Mary Todd Lincoln Character Analysis

Abraham Lincoln’s wife and the famously controversial and maligned First Lady of the United States from 1861-1865. Born into a slaveholding Kentucky family, she excelled in school and took an early interest in politics, then moved to Illinois, where she married Lincoln in 1842. She had several children but was not particularly fond of motherhood, which in part led her to take an active role in her husband’s political career, unlike most political wives of her time. When she became the First Lady, she earned a reputation for overspending, having too many male friends, and berating Lincoln’s political opponents. When Lincoln was assassinated, she purportedly began screaming and was removed from the theater, then kept away from her husband until the next morning, when she visited him and fainted shortly before he finally died. A few decades later, her own son publicly denounced her as a lunatic and got her committed to a psychiatric hospital for several years. She serves as something of a foil for Lucy throughout the play, and the Foundling Father repeatedly focuses on the possibility that she said something like “Emergency, oh, Emergency, please put the Great Man in the ground,” after Lincoln’s assassination. He also mentions that she accompanied Abraham Lincoln to the theater and laughed alongside him to Our American Cousin, but tellingly, Lucy notes that her favorite part of the Lincoln story is the one where Mary Todd “begins to lose her mind.”