On a July evening in 1875, a former first lady of the United States walked into a pharmacy in Chicago and asked for laudanum—enough of the opium tincture to end her life. The pharmacist, sensing something wrong, refused to sell her the lethal quantity and instead handed her a placebo. Mary Lincoln left the shop believing she had purchased the means of her own death. She had been committed to an insane asylum barely two months earlier, at the insistence of her only surviving son, Robert.

The question that hovered over the entire affair, then and for decades afterward, was whether she was truly mad or whether her own child had betrayed her. Mary Ann Todd was born on the 13th of December 1818 in Lexington, Kentucky. Her father, Robert Smith Todd, came from a family whose ancestors had played a prominent role in the American Revolutionary War. Though he had trained as a lawyer in his youth, Robert never entered private practice.

Instead he built a career on various business ventures in Kentucky, then still part of the American frontier, and he fought in the War of 1812 against the British. Around that time he married Elizabeth, Mary’s mother, who died from complications of childbirth when Mary was only six years old. The following year Robert remarried, this time to a woman named Elizabeth Humphreys. That second union produced nine children, making the Todd household a large one, though financially comfortable enough to absorb the growth.

The family lived in a fourteen-room residence in the center of Lexington, and Mary received a good education for the era, with an emphasis on languages, the classics, dancing, music, and social etiquette. In other ways her youth was difficult. Her relationship with her stepmother was strained, and she found herself outnumbered by a growing crowd of half-siblings. Kentucky was a slave-owning state, and the Todds were no exception; at one point they enslaved more than a dozen people, mostly household workers of various kinds.

Their position reflected the conflicts that slavery was creating across the country. In the middle decades of the nineteenth century an uneasy agreement had been reached: the northern states along the East Coast, places like New Jersey, New York, and Connecticut, were becoming free states where slavery was prohibited, while the southern states—Virginia, the Carolinas, Georgia—continued to build their economies and societies around the institution. The real question was whether the new states being admitted to the Union would be permitted to practice slavery. Kentucky and Tennessee were the first of these frontier states, but by the time Mary Todd was growing up in the 1820s and 1830s, the debate had moved further west, to places like Missouri.

These tensions would come to define her adult life. In 1839, in her early twenties, Mary moved to Springfield, Illinois, a state capital experiencing a major influx of migrants in the 1830s and 1840s. There she was regarded as a witty, outgoing young woman, popular among the city’s gentry. She was initially courted by the rising young lawyer and Democratic politician Stephen A.

Douglas. But it was also during this period that she met Abraham Lincoln. At the time Lincoln was a thirty-year-old lawyer in Springfield, not yet well known and not yet embarked on a political career. The two soon became close, but the relationship was peculiar.

They agreed to marry, then hesitated, with Lincoln growing uncertain about the match and even calling it off at one point. Nevertheless they wed on the 4th of November 1842, after a courtship that was long by the standards of the nineteenth century. Despite its unusual beginning, the marriage proved a happy one. They had several sons: Robert, born in 1843, followed three years later by Edward, who tragically died of tuberculosis before his fourth birthday.

Two more sons followed—William, born in 1850, and Thomas in 1853. The couple were eccentric in their own ways. Lincoln was mild-mannered and often distracted; his boys were known to wander into his office and disrupt the business of his law partners, who frequently complained to Abraham about it. He never did anything to fix the situation.

For her part, Mary was a troubled woman in many respects. She suffered frequent mood swings, public outbursts, and a fierce temper. She clearly struggled with depression and delusions, was possibly bipolar, and had numerous physical problems as well, including diabetes and poor vision. Had she lived in a later era, she might have been treated for one mental health ailment or another.

In the mid-nineteenth century no such diagnoses were made. Abraham began his political career as a local politician in Illinois in the mid-1840s, serving in the state legislature. It was not uncommon for individuals in leading professions, like the law, to hold such positions in the state at the time, and Abraham does not appear to have considered a career in federal politics at that point. After a few years, as he and Mary started their family, he stepped back from politics and concentrated on his law practice.

What drew him back onto the national stage was the passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854, which opened the way for the extension of slavery into the new territories being created by the US government in the West. Lincoln soon emerged as a prominent figure within the newly formed Republican Party, an anti-slavery organization established that same year. Through a somewhat unusual series of events, he was catapulted from relative obscurity to become the Republican candidate in the 1860 presidential election. Mary was a stalwart, if sometimes unorthodox, supporter of Abraham on the campaign trail.

She encouraged his growing political ambitions throughout the 1850s, and it has been argued that we might never have heard of Abraham Lincoln had it not been for her urging him to put himself forward for the presidency. She also seems to have had a hand in devising some of his political views. Conversely, sections of the press saw her as meddling, and her willingness to bring journalists into the Lincoln home in Illinois and give them tours was viewed as eccentric. Abraham clearly viewed her as a partner in his career.

When he won the election in 1860, he greeted her with the words: “Mary, we are elected. ”

The position of first lady of the United States had only entered the lexicon of American public affairs since the 1830s, but Mary relished the role. It was a difficult one for both her and Abraham. The American Civil War broke out just months into Lincoln’s presidency, owing to the belief that the new president intended to abolish slavery across the Union.

Coming from a slave-owning background in Kentucky, Mary had many close relatives who fought for the Confederacy, and several of her half-brothers were killed in action. Yet she was vocal in her support for the Union and the cause of abolition. She also generated controversy, in particular because of her lavish spending on banquets and formal events at the White House, fine jewelry, and interior decoration at a time when the country was suffering under the burden of war and many people lacked the basics of daily life. Those who knew how the Lincoln White House operated viewed Mary as a meddling figure who distracted her husband from the important business of wartime government with her frequent bouts of depression, mania, and generally erratic behavior.

Her mental state was particularly bad in 1862, after she received news that her son William—Willie—had died of typhoid fever. She was so devastated that she was bedbound for about three weeks, did not attend the funeral, and was cared for by a nurse for months. Lincoln had only barely won the 1860 election, owing to the divided nature of the Democratic Party at the time over the slavery issue. His popularity grew over time, however, and so did Mrs.

Lincoln’s reputation, in large part owing to her charitable work in the hospitals of the Washington, DC, and Maryland region. As the war went on, the Union eventually emerged victorious, ending slavery in the United States in the process. Mary had high hopes that she might become a more settled first lady thereafter. But John Wilkes Booth had other ideas.

Booth was an actor and a supporter of the Confederacy. On the 14th of April 1865, he assassinated President Lincoln while he and Mary were watching a performance of the play *Our American Cousin* at Ford’s Theater in Washington. Mary was holding her husband’s hand when he was shot in the back of the head. Lincoln did not die until the morning of the 15th of April, after being in a coma for several hours.

Mrs. Lincoln had to be removed from the room at one point, such was the level of her trauma. In the aftermath of the assassination, Mary Lincoln received considerable sympathy. The couple had suffered so much during the war, and now, when it all seemed to be over and the war won, Mary’s husband had been cruelly taken from her.

Among the messages of condolence she received was a letter from Queen Victoria of Britain, a woman who had lost her own husband, Prince Albert, four years earlier in 1861 and who would never fully recover from the loss, wearing black mourning clothes for the rest of her life. Despite the sympathy, Mary Lincoln soon found herself in a financial bind. Abraham had been successful both as a lawyer and as a politician and had left her a sizable estate of well over two million dollars in today’s money. But Mary had always been a spendthrift, and her time as first lady had only made these instincts worse.

By 1868 she was advertising in the national media that she was broke and needed financial aid as the poor widow of the murdered president. She would spend many years thereafter trying to put herself on a better financial footing, living on support from family, friends, and former political allies of her husband. At one stage this involved her and her son Tad moving to Europe to live in Frankfurt with the Seligman family. Joseph Seligman was a Jewish German who had migrated to the United States, become a very successful businessman, and helped raise an enormous amount of money for the Union war effort during Lincoln’s presidency.

Eventually, in the early 1870s, Congress voted an annual pension for Mary, but she was never on a sound financial footing after she squandered the estate her husband had left. These financial issues placed considerable strain on her always fragile mental health. This was compounded by the publication in 1868 of a book titled *Behind the Scenes, or Thirty Years a Slave and Four Years in the White House*, by Elizabeth Keckley. Keckley was a former slave who had become an employee of the Lincolns as a dressmaker and later a close confidante and friend of Mary Lincoln.

Mary considered the publication of the book, which included a huge amount of personal revelations about her and her deceased husband, a serious betrayal. Many people at the time considered it to be in bad taste. The result of all this unrest and instability in her life, combined with the death of her son Thomas—Tad—possibly from tuberculosis or a heart condition in 1871, led to a serious further decline in Mary Lincoln’s mental health. She became erratic, paranoid, and prone to delusions.

This culminated in 1875, when she visited her only surviving son, Robert, and became convinced that he was drastically ill, when in reality the opposite was the case. During her visit with him, she told him that someone had tried to poison her on the train. She also spent large amounts of money on items she never used, and she walked around the city with tens of thousands of dollars in government bonds sewn into her clothes. Eventually Robert decided to have his mother committed.

An insanity trial followed, one that generated a great deal of public attention given that it involved a former first lady. Shortly after the court proceedings, Mary was in such a bad state of mind that she seems to have tried to take her own life, ordering enough laudanum from several pharmacies to kill herself, until an astute pharmacist picked up on what she was doing and gave her a placebo instead. Initially Mary was committed to the Bellevue Asylum in Illinois. But complications in the case began to emerge, notably the fact that Robert controlled his mother’s finances and was deemed by many observers, possibly quite unfairly, to have ulterior motives in seeking to have her committed.

Eventually, in 1876, Mary was declared competent enough to look after herself and was given her liberty. It was certainly an unpleasant episode in her life, and while Robert’s character was called into question at the time, there is little doubt that Mary Lincoln’s psychological state was not good in the 1870s. Mary headed back to Europe after the insanity case and spent several years traveling in France and elsewhere. Her health declined further during these years, a development in large part attributable to several falls she suffered during her travels.

By the early 1880s, when she was still only in her early sixties, she was back in America and increasingly confined to her sister’s house in Springfield, Illinois. She died there on the 16th of July 1882, after suffering a fall which quickly led to a coma and a heart attack. She was sixty-three years old. One of the few saving graces of the troubles of her later life was that she and Robert did reconcile shortly before her death.

Mary has generally been judged as a very average or even poor first lady by historians, her various difficulties having distracted her husband from his official duties in a time of national crisis. In recent times, however, a more sympathetic portrait of her has emerged, not least following her portrayal by Sally Field in Steven Spielberg’s film *Lincoln*.