marriage that have infiltrated our cultural heritage. “He
that marries late marries ill;” “Marry in haste and repent at leisure.”
They represent just the kind of dark popular wisdom that Lincoln would
latch onto to comment about marriage as a public event, but they do not
indicate his private feelings about his own marriage. In fact he would
acknowledge his marriage as a matter of “profound wonder.” Rather than
being interpreted as the awe that a thirty-three year old man felt at the
matrimonial state, even this comment has been interpreted to display his
ambivalence about his marriage to Mary Todd.
27
For the detractors of Mary Lincoln the swiftness of the marriage
sustains the proverb that a quick marriage is a bad one. In fact after
the very public disruption of their courtship, Mary Todd had told her sister
that “it was best to keep the courtship from all eyes and ears.”
28
Again our lack of historical understanding about weddings has contaminated
the Lincoln story. Weddings of the 19th century were shorter and simpler
affairs than they are today. Indeed, getting married on what would seem
to us the spur of the moment was quite common.
For example, among the Adlai Stevenson family of nearby Bloomington
during this period, several brides and grooms undertook similarly hasty
(in our eyes, but not theirs) marriages.
29
In 1855 Lucy Stone and Henry Blackwell were married before breakfast, and
on their way to New York by eight o’clock in the morning. The point is
that there was no standardized wedding ritual, and while there were plenty
of so-called proscription manuals that proscribed etiquette on a variety
of other issues, few dealt with weddings. Nor were marriages obligatory
family events as they are in contemporary America. Brides did not wear
fancy satin gowns of lacy white; the concept of an organized catered reception
was two generations away; any need for months of planning amid wedding
consultants was unnecessary.
If we can move the Lincolns away from their uniqueness and
use them to sustain generalizations about the history of weddings, their
wedding took place at a transitional point in the history of middle-class
American marriages. In the wonderful anecdote of the occasion Judge William
Brown who was accustomed to more rustic civil ceremonies cried out after
the groom had promised to endow the bride with all his goods and chattels,
lands and tenements: “The statute fixes that, Lord Jesus Christ, God Almighty
Lincoln.” Still Lincoln had contemplated his wedding long enough and loved
his bride sufficiently to place an engraved gold ring on her finger with
the inscription “LOVE IS ETERNAL.”
30
The Marriage: “A True ‘Wife is Her Husband’s Better Half”
Like their courtship and wedding, marriage is
encrusted with conflicting
15