Jenna’s Reviews > The Addiction of Mary Todd Lincoln > Status Update

Over a century ago, this woman and many other men and women like her, were victims of a devastating American epidemic, drug addiction. Mary Todd Lincoln was one of these victims. When her family moved in the White House in 1861, she was 42 years old, the mother of three children, aged 8, 11, 18. She had suffered from severe headaches for 20 years. She would have been using paregoric and laudanum to cope her headache.

We can imagine that Mary Todd Lincoln's anger with her son Robert was even more painful for her. Robert was her first born and only surviving child, and she had always depended on him. Then Robert arranged for her insanity trial and commitment and Mary felt betrayed by him. She could not believe that her son could "do this" to her. He arranged the trial, so that he could legally control her financial affairs.

Her husband's death had brought into permanent dominance all that was unappealing even abnormal in her nature. The sophisticated, flirtatious woman who had delighted in clever talk, high fashion, the theatre, and the opera, had vanished overnight. In her place sat an aging creature, garbed in funeral black, drowning in waves of anxiety and self-pity.

The evil spirit of the drug hides its strength and touches the doomed one gently until it has made its grasp sure, then claws protrude from the soft hand and clutched the captive with a grip which [s]he can have little hope of breaking.
~an unnamed addict, 1881, quoted by: H. Wayne Morgan~