quotations about its level of satisfaction. Certainly it
is worth remembering that one observer’s bad marriage may be another’s
heaven. Both Professors Burlingame and Wilson ask the question how could
Lincoln have married such a dreadful woman? But we could ask as well
what did Mary Todd see in Abraham Lincoln, the hardly handsome or gentrified
product of the prairies of Kentucky, Indiana and Illinois who still wore
pants that were too short and who once burst into a party saying the “girls
smelt good.” In any case the marriage, a crucial one for these two who
had cut themselves off from their surviving parents and birthplaces, endured
amid compromises on both sides. Mary Lincoln acknowledged the completeness
of the relationship and its companionship, once writing a friend that her
husband had been “always lover-husband-father—all to me.”
31
And as for the close-mouthed Lincoln, it was his behavior,
not his words, that testified to the strength of the relationship, whether
it was his often-expressed desire to have Mary Lincoln home (“I really
wish to see you,” he telegraphed in 1863), his nursing of his wife after
the death of their son Eddie in 1850 and the birth of Tad in 1853, and
his appearance at the Springfield railroad station three nights in a row
during a snow storm in January 1861 to meet his wife who was returning
from New York. Certainly the President shared some of the turmoil
of his presidential life with her, meticulously advising her when she should
come home if she took Tad out of Washington during the bad weather season.
“Don’t come on the night train; it is too cold,” he warned in December
1864 with the solicitude that marked his relations with her. “I would be
glad to see you and Tad,” he telegraphed, as he acknowledged her deep interest
in army matters and he often sent news from the Virginia front. He encouraged
her to join him in the last days of the war when he went several times
to Virginia, and he was holding hands with her during the performance of
Our American Cousin when he was assassinated. Even his failure to
be at home—a chronic condition for 19th century professional men—must be
viewed in the context of 19th century marriages where complaints by wives
about their husband’s absences were common.’
32
Leaving the impressionistic judgments aside, I would like
to take three arenas of the Lincoln’s life which brought the couple close
together and then discuss several that drew them apart.
Sources of Congeniality: “Be One with Me In All Things”
Most observers of marriage have been impressed
with their sexuality. Sex was one of the bonds that made this marriage
between two very different human beings a success. Again some male historians
have argued without any evidence that the Lincolns’ sex life ended after
Tad’s difficult birth in 1853 because Mary Lincoln did not have any
21
