marriage

“Marry in haste and repent in leisure.” “A woman is necessarily an evil, and he that gets the most tolerable one is lucky”—and so on. There is an edgy, bridegroom-beware quality to the old proverbs that make marriage into a joking matter, with the joke on women. Today, yesterday’s derisive sayings may seem as far removed from contemporary reality as some of the herbal remedies of an earlier age. But unlike calomel and the wild datura vine, these reproachful wisdoms from the past still carry authority and reflect our uncertain attitudes about the matrimonial state. We remember them because marriage is a universal, habitual human behavior—the ultimate in institutional survivals, however modified. We also remember them because marriage is so little studied, and this vacuum of historical information returns us to the folklore of the past.

Consequently evaluations of marriage which is my subject this evening are largely subjective. Lacking context and for that reason varying tremendously, they float outside of historical analysis and remove a typical middle-class marriage from its moorings. Writes David Donald in the most authoritative biography ever written about Lincoln, “For all their quarrels, {the Lincolns} were devoted to each other. In the long years of their marriage Abraham Lincoln was never suspected of being unfaithful to his wife. She, in turn, was immensely proud of him and was his most loyal supporter and admirer.”¹

But listen to what Michael Burlingame has written in The Inner World of Abraham Lincoln in a fifty-eight page assessment of the Lincoln marriage, fifty-six pages of which are a condemnation of Mary Lincoln: “In 1864 {the President} pardoned a soldier who had deserted to go home and marry his sweetheart, {saying}, ‘I want to punish that young man.. .probably in less than a year he will wish I had withheld that pardon’.” According to Burlingame who argues that Lincoln regretted his marriage as much as he expected the young soldier to rue his, the Lincolns’ marriage was a “fountain of misery..."² Burlingame is certain that Mary Lincoln is responsible for this fountain of misery, without any acknowledgment that proverbs, peers and popular culture had taught Lincoln to joke about marriage, although never his own.

Mostly the depictions of marriage as a disaster focus on Mary Todd Lincoln’s failings. Of course it has always been women who are held responsible for the quality of a marriage, for many reasons not the least of which is that men write history and have especially controlled the Lincoln story. After her husband was assassinated, Mary Lincoln told the biographer Josiah Holland that during their courtship she had “trespassed” on her husband’s “tenderness of character.”³ Such a sense of guilt is hardly an unusual feeling for any recent widow or widower to acknowledge. But listen to how Douglas Wilson interprets the commonplace reaction of a widow. He writes: “Had she been a man, {Lincoln} would have known how to respond {to this trespass on his tendernessj: he could have ridiculed her in public, planted a malicious piece about her in