After the ceremony, the newlyweds did not take a honeymoon but moved into a no-frills hostelry, the Globe Tavern, a large, ugly frame structure that Lincoln thought “very well kept” and economical, with room and board costing a mere $4 per week.207 The Globe’s proprietor was miserly with candles, and his brief menu consisted primarily of sour buckwheat cakes and corn cakes. Nonetheless, John Todd Stuart and his bride had lived there immediately after their wedding, and Mary’s sister Frances and her husband, William Wallace, had spent the early years of their married life at the Globe.
From the outset, people wondered why Lincoln and Mary Todd wed. A guest at the Lincolns’ wedding, Mrs. Benjamin S. Edwards, later wrote, “I have often doubted that it was really a love affair.” Instead, Mrs. Edwards saw the marriage as a match “made up” by “mutual friends.”208 Ida Tarbell, who queried many friends and relatives of the Lincolns, stated that Abraham and Mary “were utterly unsuited for sympathetic companionship. I doubt if Mary Todd had the faintest conception of the meaning of the words.”209 Eleanor Gridley, who also interviewed people who had known the Lincolns, concluded that Mary Todd did not love Lincoln. Mrs. Gridley asked a biographer of Mrs. Lincoln rhetorically, “if she loved him, would she have often annoyed him, confused him and later when her husband became the most distinguished man of the Commonwealth would she have embarrassed and humiliated him, which she often did? No, rather, if she loved she would have been considerate, thoughtful, careful lest she add another burden to his troubled soul.”210 Yet another woman who interviewed friends and neighbors of the Lincolns in Springfield—including one of Mary’s bridesmaids—concluded that the “question whether Lincoln loved her, even when he married her, cannot be answered.”211
In later years, each of the Lincolns spoke offhandedly about the possibility of the other’s dying. Once Mary said that if he were to die, “his spirit will never find me living outside the boundaries of a slave State.”212 In 1857, she told her half-sister Emilie that “I often laugh & tell Mr. L[incoln] that I am determined my next Husband shall be rich.”213 For his part, in 1860, Lincoln told an audience in Bloomington: “I think very much of the people, as an old friend said he thought of woman. He said when he lost his first wife, who had been a great help to him in his business, he thought he was ruined—that he could never find another to fill her place. At length, however, he married another, who he found did quite as well as the first, and that his opinion now was that any woman would do well who was well done by.”214 An editor wondered what Mrs. Lincoln would “say of her husband’s opinion, that her loss can be so easily and satisfactorily replaced.”215
Close friends thought that honor and obligation, not love, impelled Lincoln to marry. Herndon asserted that “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.”216 In Joshua Speed’s opinion, “Lincoln Married her for honor.”217 According to Orville H. Browning, Lincoln “undoubtedly felt that he had made [a mistake] in having engaged himself to Miss Todd. But having done so, he felt himself in honor bound to act in perfect good faith towards her—and that good faith compelled him to fulfil[l] his engagement with her, if she persisted in claiming the fulfillment of his word.” Browning said he “always doubted whether, had circumstances left him entirely free to act upon his own impulses, he would have voluntarily made proposals of marriage to Miss Todd.”218 Mrs. William Butler “advised him if he had given his promise to marry Miss Todd he must in honor keep his word unless she released him.”219
Others pointed to the purely practical advantage of the marriage for both parties. John Todd Stuart agreed that little love was involved; he told Herndon the marriage “was a policy Match all around.”220 Herndon himself called it a “political match.” She wanted Lincoln because he was “a rising man,” while he wanted “her family power.”221 It is possible that Lincoln thought he could enhance his political career through a marriage alliance with the more aristocratic Whig element, but such a calculating approach to wedlock seems out of character for Lincoln, who was engaged to Ann Rutledge and later proposed to Sarah Rickard, neither of whom belonged to well-connected Illinois society. A few months after his nuptials, he was defeated for the Whig congressional nomination partly because of his reputation “as the candidate of pride, wealth, and aristocratic family distinction,” a reputation that accompanied his new status as an in-law of the Todd family.222
On his wedding day, Lincoln, appearing and acting “as if he was going to the Slaughter,” said to one of his groomsmen, James Matheny, “I shall have to marry that girl.” Matheny reported that Lincoln “often” confided “directly & indirectly” that “he was driven into the marriage.”223 While dressing for the ceremony, he was asked where he was headed. “I guess I am going to hell,” came the reply.224
All this, coupled with the fact that Mary gave birth slightly less than nine months after the wedding, tends to confirm Wayne C. Temple’s hypothesis that she seduced Lincoln the night before and made him feel obliged to wed her immediately in order to preserve her honor.225 She could not, of course, have known if she were pregnant, but she might have been, and this knowledge could have constrained a man with an exceptionally tender conscience and highly developed sense of honor to marry her, despite strong misgivings. Lincoln’s willingness to do so would have been fortified if, as James Matheny alleged, Mary Todd “told L. that he was in honor bound to marry her.”226 This explanation is plausible, if not provable. It helps explain why the wedding took place on such short notice; why Lincoln looked like an animal en route to the slaughter; why he said he was “going to hell”; why he married someone whom he did not love; why Orville H. Browning believed that Lincoln was not “entirely free to act upon his own impulses”; why Herndon claimed that Lincoln “self-sacrificed himself rather than to be charged with dishonor”; and why Lincoln told Matheny that he “had to marry that girl” and that he “was driven into the marriage.”227
Other considerations make it seem likely that Mary Todd seduced Lincoln in order to trap him into matrimony. It would not have been out of character, for her ethical sense was underdeveloped. Two decades after her wedding, as First Lady of the United States, she accepted bribes, padded expense accounts and payrolls, appropriated wages from White House servants, tried to raid the stationery fund, helped peddle cotton trading permits and pardons, disguised personal expenses in government bills, and engaged in other illegal activities.228 Moreover, she was 23 years old, rapidly approaching the much-dreaded state of old-maidhood. (In the 1830s and 1840s, women in Sangamon County on average married at 19 and men at 27.) The historian Frank H. Hodder speculated that she “hung on to Lincoln because she knew mighty well that unless she captured some green-horn she would never marry at all.”229 To be sure, she was courted by the lovesick Edwin Bathurst (“Bat”) Webb, a courtly, “rather aristocratic” Virginia-born legislator. In early 1842, Webb confided to a friend: “I wish I was married to some quiet sensible body who would love me a little & my children a great deal. I would enter into [a] compact to stay at home & obey orders the balance of my days.”230 But Webb’s small children were, in Mary Todd’s view, “two sweet little objections.”231 His age presented another problem (he was sixteen years her senior).
Neither Lincoln nor Mary Todd seems to have been undersexed. William Herndon considered her “the most sensual woman” he ever knew.232 William Jayne, brother of Mary Todd’s bridesmaid Julia Jayne, recalled that in the early 1840s, Mary was “a woman of … strong passions” who was “capable of making herself quite attractive to young gentlemen.”233 Her niece called her “an incorrigible flirt.”234 A Springfield neighbor of the Lincolns remembered that she “dared me once or twice to Kiss her.”235
Similarly, despite his social awkwardness with girls in his youth, Lincoln was “a Man of strong passion for woman,” a
ccording to his good friend David Davis, who said that Lincoln’s “Conscience Kept him from seduction” and “saved many a woman.”236 Herndon recollected that Lincoln was “a man of terribly strong passions for woman” and “could scarcely keep his hands off them.” Lincoln once confessed to Herndon that in the mid-1830s he had succumbed to “a devilish passion” for a girl in Beardstown.237 Well after his wedding, Lincoln while on the circuit made improper advances to a young woman sleeping in a bed near his. Lincoln told Milton Hay, James H. Matheny, and Herndon that while spending the night at the home of a friend, he was awakened by the foot of his host’s grown daughter, which inadvertently “fell on Lincoln’s pillow. This put the devil into Lincoln at once, thinking that the girl did this of a purpose. Lincoln reached up his hand and put it where it ought not to be. The girl awoke, got up, and went to her mother’s bed and told what had happened.” Fortunately for Lincoln, who hurriedly departed the next morning, the mother urged her daughter to keep quiet.238
Lincoln told a similar tale to James Short: while surveying in Sangamon County, “he was put to bed in the same room with two girls, the head of his bed being next to the foot of the girls’ bed. In the night he commenced tickling the feet of one of the girls with his fingers. As she seemed to enjoy it as much as he did he then tickled a little higher up; and as he would tickle higher the girl would shove down lower and the higher he tickled the lower she moved.” Lincoln “would tell the story with evident enjoyment” but “never told how the thing ended.”239 Lincoln said repeatedly “about sexual contact, ‘It is the harp of a thousand strings.’ ” A colleague at the bar, Oliver L. Davis, thought that Lincoln’s “mind ran on sexual [matters?].”240 He liked sexual jokes and stories; in 1859, he asked the newlywed Christopher Columbus Brown, “why is a woman like a barrel?” When Brown admitted his ignorance, Lincoln replied: “You have to raise the hoops before you put the head in.”241 That same year he delivered a lecture on “Discoveries and Inventions” in which he speculated about the first human invention, the fig-leaf apron, remarking with a sly sexual innuendo that “it is very probable she [Eve] took the leading part; he [Adam], perhaps, doing no more than to stand by and thread the needle.”242
In early adulthood, Lincoln may have patronized prostitutes. As already noted, during the Black Hawk War he and other militiamen visited a whore house in Galena. Herndon told Caroline Dall that “Up to the time of Anne Rutledge’s death Lincoln was a pure perfectly chaste man. Afterwards in his misery—he fell into the habits of his neighborhood.”243 Herndon alleged that from 1837 to 1842, Lincoln and Joshua Speed, “a lady’s man,” were “quite familiar—to go no further [—] with the women.”244 On at least one occasion Lincoln shared Speed’s taste in fancy women—in fact, the very same woman. Speed said that around 1839 or 1840, he “was keeping a pretty woman” in Springfield, and Lincoln, “desirous to have a little,” asked his bunkmate, “do you know where I can get some.” Speed replied, “Yes I do, & if you will wait a moment or so I’ll send you to the place with a note. You cant get it without a note or by my appearance.” Armed with the note from Speed, Lincoln “went to see the girl—handed her the note after a short ‘how do you do &c,’. Lincoln told his business and the girl, after some protestations, agreed to satisfy him. Things went on right—Lincoln and the girl stript off and went to bed. Before any thing was done Lincoln said to the girl—‘How much do you charge’. ‘Five dollars, Mr. Lincoln’. Mr. Lincoln said—‘I’ve only got $3.’ Well said the girl—‘I’ll trust you, Mr Lincoln, for $2. Lincoln thought a moment or so and said—‘I do not wish to go on credit—I’m poor & I don’t know where my next dollar will come from and I cannot afford to Cheat you.’ Lincoln after some words of encouragement from the girl got up out of bed,—buttoned up his pants and offered the girl the $3.00, which she would not take, saying—Mr Lincoln—‘You are the most Conscientious man I ever saw.’ ”245
In New Salem, improbable rumors circulated about Lincoln’s sexual adventures. He reportedly sired a daughter with Mrs. Bennett Abell. It was also whispered that Jason Duncan’s wife bore Lincoln’s child. Similar stories were spread about Lincoln and another of his surrogate mothers, Hannah Armstrong, though that was treated as a joke. Hannah’s husband used to tease Lincoln about the supposed child Abe had with Mrs. Armstrong. Later, people joshed the widowed Hannah Armstrong about her alleged trysts with Lincoln. She recalled that early in 1861, as she was about to visit him in Springfield, “the boys got up a story on me that I went to get to sleep with Abe &c—.” She replied “that it was not every woman who had the good fortune & high honor of sleeping with a President.”246
Lincoln had a voyeuristic streak. A New Salem farmer named Joe Watkins kept a stud horse, and “Lincoln requested him that when ever a mare come he would be sure to let him know it, as he wanted to see it. Watkins did so, and Lincoln always attended.”247
As a married man, Lincoln continued to show signs of a robust sexuality, though Herndon said he “was true as steel to his wife, during his whole marriage life.”248 Schuyler Colfax, speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives during the Civil War, recalled that he and Lincoln “often went to Ford’s opera house to regale ourselves of an evening, for we felt the strain on mind and body was often intolerable.” They found “real relaxation” in watching “those southern girls with their well rounded forms, lustrous hair and sparkling voices. We thought it a veritable treat to see them dance and hear their song.”249 Also at Ford’s Theatre, Lincoln and his assistant personal secretary John Hay one night “occupied [a] private box” where both men “carried on a hefty flirtation with the Monk Girls in the flies.”250 At a White House reception, Lincoln shook hands with a beautiful woman as she passed through the receiving line; when she prepared to leave, he offered to shake her hand once more. When she remarked that he had already done so, he smilingly replied: “Yes, but madame, you are so good looking that I would like to shake hands with you again.”251
As president, Lincoln allegedly told a friend: “I believe there is even a system of female brokerage in offices here in Washington, for I am constantly beset by women of all sorts, high and low, pretty and ugly, modest and the other sort. Here, yesterday, a very handsome young lady called; she would not take a denial, was admitted, and went straight to work soliciting a certain office for somebody supposed to be her husband. She pled her cause dexterously, eloquently, and at times was almost successful by her importunate entreaties. By degrees she came closer and closer to me as I sat in my chair, until really her face was so near my own that I thought she wanted me to kiss her; when my indignation came to my relief, and drawing myself back and straightening myself up, I gave her the proper sort of a look and said: ‘Mrs.—, you are very pretty, and it’s very tempting, BUT I WON’T.’ ”252
Thus it seems reasonable to conclude that if Mary Todd did try to seduce Lincoln in November 1842, she was in all likelihood successful. Twenty-three years later, she clearly indicated that she thought her husband was seducible. On March 26, 1865, while the Lincolns were visiting General Grant’s headquarters at City Point, Virginia, Mrs. Lincoln and Mrs. Grant traveled to the front, escorted by Grant’s aide Adam Badeau. That officer, to make conversation on the long carriage ride, speculated that a battle would soon occur, for officers’ wives had been ordered to the rear; the only exception had been Mrs. Charles Griffin, to whom the president had issued a special permit. Mrs. Lincoln bristled at the news: “What do you mean by that, sir? … Do you mean to say that she saw the President alone? Do you know that I never allow the President to see any woman alone?”253
It is possible that Lincoln knew that Mary Todd would make his life miserable when he married her, but Herndon believed that she changed dramatically after the wedding. Before marriage, he asserted, she was “rather pleasant—polite—civil—rather graceful in her movements—intelligent, [and] witty.” Indeed, she could be “affable and even charming in her manners.” But “after she got married she became soured—got gross—beca
me material—avaricious—insolent—mean—insulting—imperious; and a she wolf.” Herndon thought that the wolf “was in her when young and unmarried, but she unchained it … when she got married. Discretion when young kept the wolf back for a while, but when there was no more necessity for chaining it was unchained to growl—snap & bite at all.”254 Herndon frequently saw her in “spells of frenzy.”255
Abundant evidence supports Herndon’s characterization of Mary Lincoln as a “tigress,” a “she-wolf,” and the “female wild cat of the age.”256 (When she was First Lady during the Civil War, the two main presidential secretaries referred to her as “the Hell-Cat” and “Her Satanic Majesty,” and the presidential physician, Dr. Robert K. Stone, thought her “a perfect devil.” The commissioner of public buildings, who had frequent contact with her, likened Mary Lincoln to a hyena.)257 James Matheny declared that “Ferocity—describes Mrs L’s conduct to L.”258 A Springfield neighbor, James Gourley, reported that the Lincolns “got along tolerably well, unless Mrs. L got the devil in her.” According to Gourley, she “was gifted with an unusually high temper” that “invariably got the better of her.” If “she became excited or troublesome, as she sometimes did when Mr. Lincoln was at home, … he would apparently pay no attention to her. Frequently he would laugh at her, which is a risky thing to do in the face of an infuriated wife; but generally, if her impatience continued, he would pick up one of the children and deliberately leave home as if to take a walk. After he had gone, the storm usually subsided, but sometimes it would break out again when he returned.”259 A carpenter who worked on the Lincolns’ house, Page Eaton, recalled that Mary “was rather quick-tempered” and “used to fret and scold about a great deal.”260 Peter Van Bergen once heard her “yelling & screaming at L. as if in hysterics.”261
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