The Lincolns: Portrait of a Marriage
“He was a secretive man,” begins Daniel Mark Epstein, in his book on Abraham Lincoln and the Lincoln marriage.” And that, of course, is the problem. Efforts to reconstruct the private life of Abraham Lincoln frequently come to grief on the sheer unwillingness of this “secretive, silent, and very reticent‑minded man” (in the words of his law partner, William Herndon) to reveal anything of the workings of his private life to outsiders. On the other hand, Lincoln’s wife, Mary Todd, seemed incapable of holding anything back – provided, of course, that she could be believed. Daniel Epstein is a fine writer, and the effortless way he has in reconstructing the interior of the Lincoln marriage strives to make up for Abraham Lincoln’s reticence in almost equal proportions to his effort to treat Mary Lincoln’s instability as gently as possible. But this requires more than a little helping of speculation, and it is that speculation which is the one flaw in the marble of this elegant book. Almost from the beginning, the vague outlines of the Lincoln-Todd courtship are spiked with the assumption that Lincoln was a depressive hypochondriac who had contracted syphilis and broke off his original engagement to Mary Todd when syphilitic lesions appeared. Lincoln’s faux-gallant agreement to a duel with James Shields to protect Mary incites in Mary Todd “a state of high anxiety” and makes her “increasingly enamored of Lincoln the more she perceived that he was in danger” (although none of the sources cited in Epstein’s notes contain any reference to Mary Todd’s state of mind, much less her inamorata). The Rev. Charles Dresser, who married the couple on Nov. 4, 1842, appears fresh from “mass on All Saints’ Day” in “his cassock and tippet,” despite the fact that the Oxford Movement did not introduce the “mass” into American Episcopalianism until 1844, or that no description of Dresser’s clerical attire appears in any account of the wedding. Epstein even hints ever so fleetingly that “the mad rush to the altar” might have been because she was pregnant “soon after the marriage or soon before.” We are now 60 pages into the book’s 509 pages of text, and already we are afloat on a sea of conjecture. All of this striving to add color to an outline may be true and, happily for Epstein, little of it affects either the basic narrative of the Lincoln marriage, from 1842 until the morning of Lincoln’s death in 1865, or the enormous mass of detail which he skillfully synthesizes into a marvelous and plaintive story. But it also makes us flinch with uncertainty when Epstein does develop a well-integrated account of the dangerous lurch in which Lincoln left his wife when he bolted undercover into Washington in 1861, of the scandals caused by Mary’s willingness to be flattered into betraying her husband’s confidence to William Wood, John Watt and Henry Wikoff, and the death of Willie Lincoln. And it does not help that even when Epstein is on solid and well-documented ground, he still stumbles over minor errors like “the youthful General Hooker” taking command of the Army of the Potomac (Fighting Joe was 48 at the time), the Wilmot Proviso as a “bill proposing that slavery be banned” (it was a rider to an appropriations bill), “Sergeant Boston Corbin” shooting John Wilkes Booth at the end of the post-assassination pursuit (he was Boston Corbitt) and Lincoln’s supposed secret meeting with a Congressional committee to exonerate Mary (a myth exploded by Mark Neely in 1975). In the end, for all the tremendous risks Epstein’s guesses involve, his judgments on the Lincolns contain surprisingly little out of the ordinary. Although Epstein tries to award Mary at least some credit for “her passion for politics” and her unwillingness “to play the role of the silent, submissive helpmeet,” nevertheless “Mary always had a terrible temper,” and after age 36 “began to lose control over her actions.” Abraham Lincoln, on the other hand, was an indifferent and neglectful husband who, ironically, only became more neglectful of Mary when the White House threw them more closely together than they had ever lived. These are not new discoveries. In Epstein’s hands, they are told as well, and better, than they have ever been told before. But reliance on hearsay, rumor and myth are what undo all the wonderful telling. Reviewer: Dr. Allen C. Guelzo
Dr. Allen C. Guelzo is the Henry R. Luce Professor of the Civil War Era and director of Civil War Era Studies at Gettysburg College.
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Endnotes, afterword, acknowledgements, index, 559 pp., 2008. Ballantine Books/Random House, 1745 Broadway, New York, NY 10019, $16 plus shipping.