Mary Todd Lincoln (13 December 1818 – 16 July 1882) was First Lady of the United States from 4 March 1861 to 15 April 1865 as the wife of President Abraham Lincoln.
Biography[]
Mary Todd Lincoln was born in Lexington, Kentucky in 1818, and she was a Whig like her family. In 1839, she began living with her sister in Springfield, Illinois, and she was popular among the city's gentry, while she was courted by the Democrat Stephen A. Douglas, she ultimately chose to marry the fellow Whig Abraham Lincoln. They had four sons: Robert, Edward, William, and Thomas "Tad" Lincoln. Lincoln and Douglas eventually became rivals due to the issue of slavery, and Mary supported her husband socially and politically, while also raising a household. During her years in the White House as First Lady, she was faced by many personal difficulties, as several of her half-brothers served and died in the Confederate States Army; her own brother-in-law Benjamin Hardin Helm was killed at the Battle of Chickamauga. As a Westerner, she was criticized as having coarse and pretentious manners, and she suffered from migraines and depression during the American Civil War. On 14 April, she was widowed when John Wilkes Booth assassinated her husband at Ford's Theatre, and, ten years after her husband's assassination, she was briefly sent to a mental institution. She later retired to the home of her sister, and she died in 1882.