An American Marriage: The Untold Story of Abraham Lincoln and Mary Todd

by Michael Burlingame

An enlightening narrative exploring an oft-overlooked aspect of the sixteenth president's life, An American Marriage reveals the tragic story of Abraham Lincoln’s marriage to Mary Todd.Abraham Lincoln was apparently one of those men who regarded “connubial bliss” as an untenable fantasy. During the Civil War, he pardoned a Union soldier who had deserted the army to return home to wed his sweetheart. As the president signed a document sparing the soldier's life, Lincoln “I want to punish the young man—probably in less than a year he will wish I had withheld the pardon.” Based on thirty years of research, An American Marriage describes and analyzes why Lincoln had good reason to regret his marriage to Mary Todd. This revealing narrative shows that, as First Lady, Mary Lincoln accepted bribes and kickbacks, sold permits and pardons, engaged in extortion, and peddled influence. The reader comes to learn that Lincoln wed Mary Todd because, in all likelihood, she seduced him and then insisted that he protect her honor. Perhaps surprisingly, the 5’2” Mrs. Lincoln often physically abused her 6’4” husband, as well as her children and servants; she humiliated her husband in public; she caused him, as president, to fear that she would disgrace him publicly. Unlike her husband, she was not profoundly opposed to slavery and hardly qualifies as the “ardent abolitionist” that some historians have portrayed. While she providid a useful stimulus to his ambition, she often “crushed his spirit,” as his law partner put it. In the end, Lincoln may not have had as successful a presidency as he did—where he showed a preternatural ability to deal with difficult people—if he had not had so much practice at home.

Genres: Nonfiction, History, Biography, Presidents, American History, Civil War, Biography Memoir

319 pages, Kindle Edition

Published June 1, 2021

About the author

Michael Burlingame is the author of THE INNER WORLD OF ABRAHAM LINCOLN (1994) and the editor of a dozen books of Lincoln primary resource materials. He taught history at Connecticut College in New London for 33 years, retiring in 2001 to devote full time to ABRAHAM LINCOLN: A LIFE. That work is based on extensive research in manuscripts, newspapers, and public records, many of them overlooked or underutilized by previous biographers. He lives in Mystic, Connecticut."

Reviews

[Bill · Rating 2 out of 5]

Writing about Mary Todd Lincoln and making judgments about her actions and state of mind is fraught with peril. Her largely female, largely sympathetic biographers are often accused by her largely male, largely unsympathetic detractors as being "cheerleaders rather than impartial scholars," as Burlingame puts it in this book. Her male detractors, in turn, are often accused of being sexist and misogynistic. Either way, one just can’t win writing about Mary Lincoln. So should one try?

Burlingame sure did here. And, while I respect him as a Lincoln scholar and was wowed by his masterful two-volume Lincoln biography, which contained much of the same content distilled into this book, I couldn’t help but wonder while reading, whether this book was even necessary.

A lot goes into rating a biography or history book, including whether it was well-written, well-researched and well-argued. This book is all of those things. But honestly, reading this was just unpleasant and exhausting. It's a relatively quick read, and I could have finished it in one or two sittings. I just didn't want to. After a short while, I just wanted to put it down and do something, anything else.

I’m not suggesting that history or biography should be sanitized, like Daniel Mark Epstein’s silly The Lincolns: Portrait of a Marriage, or that it doesn't deserve a full, unflinching look. Mary Lincoln clearly had some psychological issues and engaged in plenty of documented bad behavior, as a wife and a First Lady. But reading this book was like going on a social outing with a couple and watching them argue all evening. Maybe one half of the couple is “right” and the other is “wrong,” but it doesn’t mean you want to sit there and listen to it. Add to that the fact that judging a marriage and dissecting the dynamics of a relationship, particularly a historical one, is difficult if not impossible. So for those reasons, and others, this was ultimately a disappointing read.

In the book’s introduction, Burlingame says Mary “is more to be pitied than censured," and concludes she likely had bipolar and premenstrual disorders. He also acknowledges that "the depressive, emotionally reserved and uncommunicative Lincoln was far from an ideal husband."

But then he proceeds to pile on, with example after censorious example, of how Mary was generally a terrible, horrible, no-good person. Burlingame’s writing style, as in his Lincoln biography, is to overwhelm the reader with evidence to prove a point. He’ll provide 20 quotes from those who knew her to support his case, when a few would do. So instead of several examples illustrating Mary’s unfortunate actions or the perspectives of her contemporaries, we get exhaustive lists that become, well, exhausting.

The book contains thorough accounts of Mary's influence on patronage appointments, on behalf of relatives and shady characters who bribed her. We learn all about her financial misdeeds that allowed her to keep up appearances and go on her compulsive shopping trips. The book also recounts well-known stories about her infamous tantrums during the Lincolns’ 1865 visit to the war front, as well as her role in prompting the Grants to decline an invitation to Ford's Theater (after which Burlingame implicitly blames Mary for the assassination that followed, suggesting that if Grant had been there, it would never have happened).

But much of the rest of the book is just story after story about Mary mistreating others, or acting haughty, imperious or stingy. Burlingame also quotes many people who criticized her etiquette, her likeability or her appearance. None of it has anything to do with the marriage or the Lincolns’ relationship, it’s just a list of her every negative personality trait - much of it introduced by chapter titles or subheadings like "Henpecked Lincoln," "Lincoln Finds Other Ways to Avoid His Wife" and “Honest Abe, Dishonest Mary."

There are also times when it seems Burlingame takes his arguments too far, cherry-picking evidence or making weakly-supported suppositions. He says the story that Mary may have cornered Lincoln into marrying by seducing him the night before their quickie wedding is "plausible though not provable," then concludes it was likely, by providing several pages’ worth of evidence that Lincoln liked sex, go figure, so was therefore probably seducible. He portrays Lincoln as lacking a marital confidante by quoting him as lamenting that "I am the loneliest man in America. There is no one to whom I can go and unload my troubles" - which is actually a third-hand account recollected decades later, that wasn't said in the context of his marriage at all. And while some accounts considered Mary’s February 1862 White House party as a grand social triumph - the Washington Star called it the “most superb affair of its kind ever seen” - Burlingame selectively quotes only those who criticized it, and implicitly criticizes Mary’s "decision to throw an elaborate party... when her sons Willie and Tad lay sick abed", when Willie only became sick shortly before the party, and the Lincolns considered canceling but were told his condition wasn't serious. And Tad only became sick later, long after the party.

Even Mary’s hospital visits with wounded soldiers, which she did out of the public eye, don't escape Burlingame’s criticism. He says she likely was pressured into doing them as a PR move, then faults her for blundering by not adequately publicizing them.

Throughout the book, and particularly in the epilogue, Burlingame critiques other authors and historians and points out where their facts about Mary are faulty or unreliable. While it is important to correct the historical record, at times it all comes across like a diatribe, like he has scores to settle with other authors.

The book is pitched as something of a popular history, when its actual value is more scholarly, in setting the record straight for future historians and biographers. But Jason Emerson's Mary Lincoln for the Ages, an analytical bibliography, already serves this scholarly function. As popular history, Burlingame’s book comes across more like celebrity gossip - interesting and a bit titillating, but without much of a larger purpose.

And it must be said that the book’s lack of end notes undermines its seriousness and limits its scholarly utility. Burlingame provides a website where the notes can be found online, but only provides a homepage url and not a direct link, so it takes some digging to actually find it. And once I found it, I only consulted it a couple of times, because doing so is a lot more cumbersome than just flipping to the back of the book. If this was a decision of the publisher, as Burlingame states, it was a bad one that he should have more strenuously resisted.

So ultimately, this book is exhaustive but overdone, containing every negative thing ever said about Mary Lincoln, with little connection to how any of it had a direct impact on Lincoln’s life or presidency. In his conclusion, Burlingame gives Mary credit only for stoking Lincoln’s early political ambition, and giving him practice in "deal(ing) with difficult people." I don't critique this book because I am a Mary Lincoln cheerleader or apologist, nor do I think Burlingame is sexist or misogynistic. His conclusions may be correct, and his evidence may be strong, but I just found it an extraordinarily unpleasant read, and ultimately decided it was simply an unnecessary one.

[happy · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is really, really - did I mention really scathing look at Mary Todd and, in the author's opinion, the hell she put the 16th President through. The author has almost nothing good to say about the President's wife. In his opinion she was a spousal abuser, both mentally and physically, pathologically jealous, committed fraud while the first lady, mistreated servants to the point none would stay for long, meddled in patronage after the elections, in the White House, was a patholical shopaholic, and last but not least seduced Lincoln before the wedding vows were said. There first son was born just shy of 9 mths after the wedding. Also, Lincoln insisted on getting married the day he announced he was resuming the engagement with Mary.

About the only good thing he says about her, and this is damning with faint praise, is without her ambitions, Lincoln probably would never have become president. The author opines that he would have been content to be a country lawyer. She really wanted to be First Lady.

In her defense, the author does look at some of the physcological problems Mary must have had, including severe PMS, probable Bi-polar disorder and last but not least an unloving step mother.

I had read much of Mary's problems in other sources, but I've never seen it put together quite like this. All I can say it is no wonder her son, Robert, had her committed later in life

Good read, solid 4 stars

[James Krohe · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is an expanded version of the review that appeared under this title in the June 24, 2021, issue of Illinois Times.

Hear the name “Lincoln” and you see the man splitting rails, say, or on a debate platform towering over Stephen A. Douglas. Few recall the soon-to-be President being shooed out the front door of his house in a hail of potatoes. But that image of Lincoln was as valid as the others, as we learn from An American Marriage: The Untold Story of Abraham Lincoln and Mary Todd (Pegasus, 2021), the newest work from Lincoln biographer Michael Burlingame.


The long-maligned William H. Herndon, Lincoln’s law partner and biographer, was the first major biographer to suggest that the marriage was hell for Lincoln. Burlingame, who holds the Chancellor Naomi B. Lynn Distinguished Chair in Lincoln Studies at the University of Illinois Springfield, has burrowed through what is known about the Lincolns’ married life and added much new material harvested from newspaper accounts only now becoming accessible to researchers. His conclusion? Herndon didn’t know the half of it.


Herndon's placed most of the blame for that hell on Mary Todd, an opinion that got Herndon damned in polite circles as a Mary-hater. Later biographers tended to understate the difficulties of the union and Todd’s role in causing them. Male writers did it out of misplaced gallantry, not wishing to insult the First Lady, female writers did so out of sisterly solidarity.


The Lincoln world, and Springfield in particular, was divided into pro-Mary and anti-Mary factions as early as 1866 when Herndon first offered his thesis that the first and the only love of Lincoln’s life had been New Salem’s Ann Rutledge, not Mary Todd. When journalist A. J. Liebling visited Springfield in 1950 he found that the topic was still debated. “"One section of local thought agreed with Herndon that Lincoln was. . . . driven into public life because his home was intolerable,” which view in turn was hotly disputed by “most church people and nearly all married women.”


Many of those women insisted to any (male) biographer who would listen that Lincoln in fact loved Mary. By the 1950s women were writing biographies themselves. One was Ruth Painter Randall, the wife and colleague of a noted Lincoln scholar of that day. She put the Lincolns' happy marriage at the center of her Mary Lincoln: Biography of a Marriage (1953), the first popular biography of Mary Todd. Painter Randall protected Todd's reputation at the expense of the facts in the opinion of Burlingame, who describes the book as “a biography that verged on hagiography.” Burlingame's cross examination of her use of sources is conclusive and devastating. Having knocked down the walls Painter Randall built to protect Todd’s reputation as a wife, he plants his flag on the rubble.

Some readers will find Burlingame unsympathetic, even cruel in his relentless cataloging of Todd’s failures as a human being and as a wife and mother. But an historian is not a therapist; his or her responsibility is to understand, as in “comprehend,” not as in “sympathize with.” Burlingame at least treats Mary Todd as a person and not just the Little Woman, as too many historians have done.


* * *

All happy marriages are alike, you could say, but every unhappy marriage is unhappy in its own way. Burlingame's reconstruction of the Lincolns’ marriage gives us a Lincoln tried by Mary Todd, and a Todd tried even more sorely by life. Her father was neglectful and her stepmother was a villainess right out of a fairy tale. Her whole family showed tendencies toward mental instability; she was described by a neighbor as “nervous and crazy acting,” fearful of storms, peddlers, and pets.

We have learned to be skeptical of male complaints about inconvenient women, but Mary Todd by all accounts was a pain to deal with. As a younger woman, Mary Todd was an ornament to a party but she had been raised with the help of servants and thought housework to be beneath her. Lincoln did the dishes and the grocery shopping, sat (sometimes inattentively) with the kids. She was capable of assaulting the hired help the point of injury, and once attacked Lincoln physically as well. People who knew him speculated that Lincoln continued to endure riding the judicial circuit in central Illinois after he could afford not to because it gave him a chance to get away from Todd for months each year.

Lincoln, alas, could not escape his wife in the White House. She referred to herself not as First Lady but as “Mrs. President” and expected to be treated as such. She was a terror to visitors and staff (Lincoln’s secretary john Nicolay referred to her as “Her S[atanic] Majesty”) and a pest to many of Lincoln’s colleagues and subordinates. Stories of her jealousies, her shopping orgies, her feuds and backbiting and rages were common. She made herself so hated that when the widow Lincoln applied for a government pension, sentiment was against granting her the money.

Burlingame casts light on a question that had puzzled dozens of their friends and family—why ever did they wed? People who knew each partner best thought them a poor match. Albert J. Beveridge, a close student of Lincoln’s pre-presidential years, noted that “[f]ew couples have been more unsuited in temperament, manners, taste, and everything else.”

That Lincoln would be attracted to her was assumed at the time. Miss Todd was vain and frivolous, yes, but she had the kind of education and polish that he longed to have. His attraction to her had less obvious causes. As a young man, the qualities that make him great were not yet evident; while some of Todd's admirers insisted after his death that she had seen the greatness in him all along, we can ask whether she in fact saw only an up-and-coming professional man who was susceptible to her.

One plausible reading of the engagement was that a desperate Todd, believing herself to be too old and plain to get any better mate, seduced him into making a proposal. (Lincoln’s good friend Orville H. Browning said: that there was “no doubt of her exceeding anxiety to marry him.” Why “anxiety” instead of eagerness or hopefulness?)

Lincoln, realizing that they were ill-suited to each other and smitten by another woman, broke off the engagement for a time, but friends and acquaintances reported that Lincoln was tormented by the thought that he had thus treated Mary badly. Honor was considered (at least by Lincoln) to be worth much more then than it is today, when honor—how others see us—matters less than how we feel about ourselves.

The dilemma Lincoln thus found himself in left him so wretched that friends fretted for his well-being. Herndon provides a knowing explanation, which Burlingame seconds. “Lincoln knew that he did not love the girl: he had promised to wed her: he knew what would eventually come of it and it was a conflict between sacrificing his honor and sacrificing his domestic peace: he chose the latter—saved his honor and threw away domestic happiness.”

Did he really? That Lincoln was unhappy in ways we recognize is plain, but it’s hard to reconcile Burlingame’s suffering Lincoln with the man who showed endless solicitude and patience toward his wife. That he could care very much about a woman he didn’t care for confounds our simple-minded notions of conventional romantic love. A good marriage does not necessarily mean a happy one, whatever the marriage's trials to the partners, and this marriage was useful to both. Some speculate plausibly that she, timid and immature and all but helpless, aroused his protective instincts. If Todd needed a father, Lincoln needed to be a father, which he was, first to her, then to their unruly sons, and in the end to an unruly young nation.

And who knows what new, unexpected bonds grew between them when Mary Todd became mother of his beloved boys? Its children are sometimes offered as the proof of any marriage, but the Lincolns’ boys did not flatter the parents, perhaps because the Lincolns disagreed about child-rearing as much as about everything else. Their two youngest, Eddie and Willie, died when not yet formed as personalities, but Tad (“probably darling only at a distance” in the words of historian Walter Johnson) was the sort of child that would give qualm to leave any young married contemplating parenthood. Robert, the first-born and longest-lived, is described by Burlingame generously as prudish and superior, more a Todd than a Lincoln.

As a man, Robert became a servant to the grasping capitalist George Pullman, an arch-enemy of laborers’ right to organize to better their condition. We have no way of knowing whether Lincoln would have been pained by his eldest son’s politics, which so contradicted his own, but I doubt that he would have been surprised by them. Robert’s formative years occurred when his father was almost constantly away from home on the court circuit or the stump; later, when Robert was a young man, the boy was away at school. In any event, no one lists his sons among Lincoln’s accomplishments. If Todd was ill made to keep house, Lincoln was ill-made to parent, he apparently concluding that because his father, Thomas Lincoln, was a poor father, he, Abraham, would be a good father merely by not being Thomas.


* * *

Some readers will ask, who cares? For a long time, few historians did, Lincoln’s private life being judged irrelevant to his public career. In his preface to Here I Have Lived, for instance, the late Paul Angle eloquently argued that Lincoln could not have become Lincoln had it not been for nine circumstances of his life in Springfield that informed and tested him. Angle did not include among them Lincoln’s courtship and marriage.

For his part, Burlingame argues that the marriage is important because Lincoln is important, and because Lincoln was shaped by his marriage. Consider politics. That Todd played a part in his political rise is pretty much undisputed, although how big a part is disputed vey much. Claims that Todd favored her husband with political insight, even that she was counselor to Lincoln, seem fanciful. Certainly, she liked to talk politics with the men, although one suspects that politics might have been for her merely another form of gossip or because it made her the center of attention in male company.

Burlingame credits her with much more. Her ambitions for her husband were pretty clearly self-regarding. (Burlingame notes that by 1854, Lincoln had prepared himself to “not only facilitate the abolition of slavery, preserve national unity, and vindicate democracy; he would also slake his wife’s thirst for fame, recognition, and deference.”) Still, Lincoln may never have become president, he writes, “if his wife had not turbocharged the restless engine of his ambition.” She was talking about making him President back when they were courting; she wrote a friend, “You will see that, as I always told you, I will yet be the President’s wife.”

Burlingame also gives Todd some credit for not only making Lincoln a president but for making him a great president. Lincoln’s marriage to this daughter of slave-owning Southerners was his own private Civil War, a domestic saga of insurrection and betrayals and heartbreak, and Burlingame suggests that President Lincoln’s preternatural ability to deal with difficult people owed to his having had “so much practice at home.”

Charles B. Strozier's Lincoln's Quest for Union: Public and Private Meanings (Basic Books, 1982) anticipated Burlingame in this. Strozier was a budding young psychoanalyst on the teaching staff of Sangamon State University with time on his hands. As he put it in a preface “what else can one do in Springfield, Illinois but study Lincoln?” His study convinced him that Lincoln's grasp of political sectionalism owed much to his unhappy home life.

Strozier’s old book and Burlingame’s new one are alike in another way. Writing of the former, David L. Wilson wrote, “Strozier [became] so engrossed with the manifold problems of Mary that he sometimes loses sight of his main subject.” But who could resist? Burlingame notes that Todd displayed what today is recognized as bipolar behavior: prolonged bouts of depression, excessive mourning for losses, wild spending sprees, ego inflation, and delusions of grandeur. Speculation that her miseries owed to premenstrual stress syndrome or narcissism or borderline personality disorder. Those last maladies are today’s version of the Victorian ladies’ maladies such as neurasthenia and probably ought to be regarded as gossip. and Burlingame notes but does not dwell on them.

Recent scholars, most of them female, found the source of Todd’s ills in her social situation. In her Mary Todd Lincoln: A Biography (1987), Jean Baker essays that Todd’s problem was that she was an unliberated woman, a victim of what Baker has called "male-prescribed true womanhood." That’s too simple by half—a victim of Vctorian sexual mores she might have been, but that was at most a factor, not the cause of her miseries. In his history of Lincoln’s Springfield, Angle lists Mary Todd in his index, a woman who disappears after she wed Lincoln to be reborn elsewhere in the index as “Mrs. Abraham Lincoln.” This was faithful to the conventions of the day, but anyone who knew her would have told him that even after their marriage, Lincoln’s wife remained Mary Todd to the end.

* * *

The publisher describes Burlingame’s book as the “untold story,” but the story has been told by not only by Herndon and Strozier but by Burlingame himself in his previous major works—Abraham Lincoln: A Life and The Inner World of Abraham Lincoln, which books borrow in turn from the revelations in William Herndon’s 1888 biography of his late partner.

Burlingame’s version is, if not more nuanced, certainly more amply documented. When it comes to Todd, it sometimes seems that no stone was left unthrown. Even people who had nothing to say said it in ways that vividly described that unhappy woman. Lincoln relative Harriet Hanks, who lived with the Lincolns for a time, wrote to Herndon that she “would rather Say nothing about his Wife[;] as I Could Say but little in her favor I Conclude it best to Say nothing.”

Burlingame, in contrast, is determined to say everything. In his method, Burlingame resembles Springfield attorney Logan Hay, long-time president of the Abraham Lincoln Association, who in the 1920s set that organization to collecting all the known facts about L’s life (to borrow from Liebling again) “as if he was preparing a lawsuit.” Burlingame does not intend merely to contribute to the debate about the nature and significance of the marriage but to settle the question once and for all. The present book runs to some 300 pages, and that total does not count his research notes, which Burlingame has published separately on the website of the University of Illinois Springfield. In an appendix he adds his critical appraisal of the literature on the Lincolns’ marriage, for which the serious student will be grateful.

Some readers will conclude that, surely, Burlingame’s will be the last word on the subject. But there is no last word about the Lincolns. For example, the delicate matter of Mrs. Lincoln’s corruption as First Lady needs to be examined more deeply, he writes. And now that the facts have been laid out, let the interpretations begin. He adds, “There is a crying need for a modern, thorough, psychologically sophisticated biography . . . written with the goal of understanding rather than vindicating her.”

Burlingame’s own research is deep rather than wide. He limits the scope of his inquiry to what is known about the Lincolns; his consideration of the marriage in the larger social context is perfunctory. Interesting questions thus are left unaddressed. One reviewer has already chided Burlingame for failing to fully take into consideration how the sexism of the era might have distorted the contemporaneous views of Todd's behavior on which his account relies. But that is to criticize a book that Burlingame did not write.

This is not the first book that a newcomer to Lincoln should pick up, nor one that will much inform the students of Lincoln the war leader, the politician, the orator, or the lawyer. Anyone interested in Lincoln the man, however, also will profit from it. ●

[Trisha · Rating 1 out of 5]

I read this book while also reading Ronald White’s biography of Lincoln and it’s left me feeling like the author of this one has set out to focus solely on the most reprehensible qualities Mary Todd Lincoln brought to the marriage. And contrary to the title, there isn’t all that much about what Abraham Lincoln brought to it either except to cast him in the role of a helpless victim of domestic abuse.

A quick glance at some of the chapter and section headings reads a little bit like what you’d expect to find in the supermarket tabloids: “Henpecked Lincoln” “Lincoln Escapes from Home by Traveling the Legal Circuit” “Lincoln Finds Ways to Avoid his Wife” “The Female President Sticks her Finger in the Government Pie” “The First Lady Helps Relatives Win Government Jobs” “Dishonest Mary: A Natural Born Thief” “Penny-pinching Penuriousness” ”The First Lady Humiliates Lincoln,” etc.

Lincoln’s marriage was not a happy one and there’s evidence he regretted asking Mary to be his wife. (Burlingame, like other Lincoln biographers has suggested that the decision was not based on love and that in fact there was little love in the marriage.) Nor is there any doubt that Mary was a difficult woman to get along with, prone to uncontrollable fits of temper and violent mood swings. But to focus solely on the dark side of her personality does her a terrible disservice especially since most likely there was another side to her as well. But what’s most unfortunate is that Mary Todd Lincoln was suffering from mental and emotional disorders that were simply not acknowledged and dealt with at the time. (Were she alive today most likely her physician would want to keep close track of her meds!) She was also carrying a tremendous burden due to the grievous toll the deaths of her three children had on her. Unfortunately Burlingame doesn’t say much about this. But other Lincoln biographers do which leads me to wonder why this one chose to present Mary Todd Lincoln the way he has in this book.

[Mark Anderson · Rating 5 out of 5]

WOW! This is a great read about the Lincolns. I have read a number of the reviews already posted here and realize that a good portion of them are against this book and defend Mary Todd Lincoln. The author has done EXTENSIVE research for this book, and it is what it is. What it is not, is revisionist history which seems to be the "in thing" for teaching history nowadays in this country. Kudos Mr. Burlingame! Well done sir!

[LMORRELL · Rating 1 out of 5]

I really wanted to like this book. I found it so painful that I kept procrastinating by cleaning.

Michael Burlingame"s account of the dysfunctional marriage of President and Mrs. Lincoln is so repetitive that I kept thinking that he was beating an entire stable full of dead horses.

Sadly for me I thought the intro was the best part of this book, and would have stopped reading after that point had this not been a book discussion group selection.

[Socraticgadfly · Rating 4 out of 5]

Mary Lincoln with the bark off — WAY off.

First, contra one-star screeds on Amazon — they are — and, if any similar ones arise here, Burlingame has excellent research skills and shows it by the amount of material he cites, as well as by pointing out BAD research (and that might be charitable) by previous Mary Lincoln biographers. And no, he's not a misogynist. Citing national statistics about how many men are victims of domestic abuse is not misogynist.

Now that that's out of the way, let's proceed to the book, shall we?

Burlingame thoroughly documents just how much of a "problem" Mary Lincoln was. Having read many Lincoln bios as well as the one about Robert Lincoln that came out a few years ago, I still have to say that a fair amount of this was new to me.

Contra a reviewer here, and exactly to overturn the one-starrers at Amazon and those previous bad biographers, yes, Burlingame needed to refer extensively to all the research he had done. He also puts the lie to the claim that Herndon was a lifelong hater of Mary Lincoln.

Now, just how bad? Mary assaulted Abe with both hot coffee and hot tea, with stove wood, and repeatedly with a broom. She drew blood on one occasion. I had heard only about the stove wood.

Tying back to Bob Lincoln? I knew that Mary was severely depressed after Willie's death in 1862. I don't know that I had before heard that Abe himself had talked at that time about the possibility of institutionalizing her.

Nor had I heard of the full degree of mental/emotional/verbal abuse she heaped on him, from shortly after they were married to, essentially the end of his life. Burlingame documents this with many comments from women as well as men in Springfield. He also has comments from or about servants that Mary ran off due to her abuse of them.

Next, the grifting and grafting as First Lady. Again, I'd read a fair amount of this before, but not THIS much. Essentially accepting bribes to push people on her husband for nominations to a variety of positions, especially ones with opportunities for graft, like about anything related to the Collector of Customs for the Port of New York. And, I'd heard nothing before about the payroll skimming scheme. That's enough, to avoid spoiler alerts.

Then, there's the issue of the start of the marriage itself. Lincoln wanted to save his honor after breaking the engagement. Burlingame offers circumstantial evidence that Mary helped him help himself out by seducing him, with Abe being a semi-willing partner. (The circumstantial evidence includes Bob being born less than nine full months later, and the wedding being a rushed affair and not in a church.)

In his appendix — and don't you love it when academics squabble? — Burlingame throws several biographers of both Lincolns under the bus. The name probably best-known today is that of the "venerated" David Herbert Donald. In essence, Burlingame said they had much of the material available to them that he had (some of the items he used were only released in the middle 1990s), but took a powder.

BUT?

While it purports to be well-researched and gives every impression of that? No footnotes or endnotes. And, unlike some modern nonfiction, I'm not even referred to a website where they might exist. Kirkus Reviews talks about footnotes, but as I just told it on Twitter, ain't none in my copy.

So, it loses a star.

That's too bad, in light of the one-starrers, but it is what it is. And that "is," is inexcusable in a book that the author surely knew would be controversial both with the general public and with his fellow academics. There's also no formal bibliography.

[The History Mom]

A look at the marriage of Mary Todd and Abraham Lincoln. It is not balanced, painting Mary as an abusive, conniving, and calculating woman who wasn't really loved by Abraham. It was a tough read and contains many, many quotes from her contemporaries, detailing her many failings with little about her devotion and care for her family.

[Amy Edwards · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a well-researched (footnotes and references not in the book but available online) compilation of quotes and reports of Mary Todd Lincoln’s life as Mrs. Lincoln. It is not really so much about the marriage as much as it as about the wife—poor Abe is seen mostly as the long-suffering victim of a very difficult, probably mentally ill, woman.

I picked it up off the library “new books” shelves. I once read Carl Sandburg’s two-volume biography of Lincoln from library copies—which of course the library has since culled (the fate of so many old books)—and now have my own copy of Sandburg’s combined volume. I love that portrait of Lincoln, and was relieved the Burlingame’s appendix, which exposes several biographies as flawed or badly researched, did not criticize Sandburg. (How are biographers such as those scorned by Burlingame able to get away with sourcing books only from secondary sources?)

I am sorry to learn just how badly Abraham Lincoln suffered in his marriage, but it only makes me admire him more for his kindness and commitment to his marriage covenant, even to an undeserving wife.

Impressive research. Not a fun read. For one, sad content. But for another, it just becomes a string of anecdotes and quotations held together loosely.

[Tina · Rating 2 out of 5]

In all his years of researching Lincoln, I can feel this author's growing hatred for Mary Todd Lincoln fuming from every page. And he must have really despised her. Glad I am done finally done reading this.

[Kara Eshenaur · Rating 1 out of 5]

An American Marriage: The Untold Story of Abraham Lincoln and Mary Todd ("AAM") was a disappointing read for me. I had hoped to enjoy the results of an historical investigation into the personal life of one of our greatest presidents. Instead, I was given the results of one biased professional's irrational rage against other biographers and researchers of Mary Todd Lincoln.

Did I learn about the Lincolns? Yes. And because Mr. Burlingame offered me some irrefutable facts in a somewhat palatable format, I have assigned 1 star to AAM. I cannot justify a higher rating for three primary reasons:

1. The text was unreadable from time to time, due to Mr. Burlingame's excessive use of quotations from contemporary sources. I believe he offered so many contemporary view points in an effort to justify his conclusions ("see -- they thought she was crazy, too!"). An example is thus:

" [Josiah] Kent reported that it "was never difficult to locate" the "nervous" Mrs. Lincoln, who had a "furious temper."" (pg. 89)

Multiply the above example by 300, and you will understand a reader's frustration. A better way of writing this phrase would be:

"[Josiah] Kent, who found Mrs. Lincoln to be nervous, noted that it was never difficult to find her, because she was known for her "furious temper". (Honestly, I'm not sure that I even needed to include his direct quotation regarding the temper, but since Mr. Burlingame seemed intent on including as much "authority" as he could, I will allow it.)

2. I could not walk away from the feeling that Mr. Burlingame has filtered and interpreted the records through his -- let's call it what it is -- privileged point of view. AAM begins with an exploration of Mary Todd's mental illness -- she had profound swings in mood, which involved episodes of hysterics and severe bouts of explosive rage. She also experienced migraines throughout her life, causing her to be irritable. In Mary Todd's time, mental health services were not offered, and many mental illnesses were not diagnosed. Looking at the contemporary evidence from our viewpoint in 2025, we can recognize (indeed, Mr. Burlingame concludes on page 12 that Mary Todd likely suffered from bipolar disorder) the signs of a profound mental illness. By today's standards, Mary Todd would not be chastised for her illness. She would be given treatment, likely involving medicine. She would be treated with compassion (hopefully). Instead, and notwithstanding the fact that Mr. Burlingame acknowledges her mental illness, AAM berates and vilifies Mary Todd for her abhorrent behavior -- most of which we can see as being symptomatic of bipolar disorder. It's disgusting. Further, much ado is made about Mary Todd forcing President Lincoln into appointing her "friends" (who had bribed her) to government offices. No blame is apportioned to President Lincoln for giving into her demands. At what point do we turn to President Lincoln's behavior and hold him responsible for violating his ethical duty to appoint only the most qualified persons for such offices? Apparently never. He's a man.

Finally, Mr. Burlingame, a revered "scholar", thought it necessary to include 2 and 1/2 pages (pages 206-208) to describe Mary Todd's appearance. Her physical fucking appearance. I found this to be reprehensible and indicative of a lack of scholarly neutrality. An example:

"William Howard Russell confided to his diary that the 'impression of homeliness produced by Mrs. Lincoln on first sight, is not diminished by closer acquaintance.'"

The next 2 pages go on in a similar vein. Why are we told to judge Mary Todd by her physical appearance? For that matter, I fancy that Mr. William Howard Russell looked like a troll. Notably, Mr. Burlingame chose to omit a photo of himself at the back of AAM, thus escaping our judgement of his physical nature; considering that he included various descriptions of Mary Todd in AAM, I am sure he'd agree that including a photo of the author is appropriate, for "scholarly purposes", of course.

What a sexist, ableist pig.

3. The entire Appendix was dedicated to disproving and dismantling all other biographies written about Mary Todd. What the fuck, dude?

[False · Rating 4 out of 5]

Do not blame the bearer of the bad news for the fact that this book is an unflattering portrayal of Mary Lincoln. She was an unpleasant and deeply troubled woman who managed to gain the enmity of Lincoln’s friends and peers, the wives of Lincoln’s professional associates and military leaders, her own relatives, and nearly the entire population of Springfield Illinois. Her own son had her committed to an insane asylum in 1873. Having read the other reviews posted here I can’t help but wonder if any of the writers have actually read the entire book or bothered to check the sources cited. Despite the false claim of shoddy research and lack of sources by one reviewer, there are 152 pages of source notes and citations provided online that can be reviewed or downloaded at the website provided in the book.
The only ax/axe being ground here is by angry reviewers who want to pillory one of the foremost Lincoln scholars for writing what most historians have long known to be true about Mrs. Lincoln. To call a distinguished scholar a misogynist while decrying his work as a hit job seems to be hypocritical at best, and according to multiple accounts quoted in the book, Mary Lincoln physically abused her husband. This book is not about gender-bashing or misogyny and reading those motives into this tremendously well-written piece of Lincoln scholarship can only be considered misdirected animus by the reviewer. The editorial reviews on this page extoll the value of this work and the credentials of its author far better than I could, but in my opinion it is contemptible to impugn the character of the author, or for that matter any historical figure (such as Mary Lincoln) without evidence or proof, which this book contains a copious abundance of.
This work contains harsh truths that are substantiated with a massive amount of evidence in the form of direct quotes from people who knew the Lincolns well, such as Abraham’s long-time law partner William Herndon. After Lincoln’s assassination Herndon collected the depositions of dozens of people, which were not challenged by contemporary scholars for their veracity. The so-called Herndon’s Informants provided a treasure trove of primary source information about the Lincoln’s from those who knew them best. The discrediting of William Herndon’s research was itself a hit job perpetrated by twentieth century Lincoln scholar David Herbert Donald who concluded that Herndon “hated” Mary Lincoln, something that historian Douglas Wilson calls a presumption, not a fact. Donald’s work inspired a Mary Lincoln hagiography by Ruth Painter Randall that corroborated Donald’s view of Herndon which has largely and mistakenly prevailed to this day.
An American Marriage is a deeply researched look at the Lincoln’s that does not concern itself with the niceties of giving equal treatment to the non-existent evidence that Mary Lincoln was a good wife or political advisor to her husband. The flaws of both Lincolns are addressed, and the testimony of the people that knew them speaks for itself, and it is their words that paint a dire portrait of the marriage, not the author’s.

[Linda · Rating 3 out of 5]

“An American Marriage: The Untold Story of Abraham Lincoln and Mary Todd” by Michael Burlingame sheds light on the troubled partnership of Abraham and Mary Lincoln. Unlike other Lincoln biographers, Burlingame has little patience or sympathy for Mary Todd Lincoln and her emotional issues. He depicts her as a liar, thief, cheat, and abusive spouse. His rendering of Mrs. Lincoln is backed by meticulous written accounts from those who knew the Lincolns or had witnessed Mary’s behavior. He even assigns indirect blame to Mary for Lincoln’s death. He suggests that if Mary had not alienated Ulysses S. Grant and his wife, Julia, the Grants would have been with the Lincolns at Ford Theater and Grant could have somehow prevented the assassination.

Despite all of the author’s efforts and evidence, I still came away from “An American Marriage” with a good deal of sympathy for Mary Lincoln. Mrs. Lincoln almost certainly suffered from debilitating mental illness, depression, migraines, and menstrual problems for which there was little treatment in the 19th century. Only one of her sons survived to adulthood. Much of her behavior is inexcusable, particularly the verbal and physical abuse toward her husband. However, she soldiered on throughout a difficult life. And certainly, she’s not the worst First Lady in American history.

[Stacey · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book infuriated me even though parts were well researched and I learned a few new tidbits of Lincoln information. My problem was the obvious bias against Mary Lincoln in absolutely ever manner. If the author did say something even somewhat positive about Mary, it was followed up by something along the lines as “sources can’t back this up” or “sources don’t exist”. Yet there is all kinds of sources to document how awful US citizens write or spoke on Mary based solely on her looks. This but went on and on about how ugly she was, how stout she was, how her lips were too thin, etc etc.

The woman was not blameless and was in no ways a First Lady equal to her President husband. But it’s widely agreed now that she likely had chronic depression and bipolar disorder and possibly other mental illnesses. Some grace should be given to her, if not for that, due to the fact that she lost three of her young children and also saw her husband murdered as they held hands in Fords theater. Who could be normal after all that loss.

I don’t tend to enjoy any nonfiction books where there is an obvious bias in any direction. And this is one of the most slanted I’ve ever read.

[Elizabeth VanDyke · Rating 5 out of 5]

I got the feeling as I was reading this book, because of the repetition and the structure that it was notes for a later, bigger book that the author/publisher decided were publishable now. Although I was a little put off by that I still have to give this book 5 stars for the incredible amount of information gathered in one volume. I could not put it down. I have been a Lincoln fan since my childhood in Illinois and have read many books about him and his family (my favorite is "The Last Lincolns") I also taught Chasing Lincoln's Killer in my middle school literature classes. Although I knew Mary was a little unbalanced I had no idea about the extent of her craziness until now. It is amazing that AL was able to lead the nation. For people complaining about lack of references there are *152 pages* of them on the University of Illinois website. Here's the link: https://www.uis.edu/cfls/wp-content/u...

[Mark O'brien · Rating 4 out of 5]

Whew, it's amazing that the United Staes defeated the rebels considering the havoc Abraham Lincoln's wife was causing in the White House -- tantrums, phony payrolls, oodles of gentlemen friends, and "gifts" that served as bribes.
The author lays out the evidence like a good prosecutor making his case. As he concluded, Abe was a lousy husband but Mary Todd Lincoln was very harmful individual, probably due to a bipolar condition.

[Claire Talbot · Rating 1 out of 5]

I listened to this on audio - I found it repetitive, disorganized and very prejudicial against Mary Todd Lincoln. I found it very presumptuous that his appendix was entitled " An appraisal of the literature on The Lincoln's Marriage". Not that she was above reproach - she most certainly had her faults, especially with using her husband's office and her verbal abuse. I feel that she was probably suffering from a form of mental illness and there really was no explanation.

[Lucky Ringwood · Rating 3 out of 5]

Burlingame's tome is highly researched and credible. It gets bogged down with too many quotes and verbatim letters. It would have been more interesting had Burlingame written a comprehensive narrative instead of copy/pasting tons of documents and calling it a book. One thing is certain: Mary Todd suffered from an undiagnosed mental illness.

[Lynn Gambardella · Rating 5 out of 5]

I found this book very interesting and also very sad. Glad I read it, because it confirms what a great man Abraham Lincoln was. Mary Todd Lincoln, not too good of a person. Some of the items about her I knew, some I did not.

[Sheri Hanrahan · Rating 3 out of 5]

It was a bit dry which made it difficult to read but it was very interesting. It is hard to believe that the popular President Lincoln had to contend with a terrible wife. Not only did she make his life miserable but she was corrupt and a thief. Although it is true she definitely had mental problems, she really should have been arrested. It was no wonder that she had very few friends. She made enemies everywhere she went.

[Donna Peake · Rating 5 out of 5]

I could not put this book down. Mary Lincoln was a woman who wanted to be the Queen of the Ball. If any 1st Ladies tried to do what she did they would most likely be in jail. She didn't care if you were a friend of the President or not.
Don't know how he ran the country with all the time that had to be spent picking up after Mary. They do say opposites attract.

[Lynn Coullard · Rating 2 out of 5]

Very, very academic treating of the relationship of the Lincolns. While sources were compiled, quoted, and referenced admirably, they made something that was more a recitation of facts rather than a narrative, or even a good argument with connections and support. I think the same information could have been presented in a more artful form.

[K A · Rating 1 out of 5]

Misogynistic slop.

[Anna Wooliver Phillips · Rating 1 out of 5]

Kinda seems like the author thinks Mary Todd was such a b$&,( that she’s the sole reason Lincoln was assassinated. Blaming her got very old very quickly.

[Brandon H. · Rating 4 out of 5]

"Try to imagine contending with the pressures to which Lincoln was subjected as he toiled to unify the vociferous Republican party composed of wig-hating former Democrats and Democratic-hating former wigs. And the even more vociferous North, which included slave holders in the loyal border states and abolitionists, anti-tariff free traders and high tariff protectionists, radical European refugees and nativist bigots, teetotaling prohibitionists and beer-loving Germans, racial Egalitarians and dyed-in-the-wool Negrophobes. On top of all that, he had to inspire popular morale, to raise armies and find capable leaders for them, to mobilize the economic resources of the North, to distribute patronage wisely while besieged by swarms of importunate would-be civil servants and to deal with hypercritical newspaper editors, backbiting cabinet members, fractious governors, ego-maniacal legislatures and recalcitrant generals among others. And on top of that, he had to cohabit the White House with a psychologically unbalanced woman whose indiscreet and abusive behavior taxed his legendary patience and forbearance to the limit." - Michael Burlingame


This book is a detailed, excoriating account of the utterly appalling and loathsome attitudes and behaviors of Mary Lincoln Todd. I'm not sure why the author entitled the book, "An American Marriage." I think, perhaps, a better title would have been, "The Biography of an American She-devil in High Places." I say this because, while the author did cover the Lincolns' marriage, it seemed that the vast majority of the book was about Mary Lincoln Todd and her inexcusable and detestable behavior. The author not only thoroughly details Mary Lincoln Todd's life with Lincoln in the White House, but also pushes back against the rosey and inaccurate portrayals of this woman. The author spends the appendix challenging and criticizing other authors who misrepresented and portrayed Mary Lincoln Todd in an exaggerated positive and misleading light.

I decided to read it because I wanted to learn more about Lincoln and his marriage. It was not the easiest read but it was educational.

[David Kent]

Review to follow

[Emma · Rating 1 out of 5]

DNF

[Chris]

This was a struggle for me to finish. In many places, it read more like a textbook. Some citations were used over and treated like it was the first time the author used it. Burlingame would frequently include chapter numbers if he had said something in a different chapter.
What I found most off putting was an entire appendix was spent trashing another author's book and providing citations of other authors explaining why that book was bad. (It appears this other author claimed to have gotten information from non-existent references etc.)
What I wanted was a story about Abe and Mary and their life. Tell me about the stresses of being in the White House during a civil war. What brought them joy. How did they navigate losing 3 children? How did that impact their marriage?
What I got, was a story mostly about what a nut job Mary Todd Lincoln was. Claims she was bi-polar, but no recent documentation to support that.
Don't waste your time or money on this book.

[Judy · Rating 4 out of 5]

As one who was born and raised in Illinois, and was always drawn to study Lincoln, Burlingame’s biography of the marriage is the most thoroughly documented book on the subject I have read. Apparently, the author has been privy to many more sources than past researchers, and thus gives us a more detailed and accurate account of the relationship between Abraham and Mary. For anyone who is interested in what factors molded the man and made him the President he was, this book is a must.

[Serge · Rating 3 out of 5]

An uneven work of historiography that paints a damning portrait of Mary Todd Lincoln as "unethical, tactless, unpopular, and scandalous." Burlingame describes the Lincoln marriage as "a domestic hell on earth, a burning scorching hell as terrible as death and as gloomy as the grave." Some of the book reads like a tabloid character assassination anchored by rumor and gossip. Other sections are armchair psychology assessments of the mental state of a First Lady who admittedly suffered from a bipolar disorder, crippling migraines and the grief of burying three sons before they reached adulthood. Burlingame describes the young Mary Todd who caught Abraham Lincoln's attention as "quick, gay, frivolous, social, and conniving. His Freudian frame for the early Lincoln romance is laughable and his use of the Wayne C. Temple "Seduction Hypothesis" (to explain the accelerated nuptials) scurrilous. The merits of the book are that it offers historical evidence for the true failings of the First Lady: she took and extorted bribes, padded expense accounts, peddled trading permits, expedited pardons, and leaked sensitive documents. In this regard, she was the equal of her husband, willing to make expedient compromises for ambition's sake. The tantrums, the shoplifting, the public jealousy are and should remain historical footnotes.