marriage

of 19th century courtship and marriage. There is an additional reason. Given the culture of their time, the Lincoins did not leave much documentary evidence about their relationship, and this silence, especially since many of their letters to each other burned in a fite, has encouraged an ensuing battle of quotations from outsiders over the state of their marriage. Unlike today when young adults feel comfortable asking the President of the United States about his underwear, most middle-class Americans one-hundred-and-fifty- years ago were reticent about their relationships with spouses. They closed their bedroom doors to the prying eyes of outsiders. Besides being off-limits, marriage is not a topic that most historians are interested in, especially those who write about Lincoln. Instead it is consigned to the woman’s world.

In recent years sociologists and historians have begun to study marriage as a legal arrangement, a social custom, a gender practice, and a sexual statement that changes over time. Critical in this regard for the Lincoins was the fact that the patriarchal marriage of the 18th century that placed men as the rulers of the household was giving way in mid-l9th century America to a more companionate ideal in which wives and husbands sought mutual love and affection as individuals creating a satisfying partnership. Some, though not all, Americans of this period held a romantic vision of marriage as the joining together of individuals with unique personalities who adored each other because that newfound entity of the 19th century—their essential self—had discovered a complementary soul.¹⁰ In what follows, I would like to place marriage in the context of the scholarship that we have on courtship, wedding, marriage, and parenting, using mostly the words and behaviors of the marriage’s two principals and avoiding the memories of their contemporaries. Perhaps that way we can end the divergence of opinion—the battle of the quotations” as I have called it in my title—that has led historians to create a contentious subfield of Lincoln studies.

Courtship:	“A Man Chases a Woman until She Catches Him”

For most young women in mid-century America the period of courting was a time of gaiety and fun, during which females exerted an authority they lost when they married and by common law became one with their husbands and he legally the one. Certainly this was the case with the Kentucky belle Mary Todd who, as her brother-in-law Ninian Edwards said, “could make a bishop forget his prayers.”¹¹ She was having a good time at the parties in Springfield, Illinois after she settled in her sister Elizabeth’s home in the late 1830’s.