Mary todd lincoln life summary
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Mary Todd Lincoln on life after the White House,
Mary Todd Lincoln’s years in the White House were a combination of triumph and tragedy. Never fully accepted by the public and vilified by the press for overspending, her tenure as First Lady was unstable at best. After the death of the Lincolns’ twelve-year-old son, Willie, in , the assassination of President Lincoln shattered his wife’s already fragile state. To compound the matter, Mary was held personally liable for the debts she and the President had incurred for improvements to the White House. While battling for her widow’s pension, she traveled to Germany in for her health and to escape her many creditors. Left almost penniless and both mentally and physically ill in February , she poured out her troubles and petitioned James Orne for money. Orne was a prominent Philadelphia Republican married to a good friend of Mary’s.
In this letter from Frankfurt am Main, written on mourning stationery on February 4, , Mrs. Lincoln
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Mary Todd Lincoln
First Lady of the United States from to
For other women named Mary Lincoln, see Mary Lincoln.
Mary Ann Todd Lincoln (December 13, &#;&#; July 16, ) served as the first lady of the United States from until the assassination of her husband, President Abraham Lincoln, in
Mary Todd was born into a large and wealthy slave-owning family in Kentucky, although Mary never owned slaves and in her adulthood came to oppose slavery. Well educated, after finishing-school in her late teens, she moved to Springfield, the capital of Illinois. She lived there with her married sister Elizabeth Todd Edwards, the wife of an Illinois congressman. Before she married Abraham Lincoln, Mary was courted by his long-time political opponent Stephen A. Douglas.
Mary Lincoln staunchly supported her husband's career and political ambitions and throughout his presidency she was active in keeping national morale high during the Civil War. She acted as the White House social coordina
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Mary Todd Lincoln () was born into an influential and politically well-connected Kentucky family in Lexington. The Todds were among a handful of elite families in the state that sought to create a citadel of civilization on the frontier. Mary’s upbringing reflected these values. The family, who played an integral role in the creation of Transylvania University, made sure that Mary received a solid education. Rare among women of her time, Mary Todd attained nearly ten years of schooling. She followed six years of study at Shelby Female Academy with four more years at Madame Charlotte Mentelle’s boarding school. By that point, she had become fluent in French. Mary's academic background instilled a poise in her that would become one of the hallmark characteristics of her personality. At age fourteen, she dined alongside close family friend and presidential candidate Henry Clay. Mary told Clay that she, too, fully expected to live in Washington in the future.
Abraham Lincoln consider