were unusual. Mary dressed up and played a part in Robert’s
reenactment of Ivanhoe, giving advice to the brave knights to be more merciful
than brawny. Neighbors remembered parties at the Lincolns where the boys
were trotted downstairs to recite poetry, usually Shakespeare and Burns.
And when her half-sister Emilie Helm was soon to be a mother, she offered
her own self-portrait as a “happy, loving, laughing Mama.”
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Besides sex and their children, Mary Todd and Abraham Lincoln
shared the politics of what Mary Lincoln liked to call the affairs of “our
Lincoln party.” Indeed the relationship between Mary and Abraham Lincoln
is laced together with examples of their mutual interest in partisan politics.
The daughter of a father who participated in Kentucky politics as a Whig
state senator, Mary Lincoln was one of those 19th century women who were
interested in “the great game of politics.” There were others, and we are
in the process of finding out about the tangential, but nevertheless important,
ways in which American women participated in parades, went to rallies,
and even gave speeches in the 1840’s and 1850’s.
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Mary Lincoln was such a woman and even in the White House the couple discussed
the composition of his Cabinet as well as matters relating to the war and
politics.
This was a couple who transformed a mutual interest in public
events into a love affair. They had always shared an admiration for Henry
Clay, Mary’s neighbor in Lexington, and Whig politics. During the days
of their courting, they had discussed election returns, and Mary Todd had
commented in a letter to a friend about Lincoln’s presence in the offices
of the Whig newspaper during the 1840 election when, according to James
Conkling, “some fifteen or twenty ladies were collected to listen to the
Tippecanoe Singing Club.” During their courtship Lincoln gave Mary a list
of the state legislative returns, and she tied it with a pink ribbon.
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After their marriage Mary Lincoln maintained her interest
in the male sphere of politics. It was partly her interest in public issues
that brought her to Mrs. Spriggs’s tiny Washington boarding house when
Lincoln was a congressman in 1847. Few wives from the midwest, much less
mothers with small children, uprooted their households to be with their
husbands in Washington, and Mary Lincoln is one of the few. And when Lincoln
wanted to become the Commissioner of the Land Office, it was his wife who
undertook a letter-writing campaign. This shared interest in politics was
one of the significant ways in which she related to her husband.
Lincoln’s political career stalled in the 1850’s, and it
was Mary Lincoln who constantly encouraged him in his two unsuccessful
senatorial campaigns. An ascension from Vandalia, the first capital of
Illinois, to the White House would have left little room for a wife’s advice.
But instead Lincoln’s jagged course across the partisan landscape of 19th
century American party politics left plenty of opportunity for shared discussions
of political strategies. At home Lincoln received not only the applause
that a typical wife might bestow; he received heartening reinforcement
as well as intelligent discussion of
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