By PETER HANCOCK
Capitol News Illinois
[email protected]

SPRINGFIELD — On May 19, 1875, a Cook County jury handed down a verdict in a case concerning the health and welfare of Mary Lincoln, widow of the former president who had been assassinated a decade earlier.

After listening to only a single day of testimony, the 12 men on the jury signed the standard verdict form stating simply that they “are satisfied that said Mary Lincoln is insane, and is a fit person to be sent to a State Hospital for the Insane …”

The case had been brought to court by her surviving son, Robert Todd Lincoln, then just 31 years old and a successful practicing attorney in Chicago. At his request, the court ordered her committed to the Bellevue Place Sanitarium in Batavia, west of Chicago, and named him conservator of her estate for a period of one year, based on the finding that she was at the time incapable of managing her own affairs.

But Mrs. Lincoln would not spend a full year in the facility. With the help of two of her closest and only remaining friends, James and Myra Bradwell, of Chicago – and against the strong protests of Robert Lincoln – Mary Lincoln would be released after only four months to the custody of her sister in Springfield, Elizabeth Edwards.

The subject of Mary Lincoln’s mental health has long been the subject of public debate. Was she, in fact, a danger to herself and others, and was her son truly acting in her best interests? Or was Robert Lincoln, as his mother would sometimes allege, scheming to shove her aside in order to take over her money and property?

Now, 150 years after her commitment, a newly rediscovered collection of correspondence between Mrs. Lincoln and her friends and family – letters long assumed to have been lost or destroyed – shed new light on the nature of her illness as well as the nature of her relationships with the few friends and family she had left by that time.

“The Dark Days of Abraham Lincoln’s Widow, As Revealed by Her Own Letters,” was compiled by historian Jason Emerson and was recently released by Southern Illinois University Press.

“People have always wondered if these missing letters, if they showed that, in fact, she was perfectly sane, that her son Robert did actually railroad her, bribe the judge and jury because he wanted to steal her money,” Emerson said in a podcast interview with Capitol News Illinois. “And they do not show that at all. They show that Mary thought that’s what was happening – which, in my opinion, and the opinions of psychiatrists I’ve consulted – that was one of her delusions, that everyone was trying to steal her money, not just Robert.”

The book was actually first compiled a century ago by Myra Helmer Pritchard, granddaughter of James and Myra Bradwell, and they were scheduled for publication in 1927, first in installments in the magazine “Liberty,” and then as a book.

Before the publication, however, Pritchard, as a courtesy, offered to show them to Mary Harlan Lincoln, widow of Robert Lincoln, who had just died the year before. Although she was initially agreeable to the project and even offered to add additional information, after reading the manuscript, Mary Harlan Lincoln withdrew her consent and launched a series of legal efforts to suppress their publication.

Pritchard eventually agreed to hand over the material and never publish them in any form, in exchange for a payment of $22,500.

Emerson’s book recompiles that material and presents it as it was intended to be published in 1927, including Pritchard’s comments on the letters. But it also includes Emerson’s own annotations and footnotes that provide context, as well as clarifications and corrections to some of Pritchard’s commentaries.

The letters reveal her to be lonely, occasionally depressed and at times desperate for companionship. But on their surface, do not necessarily portray someone of an unsound mind, especially considering the traumas she had endured through much of her life.

“Pray for me that I may be able to leave such a place as this,” she wrote to Myra Bradwell on Aug. 3, 1875. “Let me see Judge Bradwell. I beg you to come on Friday morning. I should like to see Dr. Evarts. I feel I must have some further conversation with him. Write me, your heartbroken friend, frequently, daily. But come to me. Will you kindly bring out some samples of black alpaca a best quality without luster and without cotton. Also some samples of heavier black woolen goods.”

The book is Emerson’s second work on the subject of the lost letters, which he uncovered in 2005. He found them locked away in a trunk that had once belonged to one of Robert Lincoln’s personal attorneys, Frederick Towers. 

Using those letters and a wealth of other material, Emerson wrote his first book on the subject, “The Madness of Mary Lincoln,” in 2007. 

In that book, Emerson cites a modern psychiatric expert who theorized that Mary Lincoln suffered from what would likely be diagnosed today as bipolar disorder.

“And he told me that today, Mary would be committed involuntarily for probably about seven days,” he said. “Doctors would look at her. They’d give her medication, and she’d be fine today, as long as she took the medication.”

“But back then, they didn’t have that,” Emerson said. “But if you look at her whole life, it’s very clear the incidence of bipolar disorder, or what used to be called manic depressive illness, where she’s high and she’s low, and she’s wonderfully loving and horribly mean. Her spending could be considered a manic action. She was depressed a lot. So it’s clear throughout her whole life.”

After her release, Mary Todd Lincoln lived a relatively quiet life, although she remained plagued by both psychiatric and physical ailments. She died in 1882 at the age of 63. She is buried next to her husband at the Lincoln Tomb in Springfield, along with three of their sons: Edward, William and Thomas.

Robert Lincoln went on to lead a distinguished career of his own. In addition to his legal career, he served as secretary of war under President James Garfield and continued in that post under President Chester A. Arthur after Garfield’s assassination. He also served as minister to Great Britain in the Benjamin Harrison administration. He died in 1926 at age 82.

Capitol News Illinois is a nonprofit, nonpartisan news service that distributes state government coverage to hundreds of news outlets statewide. It is funded primarily by the Illinois Press Foundation and the Robert R. McCormick Foundation.