The Health of the First Ladies: Medical Histories from Martha Washington to Michelle Obama (16 page)

After her son Willie died, Mary Lincoln engaged in a more destructive pattern of spending. Her shopping sprees were hidden from the president, and for four years, she continued to run up debts: “She bought the most expensive goods on credit, and, in 1864, enormous unpaid bills stared her in the face.” As a result, she counseled Lincoln to run for a second term. (In 1863, she owed $27,000, and at the time of the president’s death two years later, $70,000.) Relieved after her husband’s reelection, she continued her shopping addiction. For the second inaugural ball, she purchased a gown for $2,000 and pearl, amethyst and diamond jewelry from Washington’s Galt Brothers Jewelers for almost $3,000.
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These were enormous sums for the era.

According to Emerson, the inflection point in Mary Lincoln’s mental devolution was the death of the Lincolns’ favorite son, eleven-year-old Willie. Mary, incapacitated by sorrow, remained confined to her room for weeks. The president asked Elizabeth Edwards to remain to comfort her sister. Lincoln bent over his wife and pointed to Saint Elizabeth’s mental hospital seen in the distance: “Mother, do you see that large white building on the hill yonder? Try and control your grief, or it will drive you mad, and we may have to send you there.”
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Willie became ill in February 1862. When his illness persisted, the family physician, Doctor Robert Stone, was summoned to the White House. He proclaimed that Willie was better, that he was “in no immediate danger,” and that there was every reason for a full recovery. The diagnosis was “bilious fever,” most likely malaria. Stone’s treatment was Peruvian bark, calomel, and jalap every thirty minutes when the patient was awake. In addition, gentle blackberry cordials were provided.
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The physician’s optimism was in error—neither the first nor the last time that a presidential physician’s eminence exceeded his diagnostic or prognostic accuracy. Willie’s condition deteriorated, his breathing became labored, and he died. The cause of death was probably typhoid fever. Mary Lincoln was paralyzed: she retreated to her bed. Elizabeth Edwards, her sister, finally persuaded the distraught parent to get out of bed, dress, and attend church services.
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In December 1863, Mary’s Southern half-sister Emilie visited the White House. Emilie “was alarmed by … wide and shining eyes during rapturous descriptions of visitations from the dead…. [She] longed to communicate with her dead son Willie—not just in spirit circles, but when he came to her chamber at bedtime.”
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Emilie reported that Mary experienced hallucinations: “[Willie] comes to me every night and stands at the foot of my bed with the same sweet, adorable smile he always had; he does not always come alone; little Eddie is sometimes with him.”
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These hallucinations were probably Mary Lincoln’s first truly psychotic symptoms.
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In the summer after Willie’s death, Mary Lincoln sought the comfort of spiritualism, the belief that one can communicate with the spirits of the dead, especially through mediums. She visited mediums in Georgetown and invited them to the White House to conduct séances. Lincoln was skeptical, but in deference to his wife, he attended a few meetings. Mary claimed communication with her son during these sessions. A constellation of spiritualist stars of the nineteenth century became associated with Mrs. Lincoln. These included the Fox sisters, Charles J. Colchester, Nettie Colburn, Mrs. Laurie of Georgetown, and William H. Mumler of Boston. After the Lincoln assassination, Mrs. Lincoln continued to visit mediums and returned to their ministrations after her son Tad’s death in 1871.
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After Willie’s death, Mrs. Lincoln became truly eccentric. That was a near universal assessment, by her family, by the White House staff, by official Washington, and by the country. The accepted presumption was that her presence in the president’s life placed an additional burden upon him. Her inveterate bluntness and rudeness already had earned her legions of Washington enemies and detractors. After Willie’s death President Lincoln no longer received much emotional support from his wife. She lost interest in receptions and refurbishing the White House. Her behavior became increasingly erratic: One day she seemed fine, the following day she would be angry for no apparent reason.
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A bizarre incident occurred in late March 1865, soon after the fall of Richmond to the Union army. The first couple journeyed to Union army headquarters aboard the
River Queen
. Amid a military celebration, Mary Lincoln became unhinged; she gave uncontrolled vent to her emotional insecurity and overreacted to any woman’s affection for her husband. She became enraged upon learning that Mary Ord, the beautiful wife of the local commander, General Ord, rode alone with her husband. Mary, in a carriage with General Grant’s wife, demanded that the carriage stop to let her out so she could upbraid the woman. When the driver refused, the first lady grabbed his arms and physically tried to force a stop. The next day Mary’s jealous rage was unabated; in a frenzy of excitement she insulted Mrs. Ord, called her vile names, and stormed at her until Mrs. Ord began to cry. The same night before guests at dinner aboard the
River Queen
, Mary Lincoln “repeatedly attacked her husband for flirting with Mrs. Ord and demanded that General Ord be removed from command.”
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In contrast to her mental health, her physical health was good while in the White House. There was a single exception. On July 2, 1863, she fell from a carriage that was transporting her from the Soldiers’ Home, their summer Washington retreat, to the White House. The driver’s seat detached from the front of the vehicle, throwing the driver to the ground. The frightened horses began a frantic gallop. The first lady leaped from the carriage to avoid disaster. A traumatic head injury was the result. Mary was “stunned, bruised and battered, but no bones were broken, and her injuries, which were immediately attended to by surgeons from the nearby hospital, did not appear serious.”
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Her head wound was stitched. Unfortunately, the wound did not heal properly and it suppurated. Her “injuries were now seen to be unambiguously grave, the blow to her head and the shock of the fall much worse than first believed.” A physician was forced to reopen the wound and drain the pus. It took three weeks for the wound to heal.
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The accident was not without untoward side effects. Mary’s chronic migraine headaches worsened in intensity and in frequency. Fears for her sanity appeared after this episode. Her son Robert retrospectively suggested that the fall had caused mental impairment and an increasing detachment from reality.
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On Good Friday, April 1865, a cataclysm befell Mary Lincoln. As she sat next to her husband at Ford’s Theater, a .44 caliber bullet from John Wilkes Booth’s single-shot flintlock Derringer destroyed Abraham Lincoln’s brain and subsequently extinguished his life. Mary was inconsolable, but cruel protocol compelled her to endure the funeral exercises in Washington and the fifty-four-hour journey of a funeral train from Washington to Springfield, Illinois. Otherwise she remained sequestered in her rooms in the White House for a month, a generosity extended by the incoming President Andrew Johnson. Her only companions were her two surviving sons, Robert and Tad, Elizabeth Keckley, the family physician, Dr. Robert King Stone, and a longtime friend from Springfield and Abraham Lincoln’s former physician, Dr. Anson Henry. For the remainder of April, Mary Lincoln could manage to function only minimally, with the constant assistance of Elizabeth Keckley.
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Davidson and Connor contrasted the effects of bereavement (loss of a child) upon the presidencies of Franklin Pierce and Calvin Coolidge with that of Abraham Lincoln: “Despite Lincoln’s own history of depression, his wife’s psychiatric instability, attributable perhaps to bipolar disorder, and the fact that he was leading a country at war, Lincoln’s overall effectiveness as president was undiminished in his grief.”
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Mrs. Lincoln’s performance as first lady has been judged harshly, albeit accurately, by historians. Watson concluded that she became a liability for President Lincoln as a result of her vanity, insecurity, impulsiveness and public outbursts of jealousy. He highlighted the Ord affair as a glaring example of the disruptions that diverted the president’s focus from important matters.
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In the ranking of first ladies, Mrs. Lincoln sits at or near the bottom. In the 1997 Watson poll, she ranked next to last, barely surpassing Anna Harrison, whose husband was in office but a month before he died. Mrs. Lincoln ranked last in the 1993 Siena Research Institute poll and at only 36 of 38 first ladies in its 2003 poll. Numbers 37 and 38 were Florence Harding and Jane Pierce respectively.
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The unhappy tale of Mrs. Lincoln’s life after the White House has been more than adequately recorded. To avoid repeating what is widely known, only the highlights of her psychological deterioration are summarized.
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Mrs. Lincoln’s life from the White House until her death in 1882 was devoid of both serenity and happiness. She was nomadic, reclusive, volatile, paranoid and mentally disturbed. On one occasion she was suicidal. In May 1875, her son Robert had her committed to a mental institution, the Bellevue Place Sanatorium in Batavia, Illinois. She was released to the care of her sister four months later.
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With a paranoid fear of robbery Mary Lincoln carried the bulk of her net worth on her person for years. Fifty seven thousand dollars in bonds were hidden in her pocket. She accused Robert Lincoln, her sole surviving son, of falsely charging her to the sanatorium so he could steal her money.
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Psychotic hallucinations reappeared. She admitted to her physician that “an Indian spirit was removing and replacing her scalp, removing the bones from her face, and pulling wires out of her eyes; that someone was taking steel springs from her head and would not let her rest.” Additionally, Mary experienced frequent paranoid delusions, e.g., a man had poisoned her coffee on a train, the city of Chicago was burning, a “Wandering Jew” had stolen her purse, and people in her Chicago hotel would harm or kill her. Mrs. Lincoln discussed suicide with Elizabeth Keckley both in 1865 and 1867 and attempted it in 1875 by swallowing a bottle of what she assumed was laudanum and camphor.
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If Mary Lincoln harbored a psychiatric illness, what was its specific diagnosis and when did it commence? In appendix 3, titled “The Psychiatric Illness of Mary Lincoln,” which appears in Emerson’s detailing of Mrs. Lincoln’s “madness,” psychiatrist James S. Brust claims that she suffered from bipolar disease. He supports this diagnosis by enumerating the diagnostic features of her illness: depression, mania (episodes of compulsive buying of clothes, etc.), its relapsing-remitting course, and its regular cyclic character.
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The date that the disease commenced is uncertain. Many of Mary’s longtime friends opined that she showed signs of insanity as early as 1860. Another view is that fears for her sanity began after the 1863 carriage accident. Emerson concluded that her intense grief over Willie’s death compounded by her traumatic head injury “did not cause her to go mad but did bring her nearer the breaking point.” However, Emerson did admit that signs of mental illness started before Lincoln’s assassination. Evans determined that Mrs. Lincoln was insane after 1865, a result of two deaths, one violent, that occurred within three years of each other.
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Mary Lincoln, with her sons either deceased or estranged, died quietly in her sister’s home in Springfield, Illinois, in 1882. She was sixty-four years old.
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Healthy, Supportive, Socially Successful and Minimal Political Impact

[Julia Grant] Since entering the White House she had worried considerably about her squint. She was much on display in public places. Her photographs were in circulation.
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[Lucy Hayes] The only drawback is her frequent attack of sick headaches. Perhaps twice a month she suffers for a day or two.
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Julia Grant and Lucy Webb Hayes, the wives of Presidents Ulysses Grant (1869–1877) and Rutherford Hayes (1877–1881) respectively, had much in common before and during their years as first lady. Both were women of the American Midwest. Both enjoyed successful and loving marriages, experienced multiple pregnancies, were married to victorious Civil War generals, and frequently visited their husbands in wartime army camps.

However, the education of the two women was different. Julia Dent Grant and her three sisters “were schooled in the domestic arts by their … mother…. They watched their mother manage her home resourcefully as they prepared themselves for the inevitable goal of matrimony.”
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In contrast, Lucy Webb Hayes graduated in June 1859 with a liberal arts degree from Wesleyan Female College in Cincinnati. She has the distinction of being the first first lady with a college degree.
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Julia Grant and Lucy Hayes were experienced social hostesses when they entered the White House. Both were unaffected and gracious women who honed their sociability as the wives of commanding generals as they comfortably intermingled with his subordinates. The two women had previously lived in Washington, D.C. Julia was the wife of the general of the Union armies; Lucy was the wife of a congressman. She later served as hostess for her husband, then governor of Ohio. During her postwar years in the nation’s capital (1865–1869) Mrs. Grant became friendly with the diplomatic set and learned to cope with the complex social crosscurrents of the capital.
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Her successor as first lady had alternative training. According to one biographer, “the years as the wife of an Ohio governor prepared Lucy Hayes to become one of the most effective first ladies of the latter half of the nineteenth century.”
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