PREFACE

I like to teach by telling stories, often personal ones. At times I conjure up my first visit to Springfield, Illinois, where the Lincolns had lived most of their lives together. My car limped in all the way from Cambridge, Massachusetts in the summer of 1967 and headed straight into a gas station for first aid. I had a good conversation with the owner- mechanic, and when he found out that I came to do research on Abraham Lincoln, he quickly explained that had it not been for Mary Todd, her husband would never have left the peace and quiet of the state. She had pushed him hard, the man explained, until Lincoln got pushed right before the pistol of John Wilkes Booth. A tone of anger, almost bitterness tinged the mechanic’s voice. I wondered then and do still: was this local folk wisdom or the voice of a married man’s experience?

Another story. I love teaching and as an exercise I sometimes start a new class by devoting the first fifteen minutes of the first meeting to a free-for-all discussion among the students. Then they are asked to write a brief history of those first fifteen minutes. Next they read aloud their writing, at times to the great amusement of the class; the variations can be truly astounding. The lesson is self-evident. Still, I never resist displaying my ever more rusty Latin: ecce historia. Behold! History

Few subjects in the Lincoln field raise more clearly the issue of the personal role historians play in creating their histories than the study of marriage. Jean Harvey Baker, the biographer of Mary Todd Lincoln, provides here a benign picture of the marriage which, she, too, notes, carried its turbulence. Judging from the reaction of the large audience she had attracted to her Gettysburg Lecture—perhaps six hundred people—Baker is highly convincing.

Yet scholars like Michael Burlingame, and Illinoisans John Y. Simon and Douglas Wilson, the latter a Lincoln Prize Laureate, and others, too, disagree. Gender wars? Perhaps. Even as feminist scholarship reshapes the historical landscape, marriage seems to grow more complex and more controversial. Nor does the discussion stay in the confines of academe. In the mid- 1980’s novelist Gore Vidal promoted his novel Lincoln by suggesting on various talk shows and the like that Lincoln had syphilis, had infected his wife, and caused the early death of three of their four children. In 1998, during the Clinton soap opera, a story on unfaithful presidents ran through the media and listed Lincoln among them. Lack of factual support mattered not. If in the 19th century, and well beyond, marriage was idealized—for Americans wanted a happy family in their ‘White House—in the late 20th century, in the Age of Divorce and at a time of changing sexual mores, people still want their Lincoln on their side. He remains the attractive fellow.