On December 13

On this day in ...
... 1818, Mary Todd was born in Lexington, Kentucky. Her mother died when she was 7, and life with her stepmother and 15 half-siblings was difficult, so that she went away to a boarding school, where "learned to speak French fluently, studied dance, drama, music and social graces." As a young woman she lived in Springfield, Illinois, with her sister, the daughter-in-law of a former governor. There she met and married an attorney 10 years her senior; as Mary Todd Lincoln (right) she would become the 1st Lady of the United States, during the Civil War years. Her adult life was marked by tragedy -- not only the assassination of her husband, President Abraham Lincoln, but also the early deaths of 3 of the couple's 4 sons. In 1875 Todd Lincoln's remaining son committed his mother to an asylum. That contested event is among the subjects of The Crimes of Womanhood: Defining Femininity in a Court of Law (2008). This book by Communications Professor A. Cheree Carlson is summarized in this Legal History Blog post, which also mentions an unrelated case, stating that the other woman and

Lincoln were both committed by male guardians to psychiatric hospitals against their will; juries eventually ruled that they were not insane and released them from their confinement.

Returning to the sister with whom she'd lived decades earlier, Mary Todd Lincoln died in 1882, at age 63, in the same Springfield home where she'd married. She's buried in that city as well, next to her husband.


(Prior December 13 posts are here and here.)

News---Kentucky's Lincoln, Todd, And Davis Birthplaces See Surge In Visitors

Davis Sites Gain Visits Amid Lincoln 200th Fervor, Joe Biesk, Associated Press, July 20, 2008.

From Abraham Lincoln's boyhood residence to the Mary Todd Lincoln house, visitors this year are flocking to Kentucky sites dedicated to the 16th president. But, Lincoln's Confederate counterpart, Jefferson Davis, is experiencing a similar resurgence. Kentucky, which claims both men as native sons and has statues of both in its Capitol Rotunda, isn't the only place experiencing a Davis boost. "It'll be hard for anyone to approach the level of attention that Abraham Lincoln gets because he's always classified as one of our greatest presidents," said Paul Bradshaw, manager at a Davis site in Georgia. "But I think there's a trend to learn more about the other side."

Interest in both Civil War presidents seems on the rise, amid a two-year blitz surrounding Lincoln's 200th birthday next February. This June marked 200 years since the birth of Davis, who served as president of the Confederacy. Attendance at Kentucky's Lincoln sites has increased about 18.1 percent, officials say. Lincoln's boyhood home in Hodgenville, for example, had more than 105,000 visitors in the first six months this year, compared with about 89,000 during the same period last year. Kentucky has nine museums and historic sites dedicated to Lincoln, which have had more than 159,000 visitors this year. Mary Todd Lincoln's home in Lexington had more than 1,100 extra visitors this year while nearly 1,700 additional people went to the Lincoln Museum in Hodgenville, according to the Kentucky Historical Society.

Davis' memorial in Fairview, in southwestern Kentucky, meanwhile, has seen an increase in visitors by about 12 percent overall for the year, and a nearly 30 percent jump in June, the month he was born, said Mark Doss, the Davis memorial park manager. Doss said the park, which includes a 351-feet tall obelisk honoring Davis, had its "biggest month of June in the history of the park," tallying about 4,000 visitors. "It's to be expected," Doss said. "There's a lot of people that study Jefferson Davis and in the last few years there's been a lot more interest in his role not just in the war, but in his experience before the war." Bradshaw, who runs the Davis historic site in Irwinville, Ga., where Davis was captured by Union troops, said he expects about 20,000 people or more will visit this year, compared with the normal attendance of between 12,000 and 15,000 people annually. Increased interest in the Civil War, combined with the bicentennial events are likely behind the renewed interest, Bradshaw said. People seem to be looking for another perspective and to learn more about Southern history, he said.

"They know about Lincoln and everything he did," Bradshaw said. "I think there's a trend that there seems to be people who want to learn more about Jefferson Davis and what happened to him." Rick Forte, acting director of Beauvoir, the home in Biloxi Miss. where Davis last lived, said about 4,000 people visited the estate on June 3 for his birthday celebration and grand opening of the home there. Forte said the home, which is now owned by the Mississippi Sons of Confederate Veterans, has also seen more visitors. "We have seen just an outstanding growth of interest," Forte said. "Phone calls, e-mails, you name it." In Lexington, Ky., a town that also boasts ties to both men, the Lexington History Museum has an exhibit featuring both Lincoln and Davis. Jamie Millard, the museum president and CEO, says a record number of people - more than 8,000 - have viewed the museum's exhibit. Lisa Cleveland, a spokeswoman for the Kentucky Historical Society, said that people drawn to Lincoln also tend to show interest in Davis. A mid-June academic symposium on Davis drew about 150 people, and Kentucky's Lincoln sites have also seen more visitors, Cleveland said. "Clearly, for whatever reason, people are finding a reason to visit those Lincoln sites and looking at the Lincoln legacy in Kentucky," Cleveland said. "The interest is there, and I think it's fair to say that there has probably never been as much focus on Lincoln's Kentucky connection as there is now."

Source: Macon, Georgia

Pictures:
Top---Lincoln Birthplace

Middle---Mary Todd Lincoln
Birthplace

Bottom--- Jefferson Davis Postcard and Jefferson Birthplace Obelisk

New : Family Feud or All in the Family? Lincoln and His Inlaws

House of Abraham: Lincoln, The Todds, And A Family Divided By War, Stephen Berry, Houghton Mifflin Company, 288 pages, 8 pp. of b/w photographs, $28.00, November, 2007.

Two Lincoln scholars think:
"Stephen Berry's House of Abraham is a couldn't-put-it-down good read." --Allen C. Guelzo, author of Abraham Lincoln: Redeemer President and Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation

"Thoroughly researched, smoothly written . . . a poignant microcosm of the wrenching familial strains that tore the nation apart." --Michael Burlingame, author of The Inner World of Abraham Lincoln and Sadowski Professor of History Emeritus, Connecticut College

The Kirkus Review thinks:
"Divided families make the stuff of drama. When the divided family is Abraham Lincoln's, its divisions are metaphors for the nation's own collapse. With a skilled and pleasing pen, Berry tells the tangled story of the sad and often painful element of Lincoln's life that deepened his understanding of the nation's travails. Lincoln was closer to his wife's large clan—she had 13 siblings—than to his own. Originally from Kentucky, the Todds had members in both the North and South and backed both the Union and the Confederacy. Four of them, including Lincoln, died as a result of the conflict. Some were honorable and others scoundrels, some were easygoing and others problematic. Berry, an assistant professor of history at the University of Georgia, calls many of them miserable, and their family a wreck. He manages to tell the story of each Todd with full sympathy yet critical distance, and adds another level of understanding to the president who would bind the nation's wounds. Finally, he rescues the Southern Todds from their obscurity. The result is a fast-paced, sobering story, never better told, of the pains of a clan and their significance for American history."

The publisher's pitch:
"Whenever historians and trivia buffs get around to the “brother-against-brother” aspects of the Civil War, inevitably they cite the Lincolns and the Todds. It probably is not true that Abraham Lincoln once said of his wife’s Kentucky family that one “d” was good enough for God, but the Todds required two. However, it certainly is true that the Todd family, thanks to its lone connection to Lincoln, became an object case in how the sectional struggle tore families apart.
The basic facts are well-enough known. Abraham Lincoln married Mary Todd of Lexington, Kentucky. Hers was an old Southern slave-holding family, one of the aristocratic names of the Bluegrass, and not surprisingly when secession came, most of her family followed its ancient sympathies into the Confederacy. That would have been difficult enough for a Southern Kentucky woman married to a Kentucky man who sided with the North. But when that man was President of the United States, the problem magnified itself ten-fold. That President Lincoln had in-laws sympathetic to the Confederacy was embarrassing enough; the position of some of them made it all the worse. Mary’s half-sister Emilie was married to Ben Hardin Helm, a general in the Confederate army. Her brother George was a Confederate army surgeon. Another brother, David, served on the staff of Confederate general—and distant Todd relation—John C. Breckinridge, and his brother Alexander Todd was killed acting as an aide to Helm.
Of Mary Lincoln’s thirteen full and half-siblings, four of her brothers served in the Confederate army, one brother-in-law carried his Southern sympathies to the point of committing treason, Mary’s sister Martha was actually a Confederate spy, and after Helm’s death in 1863, Emilie Helm came to stay as a guest at the White House in Washington. This is all the province of Stephen Berry’s excellent book House of Abraham: Lincoln & the Todds, A Family Divided by War. Besides being the first work to explore fully the trauma endured by this one Bluegrass family, House of Abraham also delves into his in-laws’ influence on Lincoln as President, on his rhetoric toward Southern civilians, and how his own relations forced Lincoln to come to grips with Confederate civilians as people, not just as enemies. Along the way we can see the sad portrait of a family with great strengths and great weaknesses, all heated to the boil in the cauldron of civil war."

CWL thinks: The History Channel's Valentine Day programming