The mother, Mary Todd Lincoln, was clearly intelligent, and she was indeed female. The word ‘powerful,’ as used above is used in a nonstandard way. Usually a ‘powerful’ person is said to possess great physical strength (which she did not have) or political or organization power — the power to affect events. If anything, Mary Todd Lincoln was pitiable victim of events, actually quite powerless in her life after the murder of her husband.

But, in the quasi-political/psychological context, as above, ‘powerful’ by an objective observer can also appear to be behavior that is ‘dominating,’ ‘manipulative,’ and/or ‘ruthless and cunning.’

If that is the case, then mother and son were, in fact, both “powerful.”

It is a weird modern argument that Mary Todd Lincoln was some kind of misunderstood forerunning feminist, who had her modern ways misinterpreted as mental illness.

The answer is less pleasing — their grief made both of them a little mad. If there is any gender issue her, it was that Robert’s mental illness — seen in his mania to the state remove his mother from his life — was more socially acceptable, or, was easier to cloak in social acceptable motive.

During the last decades of their lives, they used the same sorts of tactics against each other in a mutually destructive effort to somehow cope with the tragedy that filled their lives.

Remember, not only was father and husband Abraham murdered. All of Mary Todd’s other children — Robert Todd’s siblings — had died before the family left the White House.

Theirs was a family tree draped in black crepe.

How did the two deal with this frustration, grief and anxiety?

Robert Todd focused on becoming rich. Mary Todd went mad.

She was indeed insane, or at least suffered from bouts of insanity. The record is clear on that point and cannot be denied.

Corroborated testimony shows, for example that she was “possessed with the idea that some Indian spirit was working in her head and taking wires out of her eyes.” She ordered eight sets of the same set of curtains. Is that overspending, or is that a reaction to a paranoid delusion.

In court, Robert Todd said he wanted the spending to stop. In the twisted repression of Victorian America, it seemed consistent to seek commital of a person but not insist that they were mentally ill. To do so would mean to admit there was mental illness in the family, a shameful thing. The best strategy was to make it all about some banal issue, like the money, when everyone knew the score — it was about mental sense, principally, not dollars and cents.

Meanwhile, Robert Todd pulled many legal tricks to get his mother committed as quickly as possible. He used his influence with the state legislature to have the commital law rewritten to suit his efforts. Interestingly, as pointed out, his wily mother’s own legal skills outwitted her lawyer son.

At the same time as the Lincoln Affair, there were millions of other American families, without the renown or money, acting exactly the same way. Those nameless women, abusers of their family, and abused by their family, are never called feminists, yet they acted as she did, even if they didn’t auction their old clothes in a tacky New York City event.

Mary Todd Lincoln was indeed crazy, at least some of the time. And Robert Tood, by a modest standard, was not a loving, caring son and was in fact quick cruel to his mother. Neither behavior pattern is new, nor did either of them break ground in low forms of intrafamilial combat.

And, as the records show, this fighting didn’t commence only after the assassination. The Lincoln homelife was not always or particularly tranquil. There is much suggestive evidence that Abraham Lincoln was physically abused — beaten — on more than occassion by his own wife.

So, the picture in of Robert Todd and his mother at the time of her commital is but a late chapter in a long and tragic family story.

Mary Todd cannot, no matter how hard we try from our vantage point, be recruited into the 20th or 21st century. She was not a proto-feminist.

She was a stern woman, so concerned about her social position that she often broke social convention in sometimes bewildering efforts to make sure she was not one-upped by her supposed social rivals.

Such thoroughly strict adherence to 19th century social and gender norms, even with unusual tactics, does not make her a feminist.

They make her a complex woman, worthy of study and biography, and, more than a little pity.

Robert went on to public service as a cabinet member in the Garfield and McKinley administrations. When he was not in Washington, he was running his law firm in Chicago.

In 1897, upon George Pullman’s death, Robert Lincoln became president of the Pullman Co., and in 1911 became it’s board chairman. He was executor or George Pullman’s will. Pullman was one of the most reviled captains of industry in American history. As the man responsible for
his funeral, Lincoln had Pullman buried in the dead of night, in an unmarked grave, under a slab of ten-foot thick concrete, to avoid desecration or theft or Pullman’s body. Four years later, he had his father re-interred in Springfield in a similar fashion.

Lincoln’s last major public appearance was at the dedication of the Lincoln Memorial in 1922, at age 78. He was an avid golfer, a serious amateur astronomer and a very, very wealthy man.

Lincoln built a large estate called Hildene, in Vermont, in 1901, where he spent summers. He had three children, and two grandchildren. The last direct descendant to Abraham Lincoln was Robert Lincoln’s grandson, “Bud” Beckwith, who died childless in 1985.

the thought was prompted many years ago by “lord” buckley’s declamations on lincoln, and “lincoln” would be a great name for our country. and, from a purely marketing standpoint, “california” has a nice ring to it as well.

guessing this probably won’t happen.

Oh noez! He shot the Garfield! ahhh