THE CURSED LIFE OF MARY LINCOLN

A Story of Sadness, Spiritualism and Sorrow

On November 4, 1842, future president Abraham Lincoln married Mary Todd in Springfield, Illinois. It was a complicated and often turbulent marriage, but Mary remained devoted to Abraham throughout his entire life – and even after his death.

A young Mary Todd, who Lincoln fell in love with in Springfield and married in 1842

The two met at a Christmas party in Springfield in 1839. They were attracted to each other from the start. Mary’s sister soon noted with disapproval that when Lincoln would call, he would sit in rapt attention to everything Mary said. She believed the young man, who the wealthy family considered to be unsuitable, was paying far too much attention to Mary. Mary seemed to be returning his attentions for a time, but the following year found her still being courted by other men (including Lincoln’s rival, Stephen Douglas) and Lincoln still pining away after her. At the close of the year, he made his decision, he would marry her. Whether or not Lincoln formally proposed to her or not, Mary promised to become his wife. For some reason, though, on New Year’s Day 1841, Lincoln decided to break off the engagement.

Some have speculated that Lincoln was intrigued by the idea of marriage, but afraid of it also. He feared his loss of freedom but was unsure that he wanted to live without Mary. His friend and law partner, William Herndon, noted that Lincoln was acting as “crazy as a loon”. He didn’t eat, he didn’t sleep, he let his work slide and refused to meet and dine with friends. Another friend, Dr. Anson Henry, suggested that Lincoln take a trip out of town and try to ease his state of mind.

A short time before, one of Lincoln’s closest friends, Joshua Speed, had moved to Louisville, Kentucky and so Lincoln decided to travel there and stay with him for a little while. Unfortunately, things were no better for him in Louisville. Speed was also in the midst of a turbulent relationship with a local woman named Fanny Henning. After a short visit, Speed returned to Springfield with Lincoln and wrapped up his business affairs to move to Kentucky permanently. He would soon be marrying Fanny, but he left his good friend with one piece of advice: either give up Mary for good or marry her and be done with it.

In the summer of 1842, Lincoln again turned his attentions to Mary Todd. A friend cleverly arranged a surprise dinner so the two of them would meet again and it worked. By November, marriage was on Lincoln’s mind again. In fact, it was so much on his mind that on the morning of November 4, he and Mary announced they were going to be married --- that same evening.

Their friends were in great haste to make the preparations, surprised by the announcement. There was no time for Joshua Speed to travel from Kentucky, so Lincoln asked another friend, James Matheny, to stand in as best man. Matheny would later write that during the ceremony, Lincoln “looked and acted like a lamb being led to the slaughter.” While he was getting dressed, his landlord’s son asked him where he was going and Lincoln answered, “To Hell, I suppose.”

Despite the haste in making arrangements and Lincoln’s obvious foreboding, the ceremony proceeded without a hitch and Lincoln was now a husband.

The Lincolns had their honeymoon at the Globe Tavern, where they lived during the first years of their marriage. There was every indication that their marriage was a happy one, despite Mary losing track of her socialite friends and her sister’s warnings that her husband was unsuitable. It was not long before they were expecting their first child and Robert was born just three days short of nine months after the wedding.

During the Civil War and the Lincoln’s years in the White House, their son Willie died, a loss from which Mary never recovered. It was during this time that she turned to Spiritualism and séances began to be held at the White House. Mary seemed to feel great relief from her contact with the dead but later, after Lincoln was assassinated and Spiritualism fell out of popular favor (it would revive again in the early 1900s), Spiritualism would become her undoing.

For months after Lincoln’s death, Mary spoke of nothing but the assassination until her friends began to drift away, their sympathy at a breaking point. She began to accuse her husband’s friends and his Cabinet members of complicity in the murder, from his bodyguards to Andrew Johnson.

Mary lay in her bed for 40 days after the assassination and in the years that followed, she deteriorated mentally and physically into a bitter old woman who wore nothing but black mourning clothing for the rest of her life. Her attachment to Spiritualism turned into a dangerous obsession, reaching a point where she could not function without aid from her “spirit guides.”

Mary had a great fear of poverty. She often begged her friends to help her with money. Unlike the widows of generals and governors, for whom money was easily raised, Mary’s handful of supporters found it impossible to raise funds on her behalf because she was just too unpopular. In fact, she was despised across America. Newspapers wrote unflattering stories about her and she was ridiculed by members of Washington society.

In 1868, she abandoned America and took her son Tad to live in Germany. They lived there in hiding for three years before coming home. In July 1870, Congress approved a lifetime pension for Mrs. Lincoln of $3,000 per year. This pension awaited her when she returned to America, as did an inheritance from Lincoln’s estate. She was finally wealthy woman. This fear was over, but heartbreak soon followed.

Travel and an ocean crossing had dire circumstances for Tad. He developed tuberculosis and his health began to fail. He lingered for many weeks and then died in July 1871. Tad’s death, which followed the death of two other children and her husband, further aggravated Mary’s grief, which was enhanced by her previous history of mental instability.

Mary turned to the only thing that she believed that she had left – Spiritualism. For a time, she moved into a commune, where she began to develop her psychic “gifts,” which enabled her to see “spirit faces” and “communicate beyond the veil.” She claimed to have daily conversations with her late husband. Many took advantage of her, tricking her out of money and using her name to promote their own “abilities.” One of these was so-called “spirit photographer” William Mumler, who produced thousands of blatantly fake photographs of ghosts during his infamous career. Although he claimed not to recognize Mary when she called at his studio, he “miraculously” managed to produce a photo of her and her late husband by deft manipulation of the photographic plates.

The infamous photograph taken by William Mumler, which Mary believed showed the phantom image of her late husband. Although Mumler claimed that he had no idea who the veiled woman was who visited his studio that day -- until the moment she removed the veil, that is -- Mumler was a notorious fraud, who produced thousands of blatantly fake "spirit" photographs.

Mary’s sole surviving son, Robert, a rising young Chicago lawyer, was alarmed as his mother's behavior became increasingly erratic. In March 1875, during a visit to Jacksonville, Florida, Mary became absolutely convinced that Robert was deathly ill. She traveled to Chicago to find him in fine health. On her arrival, she told her son that someone had tried to poison her on the train and that a “wandering Jew” had taken her pocketbook but would return it later.

While staying with Robert in Chicago, Mary spent money lavishly on useless items, such as draperies that she never hung and elaborate dresses that she never wore, due to the fact that she only wore black after her husband's assassination. She often walked around the city with $56,000 in government bonds sewn into her petticoats. She was afraid of banks and still feared losing all her money. After Mary had an “episode” during which it was feared she would jump out of the window to escape a non-existent fire, the family began to feel that she was going insane.

Fearing that his mother was a danger to herself, Robert was left with no choice but to have Mary committed to a psychiatric hospital in Batavia, Illinois in 1875. After the court proceedings had ended, Mary was so enraged that she attempted suicide. She went to the hotel pharmacist and ordered enough laudanum to kill herself. However, the pharmacist caught on to her plans and substituted the drug with a harmless liquid.

On May 20, 1875, she arrived at Bellevue Place, a private, upscale sanitarium in the Fox River Valley. With his mother in the hospital, Robert Lincoln was left with control of Mary Lincoln's finances. By this time, Robert was wealthy in his own right and had no plans for his mother’s money, which Mary refused to understand. She was sure that he planned to steal everything from her.

Three months after being installed in Bellevue Place, Mary Lincoln engineered her escape. She smuggled letters to her lawyer and his wife, who was not only her friend but also a feminist lawyer and fellow Spiritualist. She also wrote to the editor of the Chicago Times, known for its sensational journalism. Soon, the public embarrassments Robert had hoped to avoid were looming, and his character and motives were in question. The director of Bellevue, who at Mary’s trial had assured the jury she would benefit from treatment at his facility, now in the face of potentially damaging publicity declared her well enough to go to Springfield to live with her sister as she desired.

Mary was released into the custody of her sister, Mrs. Elizabeth Edwards, in Springfield and in 1876 was once again declared competent to manage her own affairs. The committal proceedings led to Mary severing all ties with Robert. She called him a “wicked monster” and despised him for the rest of her life. Before she died, she wrote spiteful letters to him, cursing him and telling him that his father had never really loved him.

Mary went into exile again and moved into a small hotel in France. Her eyes were weakened by cataracts and her body was wracked with pain from severe arthritis. She refused to travel back to the United States until several bad falls left her nearly unable to walk. Her sister pleaded with her to come home and finally she returned to Springfield, moving into the Edwards house, the same house where she and Lincoln had been married years before.

Mary lived the last years of her life in a single room, wearing a money belt to protect her fortune. She kept all of the shades in her room drawn and spent her days packing and unpacking her 64 crates of clothing. She died in July 1882 at the age of 63 – a faded shell of the exuberant young socialite that she had once been and a sad victim of the Lincoln assassination who found herself cursed to live for 17 years after the death of her beloved husband.

"MRS. SATAN" FOR AMERICA

The Ghostly Story of the First Woman to Run for President

In 1872, American history changed forever when a woman named Victoria Woodhull became the first woman to try and become President of the United States. She had an uphill battle ahead of her. As a woman, she wasn’t even allowed to vote. If elected, she would have been too young at the age of 34 to serve, but it didn’t matter because she only received a handful of votes. Even her running mate, Frederick Douglass, voted for President Ulysses S. Grant. On Election Day, she was in jail for slandering the most famous minister in the country.

Victoria Woodhull, the first American woman nominated for the presidency -- and practicing Spiritualist medium

When Hillary Clinton was nominated as the Democratic Party’s choice for the presidency in 2016, Victoria Woodhull, a largely forgotten novelty in the historical record, was suddenly in the spotlight for the first time in more than a century and a half. She began to be lauded for her trailblazing advocacy of woman’s rights – including the movement for “free love” and divorce – and her work in the suffrage movement of the day. But what most people neglect to mention is that Victoria Woodhull didn’t achieve her greatest notoriety as a presidential nominee, but rather as a Spiritualist medium who started the first female brokerage firm on Wall Street by charging some of the nation’s wealthiest men to contact the dead.

When someone once asked shipping magnate, financier, and railroad tycoon Cornelius Vanderbilt for financial advice, he replied, “Do as I do, consult the spirits!” His conduit between this world and the next was Victoria Woodhull.

Born Victoria Clafflin in Homer, Ohio, in September 1838, her childhood was a nightmare. Her mother was an eccentric who had “memorized the Bible backward and forward.” Her father was a con artist who abused his family and was one described by a neighbor as a “one-eyed, one-man crime spree.” He fled town after allegedly burning down his own mill for the insurance money and stealing petty cash from the post office. Locals took up a collection so that his family could follow after him. Victoria was the seventh of ten children, four of whom did not live to adulthood. She had only a few years of formal education before being put to work in her father’s traveling medicine show. She and her younger sister, Tennessee, gave séances, performed as fortune tellers, and sold fake elixirs to the gullible. 

At age 15, she was married for the first time to a drunken, philandering physician named Canning Woodhull. They had two children together, but divorced in 1864. She later married two more times. 

In 1868, Victoria and Tennessee moved to New York City, where business and industry were growing rapidly in the years after the Civil War. Millionaires were being made in the shipping, construction, and railroad businesses, and through a series of fortunate coincidences that put the sisters in the right place at the right time, they met tycoon Cornelius Vanderbilt. He was the richest man in America, had an eye for beautiful women, and was obsessed with contacting his late mother. Victoria soon became his personal spirit medium. 

Cornelius Vanderbilt, Victoria's wealthy benefactor

Within two years, using the stock advice that was gleaned from the “spirits” during her séances with Vanderbilt, Victoria and Tennessee became known as the “lady brokers.” Vanderbilt helped them to establish a stock brokerage office, the first of its kind for women of that era. The sisters did very well financially and realized a sizable profit. 

With some of their earnings, they established a weekly newspaper that was designed to cast attention on topics that were of interest to feminists of the time, such as equal rights and suffrage. In 1871, Victoria and her political positions had become so well-known that she appeared before the House Judiciary Committee to speak on behalf of women’s rights. In doing so, she became the first women to ever testify before a congressional committee. 

But her stance on women’s rights was not what earned her the nickname of “Mrs. Satan.” That came about because of her support of another controversial topic of the time: free love. She believed in the right of a woman “to love who I want for as long as I want,” then to divorce. Under the law, she said, marriage for women was slavery. By the age of 31, she was a millionaire, but when she walked into Delmonico’s restaurant without a male escort, she was refused a seat. She tried to vote in 1871, claiming that the 14th Amendment guaranteed women that right. As she had told the congressional committee, “we don’t need the right to vote, we have it.”

Newspapers and religious leaders insulted Victoria with vile nicknames, editorials and cartoons, including this one, which dubbed her "Mrs. Satan." 

But it was in 1872, when Victoria Woodhull truly earned her place in American history when she ran for president. It was a daring move that caught the attention of the press, politicians, and the public. It was the first time that a woman – and a Spiritualist – sought the highest office in the land. She won the nomination of the Equal Rights Party. The former slave and abolitionist Frederick Douglass was named as her running mate, but if he knew it, he never acknowledged the nomination and campaigned for President Grant. 

Even though Victoria could have never been elected, none of that mattered. Her goal was to call attention to women’s rights issues – and to herself. Few regarded Victoria’s candidacy seriously; but the press was more than happy to write about her efforts because it sold newspapers. During her run, she did gain support from a few women’s rights groups and from some Spiritualists, but her radical position toward free love alienated most of those who would have helped her. Conservative newspapers and religious organizations began accusing every one of America’s four million (or more) Spiritualists of supporting free love and while it was a false charge, it inflamed passions. 

One of Victoria's campaign posters

Things turned ugly during her campaign. Reverend Henry Ward Beecher, brother of Uncle Tom’s Cabin author Harriet Beecher Stowe, had attacked Victoria’s notion of free love from his Brooklyn pulpit. Shortly before the election, Victoria’s newspaper printed a story that revealed that Beecher was having an adulterous affair with a parishioner, Mrs. Elizabeth Tilton. The result of the allegations was a full-blown scandal and an embarrassing trial for Beecher on adultery charges. 

The newspaper story may have been accurate, but under a federal law against mailing “obscene” material, Victoria was arrested and jailed, where she spent Election Day. By the way, the winner of the 1872 election was Ulysses S. Grant, who went on to a second term in office.

In the wake of the scandal, her arrest, and the election, Victoria was called a “vile jailbird” by Harriet Beecher Stowe and an “impudent witch.” Others called her much worse. She was later cleared at trial but the events ruined her health, her finances, and her reputation. In 1877, she moved to England, where she married a banker, still supported liberal causes, and lived comfortably until her death in 1927.

She seemed destined for historical oblivion. The Spiritualists wanted nothing to do with her because they believed that she had used the movement to simply further her radical women’s rights agenda. Following the Civil War, when so many people were seeking mediums to contact their loved ones, Victoria Woodhull had soured the movement’s reputation. The bereaved were more concerned with speaking with their loved ones than with listening to speeches about social injustice.

Victoria’s radical position on free love had caused rifts within the women’s rights movement, as well. Even bold feminist leaders like Susan B. Anthony, who had once welcomed Victoria, later distanced herself. When Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton wrote a six-volume history of the suffrage movement, Victoria’s contributions were reduced to one brief mention. 

She would have likely have been forgotten altogether if not for another, far different woman who made history in 2016.