ambitions that were mutual. “Mary insists that I am going
to be Senator and President of the United States too,” Lincoln told a reporter
and then shook with laughter at the absurdity of it. Henry Whitney, a lawyer
who traveled the circuit with Lincoln, recounted a similar incident.
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But this interest in politics made Mary Lincoln unpopular
with some of Lincoln’s friends, certainly with his secretaries in the White
House, and ultimately with many historians. Women’s lives in this period
were to be led in private, not public. Women were not to hold discussions
about politics and know the difference among Whigs, Know Nothings and Democrats.
Women were not supposed to meddle in patronage matters. And certainly Mary
Lincoln excelled in the latter. She sought positions for her relatives,
and when she failed to get her way, she intercepted Cabinet officers and
pressed officials at her receptions. Often she pleaded in the name of the
presidential “we.”
To the extent that politics involves matters of power and
authority, as First Lady Mary Lincoln was consistently political. When
she began her crusade to fix up the White House which she, and others,
thought resembled a shabby old hotel, she did so because she believed that
it would be a physical statement of the power of the Union during the Civil
War. She knew that the impressions of foreign ambassadors, especially those
from Great Britain and France, were critical to the future of the republic.
But the White House was her home, and in the separated spheres of the 19th
century she was enacting what historians of women have classified as “domestic
feminism.” She was decorating a home for her family, and doing so at a
time in which women were beginning to enter the public domain as consumers.
Avenues of Separation: “Alas for Those who Love and Cannot Blend”
Now I do not want you to understand—I am not making the case
that this was a marriage without conflict, although the stories of marital
anguish—always for Lincoln rather than his wife—are overblown. The episodes
of Mary Lincoln’s pot-throwing and knife-wielding promoted, incredibly,
into possible maricide are exaggerated and exceptional. But their avenues
of separation involved differences in temperament and taste. He was frugal;
she was sometimes a spendthrift. He was plebeian; she was to the manor
born. On her bad days she was volatile and lost her temper; on his he was
depressed and distracted. Often he was remote, and he was frequently absent
from home. Certainly the President was embarrassed by his wife’s spending
during the Civil War, both on her clothes and on the White House—the flub-a-dubs
that he complained about.
In one spectacular public instance he was mortified by her
behavior on the parade grounds near Malvern Hill in March of 1865. She
had arrived late to the parade grounds,
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