An American Marriage

March 29, 2021
Historian Burlingame (Abraham Lincoln: A Life) delivers a detailed and highly unflattering portrait of Abraham Lincoln’s “woe-filled” marriage to Mary Todd. Though he acknowledges that Lincoln was “depressive, emotionally reserved and uncommunicative,” and that Todd had “much to bear,” including a difficult childhood, debilitating migraine headaches, and the deaths of three of her four children before they reached adulthood, Burlingame treats the First Lady rather harshly. He suggests that their 1842 nuptials may have been a shotgun wedding (their son Robert was born “slightly less than nine months” later), and alleges that Todd physically abused her husband (in one instance attacking him with a piece of firewood) and whipped her children. Their domestic battles continued during Lincoln’s presidency, according to Burlingame, who also documents public disapproval of Todd’s lavish redecoration of the White House during the Civil War, and allegations that she had extramarital affairs and accepted bribes in order to pay off her debts to dressmakers. Unfortunately, Burlingame fails to distinguish between hard evidence and rumor, and doesn’t fully reckon with how sexism may have shaped contemporaneous views of Todd’s behavior. This one-sided takedown won’t persuade Mary Todd’s defenders.