and when she saw him riding alongside the handsome Mrs. General Ord, Mary Lincoln berated him before the high command of the Union Army. But like summer storms these fits of temper and jealousy subsided and the couple had reconciled in a few days.⁴⁴
 

Clearly there were outsiders who saw their marriage as a difficult relationship; clearly Mary Lincoln had a temper which she displayed to the world, instead of, one might conjecture, internalizing her complaints against her husband in silent anger or indifference. Clearly her husband was frequently inattentive to her, “deficient,” as one woman once said of him, “in those little links which make up the great chain of woman’s happiness... .⁴⁵

In these differences Abraham Lincoln and Mary Todd Lincoln complemented each other—not in the ancient way of marriage as a little commonwealth with the husband and father as ruler and the wife and mother as subject. Rather their relationship was part of the companionate ideal of a new closeness of husband and wife—the “tender passion” of a 19th century marital style based on difference—the union of opposites of a generation that sought congeniality of interests even as it established the paradox of separate spheres. Or as Mary Lincoln perceptively commented about her marriage, “for I well know how deeply grieved the P feels over any coolness of mine.. .fortunately for both my Husband and myself...our lives {together} have been eminently peaceful.”⁴⁶
 

Partly this mutuality grew because both spouses crossed over the boundaries that divided husbands and wives into separate spheres and that often established marriages grounded in parallel lives of different work, habitats, traits and emotions. Given Mary Lincoln’s interest in politics, her life overlapped with Abraham Lincoln’s in an unusual shared endeavor, while he, with his egalitarian approach to their mutual authority in the home and with the children, entered the traditional woman’s world. “Mr. Lincoln,” according to his nephew, was always “a home man.” Today we expect marriages to be based on symmetrical roles with both partners sharing work, play, leisure activities, housekeeping and childraising. marriage puts us on the road to that kind of relationship and from this perspective is very modern.
 

The best way to remember marriage is to consider individual marriages arranged along a spectrum from total alienation to warm, empathetic relationships of intimacy. Somewhere along this line the Lincoln marriage falls. Placed in the context of other middle-class marriages of this period that separated husbands and wives into different spheres, marriage seems a close one. That is not to say that there were not squabbles and the frequent rain showers of Mary Lincoln’s temper which were
 

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