Abraham Lincoln in his Times Chapter 11 The Springfield Family Part 1

 

n March 1850, shortly after the death of little Eddie, Mary discovered that she was pregnant. On December 1, 1850, William (“Willie”) Wallace Lincoln was born, followed on April 4, 1853, by Thomas Lincoln, nicknamed Tad by his father, who thought the infant’s large head made him look like a tadpole. Although advice manuals recommended breastfeeding for ten months, Mary nursed her children for up to two years.¹

The Lincolns’ child-rearing resembled the Romantic view of the Reverend Horace Bushnell, who advised that “religion loves too much the plays and pleasures of childhood, to limit or repress them by any kind of needless austerity” [italics in the original]² The Lincoln children developed at their own pace, with little pressure or interference. Of course reprimands or brief spankings were sometimes called for. But, generally, strict oversight was avoided. Mary told Herndon that her husband said, “‘It is my pleasure that my children are free, happy, and unrestrained by parental tyranny. Love is the chain whereby to lock a child to its parents.’”³

Bob and Willie were normal learners, but Tad was not; he could not read until he was twelve. Born with a cleft lip and palate, he had a vocal impediment that made him difficult to understand. He became a temperamental boy who in the White House ignored his tutors, ran around, and played. “Let him run,” his father would say; “there’s time enough yet for him to learn his letters and get poky. Bob was just such a little rascal, and now he is a very decent boy.”⁴

Lincoln was right about Bob’s rascality. As a youth, Bob came to be known as the “head of pranks.”⁵ Once he and a few friends tried to reproduce animal tricks they saw at a circus by going into the Lincoln barn and attempting to train dogs to stand on their hind legs and bark, the way the circus lions roared. When all else failed, the boys looped ropes around the dogs’ necks and suspended the animals from rafters. A neighbor heard a ruckus and ran to Lincoln in his law office. He rushed to the barn, scattered the boys, and cut down the dogs, two of which had died.

But Bob had a sober side, and he had to endure ridicule from his peers, who called him Cockeye or Cross-eyed Bob because of his condition of right esotropia, a form of strabismus in which the right eye turns inward (his father had left hypertropia, or an upward-turning left eye). In 1853, he entered the preparatory academy of Springfield’s newly formed Illinois State University and two years later became a freshman at the university. Although he got better grades in math and science than in the humanities, he was, like his parents, an avid reader. In 1859, he took the entrance exam for Harvard but failed it, upon which his parents sent him to Phillips Exeter Academy in Exeter, New Hampshire. After a year there, he was accepted into Harvard, where he graduated in 1864. He had become a reserved, rather stuffy young man.

Willie was a happy mix of Tad and Bob, combining the former’s zest with the latter’s intelligence. When he and Tad weren’t playing soldier in the White House—setting up a fort on the roof, wearing colorful Zouave uniforms, or playing with the president’s guards—they were riding their pony in the backyard or being hauled by their pet goats, which they tied to a wagon. Willie was curious and sensitive, much like his father. He wrote out an accurate timetable of a railroad route from Chicago to Washington, and he precociously composed poetry.

FAMILY POLITICS

If the Lincolns’ attitude toward parenting was out of the ordinary, so were their separations. Lincoln’s most famous phrase about the slavery-riven nation—“a house divided against itself cannot stand”—makes us reconsider his marriage. Over the years, Abe and Mary were divided in two senses: they were separated from each other for much of the time; and when they were together, emotional outbursts, mainly on Mary’s part, frequently drove Abe to go elsewhere, especially his law office. Their marriage was a metonym of the divided nation. And it carried a lesson: a house divided could stand if the two sides were thoroughly devoted to the union. Just as Walt Whitman in his poetry offered comradeship and affection as the panacea for the shattered America, so the Lincolns remained devoted to each other and their children despite strains on their relationship.

The strains were real. Abe and Mary had very long spaces in their togetherness. Throughout the 1850s, Abe was on the law circuit or the political hustings for months at a time. In 1850, he was away 175 days and in Springfield 190 days; 1852 saw him traveling 155 days and staying home 200 days—and so on for the rest of the decade.⁶ Robert Lincoln recalled that his father “was almost constantly away from home.”⁷ Lincoln himself conceded in 1858, “I am [away] from home perhaps more than half my time.”⁸ Understandably, the separations took a toll on the marriage. According to a Springfield neighbor, Mary said that “if her husband had Staid at home as he ought to, that She could love him better.”⁹ But she was devoted to him and his career as a lawyer and, most of all, as a politician.

Actually, the separations gave both spouses freedom to enjoy other kinds of relationships. Both took advantage of becoming close to different people during the times of separation. For Lincoln, traveling for weeks at a time with his lawyer friends—eating and sleeping with them, spending evenings, trading jokes and stories—provided a release into a casual, homosocial environment. Mary, although she missed Abe when he was away, was to some extent liberated by the arrangement. She formed strong bonds with women friends whom she often addressed with affection and yearning. To Mercy Levering, she wrote, “You know the deep interest I feel for you. . . . [Y]our kind & cheering presence has beguiled many a lonely hour of its length.”¹⁰ In another letter, she called her friend “my dearest Merce, the sunlight of my heart.” Levering returned Mary’s affection, and the two inhabited a female world of intimacy and love.¹¹ Even as they confessed their love for each other, they happily discussed their marriages. Mary sustained her affectionate language with other woman friends, like Mrs. Hannah Shearer, “I can never cease to love you. . . . I shall never cease to miss you.”¹² These outcries of love are interspersed with joyful words about her Springfield friends and a forthcoming trip. A later friend, Eliza Slataper, received similar words from Mary, who wrote, “I shall feel lonely beyond expression without you—come to me. . . . Do come if you love me.”¹³

In an era when such passionate expression of love between women was common, Mary could use such language without raising bourgeois eyebrows. What did raise eyebrows was sex radicalism, popularly known as free love. The free-love movement, advocated by reformers like Mary Gove Nichols and Thomas Lake Harris, regarded marriage as an oppressive institution that entrapped women. Marital entrapment was, in fact, widespread in an era when Anglo-American common law still treated the wife as legally, economically, and physically subject to the husband, who had the right to chastise her to the point of physical punishment. According to law, the husband must not inflict permanent physical injury, but this rule was often disregarded in practice, especially in the case of drunken husbands who became uncontrollably abusive. Several of the isms—including free love, women’s rights, temperance, spiritualism, and radical abolitionism—protested against the virtual enslavement of women in marriage. Women’s rights leaders, in their 1848 Declaration of Sentiments, said of the wife: “In the covenant of marriage, she is compelled to promise obedience to her husband, he becoming, to all intents and purposes, her master—the law giving him power to deprive her of her liberty, and to administer chastisement.”¹⁴ More than thirty utopian communities were formed in the United States in the 1840s and ’50s. A number of them practiced free love. In communities such as Modern Times on Long Island, the Berlin Heights Community in Ohio, and Ceresco in Fond-du-Lac, Wisconsin, conventional marriage, which was viewed as a prison for women, was replaced by an open arrangement in which women and men followed so-called passional (aka passionate) attraction in choosing sexual partners.

Predictably, free love was attacked in mainstream newspapers, including the ones in central Illinois that the Lincolns read. The Lincolns’ local paper, the Illinois State Journal, condemning “the Free Love leprosy” at Ohio’s Berlin community, described a Love Cure building, where people paired up casually, and a free-love screed that announced “MARRIAGE IS THE SLAVERY OF WOMAN: Free love is the freedom and equality of woman and man: Polygamy is marriage multiplied: FREE LOVE IS MARRIAGE ABOLISHED.”¹⁵ Another central Illinois paper, the Ottawa Free Trader, reported a free-love event in Ohio where a woman said that “altho’ she had one husband in Cleveland, she considered herself married to the whole human race. All men were her husbands, and she had an undying love for them.” She asked, “What business is it to the world if one man is the father of my children or ten men are?”¹⁶ The same paper fumed that the Ceresco, Wisconsin, community observed “the most vile” doctrines, based on “the lowest sensuality.” At Ceresco, women could change sexual partners at will, fornication was deemed “holy,” and adultery was considered “the highest and truest relation of which two people are capable.” Were these principles universally accepted, the paper argued, the world would become “a vast brothel,” and nothing would be left but “a prospective generation of bastards and strumpets.”¹⁷

How did the free-love movement influence the Lincolns? While their marriage may have been a house divided saved by mutual devotion, they certainly did not go so far as to accept free love, an idea that willfully flouted the marriage institution and replaced it with individual desire. In Lincoln’s eyes, free love provided an anarchic analogue of Southern states that left the American Union. Addressing a crowd in Indianapolis on his trip east in February 1861, he said of the seceding states, “In their view, the Union, as a family relation, would not be anything like a regular marriage at all, but only as a sort of free-love arrangement,—[laughter,]—to be maintained on what that sect calls passionate attraction. [Continued laughter.]”¹⁸

Beneath the joking was his bedrock belief in union and mutual respect, both nationally and personally. On a personal level, he bore witness to great suffering produced by the marital inequities that generated the women’s rights and free-love movements. As we’ve seen, as a lawyer, he participated in more than twenty cases involving battered wives. In most of these cases, a woman hired him to represent her in a divorce suit against a violently abusive, often alcoholic husband. Lincoln must have argued these divorce cases persuasively, because he had a stellar record in representing such wives. Of the twenty-one cases I’ve reviewed, his team secured a divorce for the female plaintiff nineteen times; two cases were dismissed. Without overtly endorsing free love or women’s rights, Lincoln represented women who had the kinds of husbands who inspired these movements.

It may well be that his close attention as a lawyer to the abuse suffered by many wives influenced his response to his own wife’s irregular behavior. His laxness as a parent was matched by his tolerance as a husband. Allegedly, Mary once threw a piece of wood at him when he failed to respond 

to her appeals for him to tend to the fire. She was known to chase him out of the house, wielding a broomstick, club, or knife.

While such moments pained Lincoln, he also could view them as a healthy letting off of steam, then a rare option for women. He told the story of a henpecked husband, Jones, whose wife drove him out of the house. When asked how he could stand her behavior, Jones replied, “Why, it didn’t hurt me any; and you’ve no idea what a power of good it did Sarah Ann!”¹⁹ Mary’s half sister Emilie Todd, who visited Springfield in the winter of 1854, remarked that Mary “had a high temper” and “did not always have it under complete control,” but it “was soon over, and her husband loved her none the less, perhaps all the more, for this human frailty which needed his love and patience to pet and coax the sunny smile to replace the sarcasm and tears.”²⁰ A Springfield neighbor, James Gourley, said, “Lincoln & his wife got along tolerably well, unless Mrs L got the devil in her: Lincoln paid no attention—would pick up one of his Children & walked off—would laugh at her—pay no Earthly attention to her when in that wild furious Condition.”²¹

It’s difficult to say what caused Mary’s mood swings. Her problems were in part physical. She reported having near-hemorrhagic menstrual periods. With striking openness in a time when such statements were tabooed, she wrote to Abe, “I have had one of my severe attacks. . . . Some of these periods will launch me away.”²² Other of her symptoms were headaches, fatigue, rapid heartbeat, eye problems, mouth swelling, and irregular gait. In light of these symptoms, commentators have hypothesized about illnesses she may have had, including pernicious anemia (vitamin B12 deficiency), diabetes, or even syphilis.²³ Mental illness has been attributed to her, particularly bipolar disorder, more commonly known as manic-depressive illness.²⁴

Diagnoses of physical and mental conditions have also accumulated around Abe. His lanky frame has been associated with Marfan syndrome, and his long limbs and asymmetric, lumpy lower lip with multiple endocrine neoplasia, type 2B, a rare, cancer-causing genetic disorder.²⁵ It has been suggested that the irritability, insomnia, tremor, and the rage attacks he sometimes experienced were caused by the “blue mass” pills that he took for constipation until 1861, when he quit them because, he said, they made him “cross.”²⁶ The pills contained large amounts of mercury, which, as we now know, can damage the nervous system and internal organs. Some have linked his habitual melancholy to chronic depression.²⁷

Such diagnoses are merely informed guesswork. To continue with conjectures, we may wonder if Mary occasionally experimented with free love. We know that she eventually found consolation in spiritualism (contact with the dead), one of the isms closely allied with free love. Spiritualism held that the choice of sexual partners was determined by magnetic “affinities.” When Abe was away, did Mary feel affinities for other men? Uneasy about being alone and terrified of storms, she frequently hired local boys or men to stay with her. She said to James Gourley, “Mr Gourly—Come—do Come & Stay with me all night—you can Sleep in the bed with Bob and I.”²⁸ Gourley, the man she reportedly told that she would love her husband better if he stayed home, remarked cryptically, “She is no prostitute—a good woman. She dared me once or twice to Kiss her, as I thought—refused then—wouldn’t now.” Gourley’s comment that Mary was “no prostitute” and yet offered to kiss him suggests at least some sexual freedom on her part, as does her rumored behavior on shopping trips during the White House years with government worker William S. Wood, with whom she stayed in hotels in New York. When an anonymous correspondent in June 1861 wrote Lincoln about “the scandal of your wife and Wood,” the exposure of which would “stab you in the most vital part,” the president reportedly spoke harshly to Mary and barely communicated with her for several days However, the idea advanced by some biographers that the marriage was dysfunctional overlooks the firm devotion between Mary and Abe. That devotion superseded other relationships. Take Mary’s rejection of Julia Jayne Trumbull. Having helped reunite Mary and Abe after their 1841 breakup, Julia was a bridesmaid of Mary’s and one of her closest friends. But the friendship ended during the Senate race of 1855, when Julia’s husband, Lyman Trumbull, emerged victorious after Lincoln swung his supporters to Trumbull because of Democratic scheming. In Mary’s view, Trumbull should have given Lincoln his votes, not the other way around. Lincoln was relieved that at least the senatorship had gone to the like-minded Trumbull, whom he congratulated and continued to befriend. Mary, in contrast, turned the cold shoulder to Lyman Trumbull and never talked to his wife again.

HOME WORK

Mary’s complete devotion to her husband did not dampen her self-reliance. She assumed a large role in family decisions, such as the education of the children and the refurbishing of the Jackson Street home. A legend grew that she supervised single-handedly the expansion of the house in 1856. While Abe was away on the law circuit, the story goes, Mary, using $1,200 that she earned from the sale of eighty acres she had inherited, added downstairs rooms and a second story to the house. She made the house look so different that when Abe returned to Jackson Street, he asked a neighbor, “Wilkie, can you tell me where old Abe Lincoln lived around these parts