There Would be No Tea with Mary Todd Lincoln

Mary Todd Lincoln had three of her sons die in her lifetime, the fourth had her committed, and, if that is not enough, she was holding her husband’s hand when he was fatally shot.

During all of this, she was derided as a spendthrift, deemed temperamental and hot tempered, all the while generating the world’s sympathy for her browbeaten husband, you know, the one that pulled the country through the Civil War and wrote the Emancipation Proclamation a thousand times in his head before setting it to paper.

Mary Todd Lincoln had a carriage accident that resulted in a head injury so serious that doctors later thought it accounted for her deep depression and malaise. When it happened, word was sent to her husband, but he was busy with the war and all so he couldn’t go to her. Who could argue with his priorities?

After the war and the assassination of her husband, Mary Todd Lincoln went back to Springfield, then traveled in Europe and then back to Springfield. I think I got that right – this is all from memory reading the narratives at the exhibits at the Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum. She lobbied for a pension, claiming that she was a war widow as much as someone whose husband had gotten killed at Gettysburg. Nothing she did after her life’s extraordinary tragedies seemed to sweeten her image to the public.

But in one room of the museum, there was a life size black and white photograph of Mary on the wall. Magically, when one stands just so in front of the image, it comes alive. The black and white fades and crisp colors appear. Mary straightens her hair and then the fold of her skirt. She sets her hand just so on a book on a table and then settles in to being frozen again in black and white. An image of her we’ve all seen a thousand times. AI made her come alive. I wanted to shake her hand and offer tea.

Later, I went to Lincoln’s tomb. He is buried ten feet below ground but his wife and three of his sons are in crypts in the wall. I was there by myself except for two Buddhist monks in orange robes. I wanted to have a conversation with Mary, tell her that history has been too harsh in judging her, that if history was written by women, the story would have been so different, that if she hadn’t loved her boys and her husband so much she wouldn’t have gone mad with grief.

But we’d only just met, and it was a fleeting meeting at that.