Abraham Lincoln (21 page)
Authors: Stephen B. Oates
Vexed about her “American affairs,” Mary continued to write Sumner and other congressmen for federal assistance. In her behalf, they pushed and lobbied for a yearly pension, but her enemies, besides pointing out that she already had enough money, argued that she didn't deserve it because she had been a Confederate sympathizer during the late war. But in July, 1870, Congress finally awarded her a pension of $3,000 annually (later raising it to $5,000 and adding a $15,000 donation), and Mary resolved not to utter another “murmuring word” on the subject. By now, evidently with Robert's help, Mary had settled her debts and was a relatively wealthy woman, with assets totaling $58,756. Yet she had no sense of money and continued to fret about her finances, certain that she was on the brink of poverty and destitution, certain that she was too poor to maintain a home.
Feeling disoriented and ill (the spas could not assuage her pain), she packed her things, fetched Tad, and in May, 1871, set out for home on an America-bound steamer. By now, her youngest son was a manly eighteen and completely devoted to her. How she cherished “Taddie.” He had such “a lovely nature,” was “all love and gentleness.” In his “tender treatment of me at all times,” she said, “& very especially when I am indisposedâhe reminds me so strongly of his beloved father.” Mary was proud of Robert, too, who was married now and becoming a successful Chicago attorney. But with Robert on his own, it was Taddie she clung to for comfort and companionship. In her aching eyes, he alone stood between her and a void.
On their arrival in Chicago, they had a family reunion with Robert in his “charming” new place on Wabash Avenue. But Tad was not feeling wellâhe had caught a chest cold at sea, and it had gotten worse. Back at the hotel with Mary, he fell dangerously ill,
his chest so congested that he had to fight for his breath. Unable to lie down, he had to sit upright in a chair. “With the
last
few years
so filled
with sorrow,” Mary wrote a woman friend, “
this
fresh anguish bows me to the earth. I have been sitting up so constantly for the last ten nights, that I am unable to write you at length.” The physicians did what they could for Tad, but Robert said he had never seen “such suffering.” On July 15, as he and Mary looked on helplessly, Tad slumped forward in his chair, dead of what physicians later called “compression of the heart.”
Mary managed to attend a brief funeral service in Robert's house, but was not aboard the train that took gentle Taddie down to Springfield, to be placed in a tomb beside his father. For the fourth time, Mary lay immobilized with grief. “I feel that there is no life to me, without my idolized Taddie,” she wrote. “One by one I have consigned to their resting place, my idolized ones, & now, in
this
world, there is nothing left me, but the deepest anguish & desolation.”
Her desolation grew worse with Herndon's ongoing allegations. Now he claimed that her husband had been
illegitimate
. How could she stop this man? She felt powerless to stop him, and it tortured her. She just wanted to die, to join Lincoln and Taddie in their grave. Like someone smote a physical blow, she grabbed out for Robert, trying desperately to hold on. She became obsessed with the idea that he was going to die, that her one remaining son was to be taken from her. While on a trip to Florida, she convinced herself that Robert was gravely ill and sent a frantic telegram to his law partner, who went to Robert at once, only to find him entirely well in his office.
When Mary returned to Chicago, Robert begged her to stay at his house. When she refused, he rented two rooms in a Chicago hotelâone for each of themâand tried to look after Mary himself. Her erratic conduct shocked and embarrassed him. She carried $57,000 worth of securities in her skirt pocket. In her misery, she spent money recklessly, putting down $450 for three watches, $600 for lace curtains, $700 for jewelry, even buying seventeen pairs of gloves and three dozen handkerchiefs. And her head
ached worse than ever: it felt, she said, as though “an Indian” were pulling wires out of her eyes.
In the hotel at night, she would come to Robert's door in her bedclothes, sobbing that somebody was after her. Once, only half dressed, she mistook the elevator for the lavatory and refused to come out. When Robert and a hotel employee tried to get her back to her room, Mary flung their hands away and shrieked that Robert was trying to murder her.
Robert was beside himself. He had a reputation to think about. He was also genuinely worried about Mary's safety and state of mind. Frankly, he thought she was going mad. To protect his mother, to prevent her from squandering any more of her money, Robert petitioned the Cook County Court to have Mary committed on grounds of insanity. Lured to the hearing by Leonard Swett, Lincoln's old friend, Mary was taken quite by surprise. Who had advised Robert to do this? she demanded of Swett. In court, though, she endured the trial with determined dignity, as a parade of physicians and other witnesses described her bizarre behavior and unanimously testified that she was unbalanced. The jury agreed, and the name of “Mary Lincoln” appeared in the Lunatic Record of the Cook County Court.
After the verdict, Robert came to her with tears streaming down his face, and he took her hand. “O Robert,” she said, “to think that my own son would ever have this done.” For Mary, this was a final, devastating betrayal. That night, for the first time in her life, she tried to kill herself with a lethal dose of camphor and laudanum. But her druggist had substituted a harmless ingredient for the laudanum, and she did not die. The next day, thoroughly miserable, she rode with Robert himself to a private sanitarium west of Chicago.
With an airy room and the freedom to go for walks and rides, Mary was not physically uncomfortable here. But the news of her incarceration had flashed across the country, and she seethed with resentment, schemed to get out. She was no maniac. She was Mrs. Abraham Lincoln. She would prove that to Robert and all her enemies and detractors.
She found ready allies in Myra and Judge James Bradwell of Chicago, both dedicated feminists; the Bradwells in turn enlisted the help of Elizabeth and Ninian Edwards of SpringfieldâMary's sister and brother-in-lawâand pressed the sanitarium to let her live with them. Less than four months after she entered it, the sanitarium released her in the Edwards's custody. When the court in a second trial ruled her sane, Mary felt exonerated. She wrote “Robert T. Lincoln” and demanded the return of her things. “You have tried your game of robbery long enough,” she said, and signed the letter “Mrs. A. Lincoln.”
She stayed a year with the Edwardses, fled to Europe again, then in 1880 came back to Springfield for good, back to their home on the hill, back to her room there. Ill, partially blind, and crippled from a back injury, Mary spent her final days in this shuttered room, seldom venturing out, seldom seeing anyone. In May, 1881, Robert came to ask his mother's forgiveness and love. With him was his daughter, who was named after Mary. Incapable of saying no to her and Robert together, Mary promised to forgive and forget. Then they were gone and Mary was alone again in her dimly lit room. She kept the curtains closed, her eyes unable to tolerate any light beyond that of a single candle. Outside, children played in the streets, and some whispered that a crazy woman lurked behind the window with the curtains drawn. But Mary was beyond that world now; it could no longer hurt her. She lingered in the room where the candle burned, drifting with the days, caressing her wedding ring with its inscription “Love Is Eternal,” and counting over her memories of past happiness. She lived in the past now, in a gentler time when she had first come to Springfield and stayed in this houseâ¦when she had loved so to dance with all the “gay” gentlemenâ¦when she had met and married a tall, awkward young attorney who had the most congenial mind she had ever knownâ¦when she had carried his sons and made him a home. Then at night Mary would rise, blow out the candle, and slip into bed, lying carefully to one side in order not to disturb “the President's place” beside her.
CKNOWLEDGMENTS
I am grateful to the following people for helping me prepare this volume: M. S. “Buz” Wyeth, Jr., my long-time editor at Harper & Row; Terry Karten, my supportive second editor there; Gerard McCauley, my long-time agent; Eva Langlois, my indispensable assistant; Sally Ives, my imperturbable typist; and Frank J. Williams, President of the Lincoln Group of Boston, and Mark E. Neely, Jr., Director of the Louis A. Warren Lincoln Library and Museum, who shared with me their vast knowledge of Lincoln and who read the manuscript and offered constructive comments. In addition, Frank Williams and his gracious wife Virginia welcomed me into their homeâwith its rich Lincoln collectionâfor weekends of inspiring Lincoln talk. I am also indebted to Ralph G. Newman, founder of the Abraham Lincoln Book Shop of Chicago and a devoted Lincoln scholar, for his generosity, counsel, and friendship over the past eight years. My gratitude, too, to Lincoln College in Lincoln, Illinois, for awarding me an honorary doctorate in humane letters, and to Pat Newman, Willard Bunn III, Christopher N. Breiseth, Daniel R. Weinberg, Harold M. Hyman, James T. Hickey, Gabor S. Boritt, Charles B. Strozier, and my many other friends in the Lincoln community for enlightening conversation and past kindnesses. Members of the Amherst Creative Biography Group, including Dorothy Clark, Peter Eddy, Sandra and Bill Katz, William Kimbrel, Elizabeth Lloyd-Kimbrel, Ann and Michael Meeropol, Will Ryan, and Leslie Stainton, heard part of this book during our biweekly readings, and I appreciate their helpful criticism. Finally, I want to offer a special thanks to the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, for supporting my efforts at creative biographical writing and research.
Part One: Myth
1: M
AN OF THE
P
EOPLE
The quotation “Myths tell us” is from X. J. Kennedy,
Literature: An Introduction to Fiction, Poetry, and Drama
(Boston, 1983), 610. On the Christ-like Lincoln, the quotation “Oh, friends” is from Lloyd Lewis,
Myths after Lincoln
(paperback ed., New York, 1957), 95; the quotation “We mourn for the loss” from James M. McPherson,
The Negro's Civil War
(paperback ed., New York, 1967), 308; the quotation “To the deeply emotional and religious slave” from David Donald,
Lincoln Reconsidered
(paperback ed., New York, 1956), 148. For the Holland school of mythology, see Holland's own work,
The Life of Abraham Lincoln
(Springfield, Mass., 1866), and Donald,
Lincoln Reconsidered
, 148-54; Lewis,
Myths after Lincoln
, 333-34; and Roy P. Basler,
The Lincoln Legend
(reprint ed., New York, 1969), 8-9. My discussion of Herndon draws from David Donald,
Lincoln's Herndon
(New York, 1948), 218-41, 296, 303-4, 306-7, 316-20, 344-73; Donald,
Lincoln Reconsidered
, 154-57, 160-61; and Lewis,
Myths after Lincoln
, 334-35. Donald's biography of Herndon also has an excellent discussion of Ward Hill Lamon's
Life of Abraham Lincoln
(1872), which drew from Herndon's materials. For further discussions of the Ann Rutledge myth, see Basler,
Lincoln Legend
, 147-63; and J. G. Randall,
Lincoln the President: From Bull Run to Gettysburg
(paperback ed., New York, 1945), 321-42. Quotations “cause a squirm” and “Atheist! Atheist!” are from Lewis,
Myths after Lincoln
, 336, 303; the quotation “composite American ideal” from Donald,
Lincoln Reconsidered
, 163.
For the background and historical context of Carl Sandburg's
Abraham Lincoln: The Prairie Years
, see Herbert Mitgang (ed.),
The Letters of Carl Sandburg
(New York, 1968), 225-37; Alfred Harcourt, “Forty Years of Friendship,”
Journal of the Illinois State Historical Society
, XLV (Winter, 1952), 395-97; North Callahan,
Carl Sandburg: Lincoln of Our Literature
(New York, 1970), 23, 75-95; and Alfred Haworth Jones,
Roosevelt's Image Brokers: Poets, Playwrights, and the Use of the Lincoln Symbol
(Port Washington, N.Y., 1974), 7-37. I also benefited from Robert W. Johannsen's unpublished paper “The Poet as Biographer: Carl Sandburg's Prairie Years,” read at a symposium on Carl Sandburg as a Lincoln biographer, Jan. 21, 1978, at Knox College in Galesburg, Ill. The quotation “Like him” is from Callahan,
Sandburg
, 101; the quotation “both poets withall” from Sherman, “Carl Sandburg's Lincoln,”
New York Herald Tribune Books
, Feb. 7, 1926.
The best accounts of Whitman and Lincoln are in Justin Kaplan,
Walt Whitman: A Life
(New York, 1980), 28-30, 258-61, 271-72, 300-1, 308-9, and Kaplan's unpublished paper “After Whitman,” which was also read at the Knox College symposium and which is excellent on the connection between Whitman and Sandburg. The quotation “only distinguished epic poet” is from Kaplan's paper. For more on Whitman's Lincoln, see Basler,
Lincoln Legend
, 267-71, and Daniel Aaron,
The Unwritten War: American Writers and the Civil War
(New York, 1973), 69-72.
As for Sandburg's own comments about his work, the quotation “In Lincoln” is from Sandburg,
Abraham Lincoln: The Prairie Years
(2 vols., New York, 1926), 1: viii; the quotation “take Lincoln away from the religious bigots” from Wayne Gard, “Carl Sandburg Interprets Young Lincoln,”
The Literary Digest International Book Review
, IV (Feb., 1926), 189; the quotation “felt as if in a trance” from Mitgang,
Letters of Carl Sandburg
, 255-56; the quotations “All-American” and “democracy can choose a man” from Sandburg,
Abraham Lincoln: The War Years
(4 vols., New York, 1939), 2: 332-33.
For the critical reaction to Sandburg's Lincoln, see Johannsen, “The Poet as Biographer”; and Jones,
Roosevelt's Image Brokers
, 51-62. The Benét quotation is from the
Atlantic Monthly
(Dec., 1939), 22; the Hill quotation from the Kansas City
Star
, Dec. 2, 1939; the Commager quotation from the
Yale Review
, XXIX (Winter, 1940), 374; the Sherwood quotation from the
New York Times Book Review
, Dec. 3, 1939. Another favorable appraisal is Benjamin P. Thomas,
Portrait for Posterity
(New Brunswick, N. J., 1947), 285-310.
There were negative reactions, of course. Historian Milo Quaife, in the
Mississippi Valley Historical Review
, XIII (Sept., 1926), 287-91, thought the
Prairie Years
sheer fiction, “a literary grab bag” that could never be accepted as history. For Edmund Wilson, Sandburg's biography was the “cruellest thing that has happened to Lincoln since he was shot by Booth.” Wilson,
Patriotic Gore: Studies in the Literature of the American Civil War
(New York, 1962), 115. In my book,
Our Fiery Trial: Abraham Lincoln, John Brown, and the Civil War Era
(Amherst, Ma., 1979), 101-9, I discuss the errors, apocrypha, and fictionalizing that mar Sandburg's work as biography.
The sources of my discussion of the
Prairie Years
are as follows: the quotation “He suggests a bard” is from Roscoe C. E. Brown,
North American Review
, CCXXIII (June, 1926), 33; Sandburg's folk tales about young Lincoln and his quotations about Lincoln and Ann Rutledge, all from Sandburg's
Lincoln: The Prairie Years
, 1:50, 51-52, 73, 138, 140-41, 189-90 (see also 12, 16, 33, 40, 41-42, 43, 56-59, 71 ff., 187, and 290 for other fictional passages); the Wilson quotation in
Patriotic Gore
, 116; Sandburg,
Lincoln
(one-volume ed., New York, 1954), 38-40, 45-46; Sandburg's statement that he was sorry he had fallen for the Rutledge legend, Johannsen, “The Poet as Biographer”; quotations “two shifting moods,” “stubby, homely words,” “the Strange Friend,” “something out of a picture book for children,” and “a mind, a spirit, a tongue” from Sandburg,
Lincoln: The Prairie Years
, 1:177, 2:105, 284, 428, and 1:480; quotation “fabulous human figure” from Sandburg,
Lincoln
(one-volume ed.), 296.
My discussion of the
War Years
draws from the following sources: the Sherwood quotation from the
New York Times Book Review
, Dec. 3, 1939; Sandburg's Lincoln as a people's hero from
Lincoln: The War Years
, 2:562, 587, 589-92, 646, also 3:300, 383, 391, 567-68, and 4: 216-17; Sandburg's Lincoln and the Emancipation Proclamation from ibid., 3:20, 22, 25, and 4:216-17; Sandburg's Lincoln, the so-called radicals, and the South and reconstruction from ibid., 4:217, also 2:-559-60, and 3:82, 642; quotations “To a deep river” and “greatest general” from ibid., 4:297, 376-77; quotation “baffling and completely inexplicable” from Mitgang,
Letters of Carl Sandburg
, 490.
2: A
RCH
V
ILLAIN
See in particular Don E. Fehrenbacher, “The Anti-Lincoln Tradition,”
Papers of the Abraham Lincoln Association
, 4 (Springfield, Ill., 1982): 7-28, from which I extracted the quotation “bad man.” The quotation “scholarly, ringing” is from Lewis,
Myths after Lincoln
, 99; the quotation “hundred years hence” from the New York
Herald
, Apr. 17, 1865.
My account of the secessionists' and Confederates' Lincoln draws from Michael Davis,
The Image of Lincoln in the South
(Knoxville, Tenn., 1971), 41-104; my own
With Malice Toward None: The Life of Abraham Lincoln
(New York, 1977), 187; and Thomas Reed Turner,
Beware the People Weeping: Public Opinion and the Assassination of Abraham Lincoln
(Baton Rouge, La., 1982), 90-99. The quotation “the most execrable measure” is from Dunbar Rowland,
Jefferson Davis, Constitutionalist: His Letters, Papers, and Speeches
(Jackson, Miss., 1923), 5: 409-11; the quotation “All honor to J. Wilkes Booth” from John Q. Anderson (ed.),
Brokenburn: The Journal of Kate Stone, 1861-1868
(Baton Rouge, La., 1955), 333; the quotation “God's judgment day” from the Houston
Tri-Weekly Telegraph
, Apr. 25, 1865.
For the countermyth in the postwar and new South: the quotation “Is it insanity” is from George Edmonds [Elizabeth Avery Meriwether],
Facts and Falsehoods concerning the War on the South
(Memphis, Tenn., 1904), 49-50; the quotation “whole story of his career” from the
Southern Magazine
11 (Sept., 1872), 374; the quotation “gawky, coarse” from Basler,
Lincoln Legend
, 57; the quotation “
amounts to a patent perversion
” from Davis,
Image of Lincoln in South
, 169; the quotation “The real monument” from Fehrenbacher, “Anti-Lincoln Tradition,”
Papers of the Abraham Lincoln Association
, 4: 22.
For the countermyth outside the South, see Masters,
Lincoln: The Man
(New York, 1931), passim. Masters wrote at a time when it was popular for biographers to use psychology to debunk their subjects. The California political scientist to whom I refer is Dwight G. Anderson, whose
Abraham Lincoln: The Quest for Immortality
(New York, 1982) is a modern rerun of Masters and typical of the kind of fanciful psychologizing that infests recent historical literature. See, for example, George B. Forgie,
Patricide in the House Divided: A Psychological Interpretation
(New York, 1979), which argues that Lincoln both revered and resented the Founding Fathers (they had garnered all the glory) and deliberately brought on the crisis of the Union in order to escape his dilemma. As a friend of mine said, “If you believe that, you'll believe anything.”
Vidal's syphilitic Lincoln is in Vidal, “Lincoln: His Ambition Was a Little Engine That Knew No Rest,” Los Angeles
Times
, Feb. 8, 1981.
3: W
HITE
C
HIEF AND
H
ONKY
For Lincoln as White Chief: Davis,
Image of Lincoln in South
, 148-52, has a trenchant discussion of Dixon's Lincoln, but see also Basler,
Lincoln Legend
, 47, 220-21, 240. The Vardaman quotations and his excerpts from Lincoln's Charleston speech are in the
Congressional Record
, 63d Cong., 2d sess., 51 (Jan. 22-Feb. 6, 1914), 3036, 3038-40, and 65th Cong., 1st sess., 55 (July 24-Aug. 29, 1917), 6061-64. For Martin Luther King's hate mail citing Lincoln: the quotation “It should do you lots of good” is from “A disgusted White Man” to King, Aug. 5, 1960, Martin Luther King., Jr., Collection, Mugar Memorial Library, Boston University; quotation “I don't believe in lynchings” from “KKK” to King, May 2 [no year],
ibid
.
For King's views of Lincoln, see my own
Let the Trumpet Sound: The Life of Martin Luther King, Jr
. (New York, 1982), 120, 159, 207-9, 256-57, 263, 272, and
Builders of the Dream: Abraham Lincoln and Martin Luther King, Jr.
(the Fifth Annual R. Gerald McMurtry Lecture, Fort Wayne, Ind., May 20, 1982). Like historians Franklin and Quarles, King did not share the anti-Lincoln attitudes of many modern black intellectuals. The quotation “overwhelmed me” is from James Forman,
The Making of Black Revolutionaries
(New York, 1972), 47; the quotation “one of the most far-reaching pronouncements” from Quarles,
Lincoln and the Negro
(New York, 1962), 150. See also Franklin,
The Emancipation Proclamation
(paperback ed., New York, 1965), particularly 13, 29, 98-99, 131-32, 143, 145.
Malcolm X was also part of the 1960s black backlash against Lincoln. “He probably did more to trick Negroes than any other man in history,” Malcolm said. See Robert Penn Warren,
Who Speaks for the Negro?
(New York, 1965), 262. The Lester quotation is from his
Look Out Whitey! Black Power's Gon' Get Your Mama!
(New York, 1968), 58; the Bennett quotations from his article “Was Abe Lincoln a White Supremacist?”
Ebony
(Feb., 1968), 35-42. Bennett's assertion that the Emancipation Proclamation had “all the grandeur of a real estate deed” is a loose paraphrase of Richard Hofstadter's description of it as having “all the moral grandeur of a bill of lading.” Hofstadter,
The American Political Tradition and the Men Who Made It
(New York, 1948), 131. Echoing Bennett, black scholar Nathan Irving Huggins,
Slave and Citizen: The Life of Frederick Douglass
(Boston, 1980), 77, even denied that Lincoln was an antislavery man. The Harding quotations are from
There is a River: The Black Struggle for Freedom in America
(New York), 220, 223, 225, 226, 231-32, 234-40, 255, 256, and xix. The Frye quotation is from Kennedy,
Literature
, 610.
Part Two: Many-Mooded Man
1: R
ESURRECTING
L
IFE
The Michelet quotation is in Norbert Guterman,
A Book of French Quotations
(New York, 1963), 277.
2: A M
ATTER OF
P
ROFOUND
W
ONDER
Lincoln's looks: the quotation “lay floating” and “howdy” from James G. Randall,
Mr. Lincoln
(New York, 1957), 30, 28; the quotation “I have never seen a picture” from Richard N. Current,
The Lincoln Nobody Knows
(New York, 1958), 5; the quotation “His face is certainly ugly” from Lillian Foster,
Way-Side Glimpses
(New York, 1860), 221.
