The Lincolns had an unusual attitude toward parenting. Their boys had free run of the house (except for the parlor) and the law office. Having been raised in an atmosphere of rote learning and harsh discipline, Abe wanted to loosen the parental bonds. As Mary recalled after his death, “He was very very indulgent to his children—chided or praised for it he always said ‘It is my pleasure that my children are free—happy and unrestrained by paternal tyranny.’”136 One of Lincoln’s political friends remarked, “He was the most indulgent parent I ever knew[.] His children litterally [sic] ran over him and he was powerless to withstand their importunities.” Lincoln himself admitted, “We never controlled our children much.”137 Although Mary occasionally used the lash to punish misbehavior, as when two of her boys dismantled a clock she had bought or when Tad fell in a mud puddle, she was also forbearing. Jean Baker notes, “Usually she was more indulgent than even her permissive husband, once berating Lincoln for what must have been his own feeble effort to discipline the ‘codgers.’” Mary conceded, “If I have erred, it has been, in being too indulgent.”138
The Lincolns’ lenient attitude can be linked to an emerging view of education and parenting that was radical for its day. Their distaste for overly harsh discipline owed an allegiance to the so-called Pestalozzian system of education, based originally on the Romantic theories of Rousseau and Locke, that was advanced by progressive teachers like Bronson Alcott, whose Temple School discouraged flogging or reprimands on behalf of allowing children the freedom to play, roam, and learn by free association instead of by memorization. Alcott believed that children could learn to heed the inner voice of conscience if liberated rather than punished. Lincoln evidently believed that his sons could best tap into their highest potentiality if largely left to their own devices.
As the Lincolns’ views of child-rearing suggest, their outward acceptance of conventional marital roles was deceptive. In the decades after Lincoln’s death, some commentators questioned his marriage, taking special aim at Mary Lincoln. William Herndon led the way by calling the marriage a “policy match” that became intolerable for Abe because of Mary’s “avaricious,” “mean,” “insulting,” and “imperious” nature.139 These were overstatements made by Herndon in hindsight, fueled by slurs she had made about him and by his mission of debunking falsely rosy Lincoln biographies. We cannot, however, ignore Herndon’s comments altogether. Mary did sometimes behave oddly or violently.
But the extremes of complete vilification and falsely rosy descriptions of Mary miss the basic fact that she chafed under the gender restrictions of her era, as did many other women. Cultivated and strong-minded, she was faced with what was then the extremely patriarchal institution of marriage. Even before marrying, she was skeptical of the institution. She spoke half jokingly of “the crime of matrimony” and asked, “Why is it that married folks always become so serious?”140 The fact is, for most women of that era marriage was what Emily Dickinson called a “soft Eclipse”—that is, an arrangement that, with all its promised comforts, threatened to snuff out a woman’s independence and her legal rights. As a newspaper article of the time explained, “Men have a thousand objects in life—the professions, glory, ambition, the arts, authorship, advancement, and money-getting, in all their ramifications, each sufficient to absorb their minds,” whereas a woman has the “sole hope” of marriage, and “the future presents nothing but careless desolation.” If she steps outside her assigned role, “she is proclaimed a scold, a shrew,” and “calumny dogs her footsteps, hissing at her with a thousand tongues, and spitting out lies and poison from every one.”141
Mary was too idiosyncratic and determined to fit easily into a normal middle-class marriage. At the same time, however, she could not identify with women reformers. And so she sought outlets for her trapped energies, which were vented not only in the Rebecca satire but also in her giddy socializing and her free-flowing letters to friends and, later, in her angry outbursts, her migraines, her excessive shopping sprees, and, in the White House years, her behind-the-scenes financial dealings with men.
Her unpredictability created some difficulties for Lincoln and aroused the hostility of men in his circle, but it was undergirded by her genuine love of him and her fierce loyalty to what he stood for. Ultimately, she was a positive force in his life.
Just as Lincoln got home training in handling conflict, he constantly mediated over conflicts as a lawyer. Virtually every cultural theme that affected him personally—issues of gender, class, marital discord, violence, and so on—became grist for his professional mill in the over five thousand law cases he was involved with.
The law also forced him to think deeply about slavery and the meaning of America. Was there a higher law than human law? It was a question Lincoln debated inwardly, one that led eventually to his startlingly simple answer, which changed American history.
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