The Madness of Mary Lincoln (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Madness of Mary Lincoln Allen C. Guelzo The Madness of Mary Lincoln. By Jason Emerson. (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2007. Pp. 304. Cloth $29.95.) Psychiatry and history have never sat very easily together. Matters are dicey enough when an analyst actually has the living patient on the couch; the chances of producing a worthwhile analysis of someone long dead are infinitely more uncertain. Even in the case of the most famous “madwoman” in American history, Mary Todd Lincoln, the odds of producing a definitive judgment about her mental state are unhappily long. But they are also tempting. As long as we assume that pre-Freudian psychology was too primitive to offer a dependable diagnosis of mental illness and that the Victorian “madwoman in the attic” was invariably an imperiled Pauline, there will always be an opportunity to exercise vicarious pity on Mary Lincoln’s behalf. The earliest promoters of this view were Myra Bradwell and James Bradwell, who first made Mary Lincoln’s acquaintance in 1872, after she had moved to Chicago and bought a house on West Washington Street. After Mary Lincoln was committed in 1875 to Bellevue Place, a mental hospital thirty-five miles west of Chicago, the Bradwells convinced themselves that she had been unjustly incarcerated by a greedy and unfeeling son, Robert Todd Lincoln (the only survivor of the Lincolns’ four children), and they connived to leak sensationalistic stories to the Chicago Times to embarrass him. By September, Robert had grudgingly agreed that his mother be released from Bellevue into the care of her sister, Elizabeth Edwards, in Springfield. But Mary Lincoln quickly wore out her welcome there, and in 1876 she took ship for Europe in the care of her nephew. She still bore traces of manic behavior, and in 1880 she was back in the Edwards home, along with sixty-four trunks of clothes that she would pack and re-pack for hours on end. She died, probably of a stroke, in July 1882. For almost forty years afterward, the insanity verdict went otherwise unchallenged. But in the 1920s, William E. Barton’s unavailing efforts to get at the Cook county trial records spawned suspicion (which he summarized in The Women Lincoln Loved in 1927) about the integrity of the insanity [End Page 89] trial. Actually, the court records, published in 1932, revealed no trace of trumped-up proceedings. But in 1953, Ruth Painter Randall’s biography of Mary Lincoln insisted that she had never been insane and that the evidence of shoddy process was probably safely secreted in the long-lost papers of Robert Lincoln and the Bradwells. However, in both cases, the papers had never actually been lost. In 1975, Illinois historian James Hickey discovered Robert Todd Lincoln’s “insanity file” in a double-locked closet in Robert’s Vermont mansion. And the evidence of those papers (published with extended commentary in The Insanity File: The Case of Mary Todd Lincoln by Mark Neely and Gerald McMurtry in 1986) was that Mary Lincoln was indeed insane in 1875 and that Robert and the Cook County court’s proceedings had been entirely, even cautiously, above-board in declaring Mary insane. Jason Emerson’s The Madness of Mary Lincoln is similar to the Neely/McMurtry book, in that he, in the process of writing a biography of Robert Todd Lincoln, picked up the trail of the missing Bradwell papers in 2005 (including twenty of Mary Lincoln’s letters to the Bradwells) among the surviving collections of Robert Todd Lincoln’s lawyer, Frederic N. Towers. Emerson’s conclusion is also very similar to Neely and McMurtry’s: Mary was clinically insane, at least in 1875, and Robert Todd Lincoln’s conduct in committing her to Bellevue was neither cruel nor illegal. Taken together, the Robert Lincoln “insanity file” and the Bradwell documents substantially fill out our knowledge of Mary Lincoln’s sad descent into the dark waters of mental illness. These documents cannot—nor can we (although Dr. James Brust, in a brief appendix to The Madness of Mary Lincoln, feels confident in stating that Mary suffered from a bipolar disorder severe enough to “still require psychiatric hospitalization” even today...