The Resilient Mary Lincoln
‘In Pursuit’ series features the newest Mary Lincoln biographer, Lois Romano, and her essay on the widowed first lady who refused defeat.
When Lois Romano, a former Washington, D.C., veteran journalist who has covered first ladies, began researching her narrative-shattering, new biography about Mary Todd Lincoln, she was appalled by the way the wife of the revered Abraham Lincoln was treated by his friends, his enemies and the press.
But when it came time for Romano, author of The New York Times bestseller An Inconvenient Widow: The Torment, Trial, and Triumph of Mary Todd Lincoln, to distill her life down to one lesson for the ongoing In Pursuit essay series about America’s presidents and select first ladies, the widowed first lady’s narrative shifted away from the tragedies to one simple word–resilience.
“You can’t judge someone’s resilience in real time. You have to wait and step back,” Romano tells East Wing Magazine in a recent Zoom interview about the newly published essay “Public Service Demands Loyalty, Courage, and Resilience–Not Perfection.”
In it, Romano acknowledges the tragedies, loss as well as the mental illness the sometimes “difficult” Mary Lincoln endured. But what history has overlooked about Mary Lincoln is what Romano has amplified in her essay that discusses the strength, courage and resourcefulness she harnessed in the hardest years of her life.
“Mary was an incredibly resilient woman,” Romano says. “[The essay] is all about what she went through and how she survived it.”
The initial harsh narratives crafted by Mary Lincoln’s “contemporaries and excoriated by both her husband’s enemies and sensational press corps,” Romano writes, took hold and have been tolerated for more than 100 years.
In Pursuit, a bi-partisan initiative created by the Washington, D.C.-based organization More Perfect, includes an alliance of 43 presidential centers and foundations and educational and civic initiatives from around the country. It aims to share wisdom about leadership and democracy from former American presidents and selected first ladies, a part of which Mary Lincoln proudly sits.
Colleen Shogan, CEO of In Pursuit and the 11th Archivist of the United States, calls Mary Lincoln’s resilience theme and “its relevance undeniable” in a social media post, just days after former President Barack Obama’s In Pursuit essay on Abraham Lincoln published.
Mary Lincoln lived another 17 years after her husband was murdered in Ford’s Theatre on April 14, 1865, “as they held hands,” Romano writes in the essay. Early in her husband’s political career, Mrs. Lincoln was seen by family members as the “fire, will, and ambition” that helped thrust the talented Lincoln out of his common depressive state and into the White House.
Romano points out that Mrs. Lincoln was vilified for spending money on decorating the White House during the Civil War. Her long and unprecedented fight for a widow’s pension from Congress tormented her, but in the end, when Congress granted her one, it “paved the way for future widows to receive government pensions,” Romano writes.
The essay shows how Mary Lincoln was “getting up every day, putting on a dress and trying to get through life with all this incredible loss she had suffered,” says Romano, who believes the stories of presidential spouses are essential because the women are “a part of the fabric of the country.”
Whether first ladies were just supporting their husbands or had agendas of their own, they contributed. In Mary Lincoln’s case, she supported the Civil War and she became the face of the war in many ways, Romano says, adding of first ladies that “they all played a role.”
Read the full In Pursuit essay
The Weekly Wrap
The Weekly Wrap is a collection of headlines from the past week. Some publications have paywalls.
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