared.
About the Author: Jason
Emerson is an independent historian who lives in Fredericksburg,
Virginia. He has worked as a U.S. National Park Service historical
interpreter at the Lincoln Home National Historic Site, the
Gettysburg National Military Park, and the Jefferson National
Expansion Memorial; and also as a professional journalist and
freelance writer. His articles have appeared in American Heritage,
American History, and Civil War Times magazines, the
Journal of the Illinois State Historical Society, Lincoln
Herald, and the Lincoln Forum Bulletin. He is a regular book
review contributor to Civil War Times and America's Civil
War magazines.
Mr. Emerson's next book, Lincoln
the Inventor: The Story of His Mechanical Genius, will be
published in January 2009 by Southern Illinois University Press. He
is currently preparing a biography of Robert Todd Lincoln. For more
information about Mr. Emerson and his historical work, visit his website
at www.jasonemerson.com.
 The Madness of Mary Lincoln
by Jason Emerson
From the publisher: In 2005,
historian Jason Emerson discovered a steamer trunk formerly owned by
Robert Todd Lincoln's lawyer and stowed in an attic for forty years.
The trunk contained a rare find: twenty-five letters pertaining to
Mary Todd Lincoln's life and insanity case, letters assumed long
destroyed by the Lincoln family. Mary wrote twenty of the letters
herself, more than half from the insane asylum to which her son
Robert had her committed, and many in the months and years after.
The Madness of Mary Lincoln is the
first examination of Mary Lincoln’s mental illness based on the lost
letters, and the first new interpretation of the insanity case in
twenty years. This compelling story of the purported insanity of one
of America’s most tragic first ladies provides new and previously
unpublished materials, including the psychiatric diagnosis of Mary’s
mental illness and her lost will.
Emerson charts Mary Lincoln’s
mental illness throughout her life and describes how a
predisposition to psychiatric illness and a life of mental and
emotional trauma led to her commitment to the asylum. The first to
state unequivocally that Mary Lincoln suffered from bipolar
disorder, Emerson offers a psychiatric perspective on the insanity
case based on consultations with psychiatrist experts.
This book reveals Abraham Lincoln’s
understanding of his wife’s mental illness and the degree to which
he helped keep her stable. It also traces Mary’s life after her
husband’s assassination, including her severe depression and
physical ailments, the harsh public criticism she endured, the Old
Clothes Scandal, and the death of her son Tad.
The Madness of Mary Lincoln is the
story not only of Mary, but also of Robert. It details how he dealt
with his mother’s increasing irrationality and why it embarrassed
his Victorian sensibilities; it explains the reasons he had his
mother committed, his response to her suicide attempt, and her plot
to murder him. It also shows why and how he ultimately agreed to her
release from the asylum eight months early, and what their
relationship was like until Mary’s death.
This historical page-turner
provides readers for the first time with the lost letters that
historians had been in search of for eighty years.
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