Mary Todd Lincoln

"Jean Baker sets a great example for biographers. It’s not that she used a lot of new sources; there was just abundant new insight. Baker makes you recognise how Mary Lincoln was demonised in her own day and how that served the purposes of her husband’s opponents. They knew how popular Abraham Lincoln was and that his wife was the only way to attack him. In Jean Baker’s book we are able to see Mary Todd Lincoln as a woman, not a liability. She was well read, she was passionate, she was polemical, and yes she struggled with depression and perhaps paranoia. It’s fair and it’s accurate. It’s the most analytic biography ever written of Mary Lincoln. In a word, yes. Perhaps the treatment of Hillary Clinton was almost as harsh—she was baselessly accused of murder, being a secret socialist and lying to the American public about her husband’s White House liaison. But unlike Mrs Lincoln, Hillary Clinton had the personal wherewithal to endure it. Mrs Lincoln didn’t get much sympathy, despite the tragic losses she suffered, because those losses came in the midst of the Civil War—when so many in the United States had lost sons, fathers, husbands and fiancés. There was this attitude that at least you got to see your son die. Correct. Well, Ida McKinley, the wife of our 25th president William McKinley, survived the tragic deaths of her only two children, little girls who both died before reaching age five. She suffered from a chronic seizure disorder. And she lived to see her husband assassinated. Then there is Jane Pierce, wife of our 14th president Franklin Pierce. She had two children die before age four. Then, during a train trip just before her husband’s inauguration, their car derailed and she saw her only surviving son’s skull crushed right in front of her. She never recovered from what she witnessed."