The Emancipator's Wife (79 page)

A
UTHOR'S
N
OTE

The Emancipator's Wife
is a work of fiction. I've made surmises about the way things may have happened, and the possible reasons events took place, that cannot be substantiated, but I've tried not to portray anything contrary to documented events. As all historical novelists must, I have taken my best guess at those occurrences or motivations for which there are no records.

Nowhere have I found any biographer who came out and said that Mary Todd Lincoln had a substance abuse problem. Given the list of her known ailments—an unspecified “female problem” resulting from Tad's birth,
migraines, menstrual problems, what sound like allergy-related sinus head-aches, and injuries from her carriage accident in July of 1863—it would be astonishing if she didn't. Opium and alcohol figured prominently in most over-the-counter medicines in that era, and her biographers agree she took them in quantity: one friend described her as pouring dollops from five or six various bottles into a glass and chugging the result. Before the early twentieth century, no manufacturer of the various female cordials, soothing elixirs, and patented cure-alls was required to list anywhere the percentage of narcotics that these “medicines” contained. Many, many women of stronger will and character than Mrs. Lincoln ended up addicted.

It is also a fact that although she became seriously delusional during the period after Tad's death, when she was solitary and had little to occupy her time, nowhere have I found even a hint that she suffered delusions either while she was incarcerated in Bellevue Place, or following her release. In fact, after she emigrated to Europe in 1876 she also kept herself clear of major debt.

Did Mary Todd entrap Abraham Lincoln into marrying her? Looking at the manipulative chicanery she later indulged in with White House funds, and with promises dealt out to get her debts paid, I can only say that I wouldn't put it past her. She loved him deeply and possessively. She waited for him for twenty months after their breakup in January of 1841 while he tentatively pursued at least two other young ladies. Several of Lincoln's friends attested to the strong streak of physical passion that underlay his iron self-control. When they started spending time together again—unchaperoned and late in the evening at Simeon Francis's house—Mary was a month shy of twenty-four, approaching old-maid territory by almost anyone's standards. They were married on a half-day's notice and their son Robert was born nine months less four days later.

Was Mary Todd Lincoln really insane?

She was undoubtedly eccentric. It's generally held now that she was bipolar—even people who loved her describe her as being subject to wild and abrupt mood-swings, starting in childhood; friends and neighbors interviewed by Billy Herndon in Springfield, and Lincoln's two secretaries Hay and Nicolay, agree that she had a horrendous and perhaps hysterical temper. Recent biographers have suggested the effects of untreated diabetes as well. After the deaths of three of her children, and two separate incidents of major trauma—having her husband's brains blown out while he was sitting beside her and later having the Chicago Fire come within three blocks of her less than ninety days after the loss of her beloved son—she was, if nothing else, a candidate for serious therapy. Though I have been able to find no specific account of what Mary did during the Chicago Fire, her delusion, reported at her trial, that “the South Side of the city was on fire” sounds a great deal like a flashback of post-traumatic stress syndrome.

Descendants of the Todd family to whom I've spoken say that the family tradition is very clear that both Mary and her brother Levi were “crazy.”

The Spider Incident is completely fictitious, but there was certainly friction between the second Mrs. Todd and her husband's children by her predecessor. There may be no more to Elizabeth's departure from the Todd home in Lexington before her marriage at the age of seventeen than overcrowding, but the departure of all four of the first Mrs. Todd's daughters seems more than coincidental. The fact that Mary was sent away to boarding school a mile and a half from her father's house sounds like a compromise to deal with some underlying problem.

John Wilamet and his family are completely fictitious, but I have tried to be as faithful as I could to the experience of post-Reconstruction blacks.

B
ARBARA
H
AMBLY
Los Angeles, 2003

A
BOUT THE
A
UTHOR

B
ARBARA
H
AMBLY
attended the University of California and spent a year at the University of Bordeaux obtaining a master's degree in medieval history. She has worked as both a teacher and a technical editor, but her first love has always been history. Barbara Hambly is the author of
A Free Man of Color, Fever Season, Graveyard Dust, Wet Grave, Sold Down the River, Die Upon a Kiss, Days of the Dead,
and
Dead Water.

Also by Barbara Hambly

A
F
REE
M
AN OF
C
OLOR

F
EVER
S
EASON

G
RAVEYARD
D
UST

S
OLD
D
OWN THE
R
IVER

D
IE
U
PON A
K
ISS

W
ET
G
RAVE

D
AYS OF THE
D
EAD

D
EAD
W
ATER

THE EMANCIPATOR'S WIFE
A Bantam Book / February 2005

Published by
Bantam Dell
A Division of Random House, Inc.
New York, New York

All rights reserved.
Copyright © 2005 by Barbara Hambly

Bantam Books is a registered trademark of Random House, Inc., and the colophon is a trademark of Random House, Inc.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Hambly, Barbara.
The emancipator's wife / Barbara Hambly.
p.                  cm.
1.         Lincoln, Abraham, 1809–1865—Fiction.                  2.         Lincoln, Mary Todd, 1818–1882—Fiction.                  3.         Presidents—United States—Fiction.                  4.         Presidents' spouses—Fiction.                  5.         Married women—Fiction.                  I.         Title.
PS3558.A4215E43 2005
813'.54—dc22                                                                        2004048797

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