artificial contraception, what is interesting about the Lincoln marriage is that the couple controlled their fertility. Robert Todd was born in August 1843, followed by Eddie in early 1846. There were no more children until after Eddie’s death in 1850, and then immediately so. Willie was born in December 1850, followed, because he needed a playmate, by the fourth and last Lincoln son Thomas “Tad” in April 1853. Compare this to Mary Lincoln’s family of origin. Her father Robert Smith Todd had seven children by his first wife and when she died after childbirth, another eight by his second wife.
 

But by the 1850’s especially in towns and cities couples like the Lincolns were responding to the fact that children were not potential units of labor available for work on the family farm as Lincoln had been for his father, but rather were projects that required considerable venture capital. That is one reason why the American fertility rate dropped from seven in 1800 to a fraction over six in 1820 and to a little over four in 1850. The reason was birth control, by which I mean any kind of action taken to prevent having children whether it be coitus interruptus, long-term breast feeding, or the devices such as condoms and “womb veils” that arrived in the Springfield post-office in mysterious brown paper wrappers.³⁶
 

Planning a family requires an intimacy about sexual relations that for aspiring couples meant shared companionate power over reproduction, as sex, according to a recent student, “became a powerful pervasive subject in the 19th century with birth control a part of it.”³⁷ In an age when sexuality was being separated from reproduction and partners discussed the timing of their children, there was mutuality and openness about a critical aspect of the intersecting lives of wives and husbands.
 
 

At home there was also little tension in the Lincolns’ life as parents, and parenting, sex, and money matters are the habitual arenas in which couples of both the 19th and 20th centuries disagree. As we know from them and from their neighbors, both Mary and Abraham were permissive parents. Once on a train to Lexington, a fellow traveler was appalled at the behavior of what Lincoln affectionately called “the Little codgers.”³⁸ Eddie and Robert were racing through the train, disturbing the other passengers. Lincoln’s law partner William Herndon has left disgruntled accounts of the boys’ visits to the law office he shared with Lincoln where they dropped orange peels and pulled out legal files—with never a reprimand from their ever-approving father. In the White House the children’s antics which included once waving a Confederate flag and aiming a toy cannon at the Cabinet, continued unchecked by any parental intervention. According to Mary Lincoln, her husband took pleasure that his children were “free-happy and unrestrained by parental tyranny.. . Love is the chain whereby to lock a child to its parents.” Or as Mary Lincoln said, “We never controlled our children much.”³⁹
 

Fully engaged with the children—in a way that more traditional parents were not— Mary and Abraham gave birthday parties in their honor at a time when such celebrations
 

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