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
Conclusion:
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“A Union of Opposites”
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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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