marriage

marriage that have infiltrated our cultural heritage. “He that marries late marries ill;” “Marry in haste and repent at leisure.” They represent just the kind of dark popular wisdom that Lincoln would latch onto to comment about marriage as a public event, but they do not indicate his private feelings about his own marriage. In fact he would acknowledge his marriage as a matter of “profound wonder.” Rather than being interpreted as the awe that a thirty-three year old man felt at the matrimonial state, even this comment has been interpreted to display his ambivalence about his marriage to Mary Todd.²⁷

For the detractors of Mary Lincoln the swiftness of the marriage sustains the proverb that a quick marriage is a bad one. In fact after the very public disruption of their courtship, Mary Todd had told her sister that “it was best to keep the courtship from all eyes and ears.”²⁸ Again our lack of historical understanding about weddings has contaminated the Lincoln story. Weddings of the 19th century were shorter and simpler affairs than they are today. Indeed, getting married on what would seem to us the spur of the moment was quite common.

For example, among the Adlai Stevenson family of nearby Bloomington during this period, several brides and grooms undertook similarly hasty (in our eyes, but not theirs) marriages.²⁹ In 1855 Lucy Stone and Henry Blackwell were married before breakfast, and on their way to New York by eight o’clock in the morning. The point is that there was no standardized wedding ritual, and while there were plenty of so-called proscription manuals that proscribed etiquette on a variety of other issues, few dealt with weddings. Nor were marriages obligatory family events as they are in contemporary America. Brides did not wear fancy satin gowns of lacy white; the concept of an organized catered reception was two generations away; any need for months of planning amid wedding consultants was unnecessary.

If we can move the Lincolns away from their uniqueness and use them to sustain generalizations about the history of weddings, their wedding took place at a transitional point in the history of middle-class American marriages. In the wonderful anecdote of the occasion Judge William Brown who was accustomed to more rustic civil ceremonies cried out after the groom had promised to endow the bride with all his goods and chattels, lands and tenements: “The statute fixes that, Lord Jesus Christ, God Almighty Lincoln.” Still Lincoln had contemplated his wedding long enough and loved his bride sufficiently to place an engraved gold ring on her finger with the inscription “LOVE IS ETERNAL.” ³⁰