Mincey’s Musings
Year Two, Week Eight

I was on my way to the Central Office this past Saturday to work on the districtwide plan. I drove down Main Street to see if there was flooding due to the record amount of rain that was being received. As I passed the First Baptist Church of Maynardville, I noticed organist and attorney K. David Myer’s truck in the parking lot.

It’s thanks to David that I learned a love of organ music. I grew up in the First Baptist listening to him play for the services. There have been several occasions in which I have happened upon David practicing the organ on a Saturday, and if I can at all I stop and listen. David is always gracious to let me infringe upon his practice time. I like to think of these sessions as a private concert.

This past Saturday David played a hymn entitled “O Love That Will Not Let Me Go”. He said that was a good wedding hymn, and I jokingly told him, “That’s right, it won’t let you go without the wife taking seventy-five percent of everything you’ve got!”

Last week I promised to relate to you from my memory some of what I have learned about Abraham Lincoln’s marriage to Mary Ann Todd. He was of humble beginnings, she was raised in wealth and culture. Lincoln is said to have said that one “d” was enough for God, but the Todd family had to have two!

I was not present at Lincoln’s wedding nor for any part of his marriage, so all I know is what I have read and heard. History is usually unkind to Mary Todd Lincoln, painting her as a short-tempered shrew. History has lifted Lincoln to the status of an icon, a good-natured man who had the misfortune to somehow saddle himself with such an unpleasant mate.

Part of this is the result of a history of Lincoln, written by Lincoln’s last law partner, William Henry (Lincoln called him Billy) Herndon. Herndon reputedly once danced with Mrs. Lincoln and told her she had the grace of a serpent. He might have intended this as either a joke or compliment, but Mrs. Lincoln took offense to the remark and hated Herndon from that point.

Herndon portrayed Mrs. Lincoln as a most unpleasant person. In part due to Herndon’s biography, which many later historians accepted as fact due to his close relationship to the President, many stories of her ill treatment of Mr. Lincoln have been told. Dr. Joseph Suppiger, former history professor at Lincoln Memorial University, in his book The Intimate Lincoln related a story from a source that Mrs. Lincoln supposedly once hit the President with a stick of stove wood.

And then there is a depiction in a movie of Mr. Lincoln reading Shakespeare (of whom he was particularly fond) to a small gathering in the White House. Mrs. Lincoln was supposedly insanely jealous of the President, and she thought that one of the female guests paid him too much attention. She is said to have accosted the lady, accusing her of wanting to replace her as First Lady. Mr. Lincoln is said to have soothed Mrs. Lincoln’s ruffled feathers, then apologized to his guests, telling them, “I suppose you can endure for twenty minutes what I have endured for twenty years.”

Mrs. Lincoln was said to have been so “highstrung” that she could not keep domestic help. When she arrived at the White House, she overspent in a short span of time the entire allotment from Congress to update the furnishings, and ran up a great debt that she feared for the President to discover. She dabbled in dubious dealings to cover her misdeed. She was criticized for spending extravagant amounts on clothes for herself while the soldiers in the field fighting the Civil War were dressed in rags and didn’t have blankets.

There was an occasion when Mrs. Lincoln went with the president to review troops toward the end of the Civil War. She was riding in a carriage with Julia (Mrs. Ulysses) Grant, and she was feeling poorly. She went into a tirade about one of the general’s wives, Mrs. Ord, who was present. Mrs. Lincoln thought that Mrs. Ord was trying to impress herself into the place where Mrs. Lincoln should be. Mrs. Grant tried to calm Mrs. Lincoln, but it seemed the harder she tried the more irate Mrs. Lincoln became. Mrs. Ord came over to exchange pleasantries with Mrs. Lincoln, but Mrs. Lincoln (according to one book I read) screamed at Mrs. Ord and called her by the Biblical name for a harlot. Mrs. Ord burst into tears, and Mrs. Grant vowed never to be in public again with Mrs. Lincoln. This was unfortunate, for President Lincoln invited the Grants to accompany him to Ford’s Theater on the last evening of his life. Had General Grant been present, history might have been changed . . .

And the stories could go on and on. But there is another side of Mary Todd Lincoln that history overlooked for some time. She experienced death in her family from an early age, and during her marriage she lost two sons, one while living in the White House. Mrs. Lincoln was so distraught that she began to meet with spiritualists (mediums) and participated in séances in the White House.

Then her husband was assassinated while sitting by her side. After she left the White House virtually unacknowledged, she lived with her son Tad, who died about six years after his father. Her oldest and only son who survived to adulthood, Robert Todd Lincoln, had her committed to an insane asylum. These and other sad experiences continued her spiral into physical sickness and depression until she passed away at the home of her sister, Mrs. Elizabeth (Ninian) Edwards, in the same house in which she had married Abraham Lincoln in 1842.

There are so many great books written about Mary Todd Lincoln, both favorable and unfavorable toward her. And thanks to the modern technological world, they are so easy to find on Amazon.com and other sites. I challenge you to look for and read some of these great books. You will not be disappointed.

If there are errors in this article, you must forgive. I have related them from my reading memory without running sources. I leave you with a marriage thought from the annals of email:

Man is incomplete until he is married. Then he is finished.