Mary Todd Lincoln, the widow of President Abraham Lincoln, was committed to an insane asylum in 1875 by her own son, Robert, following a harrowing descent into paranoia, delusion, and financial chaos that stunned a nation still mourning her husband’s assassination.
The commitment of a former first lady—the first such action in American history—triggered a public 𝒔𝒄𝒂𝓃𝒹𝒶𝓁 that raised uncomfortable questions about mental illness, family loyalty, and the treatment of women in the Victorian era. It remains one of the most tragic and contested episodes in the story of an American presidency.
Born on December 13, 1818, in Lexington, Kentucky, Mary Ann Todd entered a world of frontier wealth and social standing. Her father, Robert Smith Todd, was a lawyer and businessman whose ancestors had fought in the American Revolution, and who himself had served in the War of 1812. The family lived in a fourteen-room mansion in the center of Lexington, and Mary received an education unusual for women of her time, with instruction in languages, the classics, dancing, music, and social etiquette.
Her childhood was nonetheless marked by loss. Her mother, Elizabeth, died from complications of childbirth when Mary was only six years old. Her father remarried the following year, and the second marriage produced nine more children, leaving Mary outnumbered among half-siblings and locked in a strained relationship with her stepmother.
The Todd family enslaved more than a dozen people, mostly household workers, reflecting Kentucky’s status as a slave-owning state. The family would later largely renounce the practice, but the contradiction of slavery would shadow Mary’s entire adult life, particularly when she became first lady during the Civil War.
In 1839, at the age of twenty, Mary moved to Springfield, Illinois, a booming frontier capital attracting waves of migrants. She was quickly regarded as witty, outgoing, and popular among the city’s gentry. She was courted by the rising Democratic politician Stephen A.
Douglas before she met a thirty-year-old lawyer named Abraham Lincoln.
The courtship was peculiar by the standards of the day. The couple agreed to marry, then hesitated, and Lincoln at one point called the engagement off entirely. They eventually wed on November 4, 1842, after a long and uncertain romance.
Despite its rocky beginning, the marriage proved a happy one, producing four sons: Robert in 1843, Edward in 1846, William in 1850, and Thomas in 1853.
Tragedy struck early. Edward died before his fourth birthday from tuberculosis. The surviving boys were famously unruly, disrupting the business of Lincoln’s law partners, who complained repeatedly to no effect.
Mary herself was a troubled woman, given to mood swings, public outbursts, and a fierce temper. Modern observers believe she suffered from depression, possibly bipolar disorder, and dealt with diabetes and poor vision as well.
Abraham Lincoln’s political rise was intertwined with his wife’s ambitions. After serving in the Illinois state legislature, he stepped back from politics to focus on his law practice. The Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854, which opened the way for slavery’s expansion into western territories, drew him back onto the national stage and into the newly formed anti-slavery Republican Party.
Mary encouraged his political ambitions throughout the 1850s and is widely credited with pushing him to seek the presidency. When he won the election of 1860, he greeted her with the words, “Mary, we are elected.” She was viewed by some in the press as meddling, and her habit of bringing journalists into the Lincoln home in Illinois struck many as eccentric.
But Lincoln clearly saw her as a partner in his career.
The role of first lady was difficult from the start. The Civil War broke out just months into Lincoln’s presidency. Mary, who had close relatives fighting for the Confederacy and several half-brothers killed in action, remained vocal in her support for the Union and abolition.
Yet she generated controversy with lavish spending on White House banquets, formal events, fine jewelry, and interior decoration while much of the country suffered under wartime deprivation.
Her mental state deteriorated sharply in 1862 after her son Willie died of typhoid fever. She was bedbound for roughly three weeks, did not attend the funeral, and required a nurse’s care for months. Those close to the White House also viewed her as a distracting presence, prone to bouts of depression and mania that pulled her husband away from wartime governance.
Lincoln’s popularity grew over time, as did Mary’s reputation, largely because of her charitable work in hospitals across Washington, D. C. , and Maryland.
The Union eventually won the war, ending slavery in the United States. Mary hoped for a more settled life as first lady thereafter. John Wilkes Booth had other ideas.
On April 14, 1865, Booth, an actor and Confederate sympathizer, shot President Lincoln in the back of the head as he and Mary watched a performance of “Our American Cousin” at Ford’s Theater in Washington. Mary was holding her husband’s hand when he was shot. He died the following morning after hours in a coma.
She had to be removed from the room at one point, so severe was her trauma.
Sympathy poured in from around the world. Queen Victoria, who had lost her own husband Prince Albert in 1861 and never fully recovered, wrote to Mary personally. But condolences could not solve the financial crisis that followed.
Abraham Lincoln had left a sizable estate worth well over $2 million in today’s money, but Mary had always been a spendthrift, and her years as first lady had only worsened those instincts.
By 1868 she was advertising in the national media that she was broke and needed financial aid as the poor widow of the murdered president. She spent years trying to stabilize her finances, relying on family, friends, and former political allies of her husband. At one point she and her son Tad moved to Frankfurt, Germany, to live with the Seligman family, whose patriarch Joseph had helped raise enormous sums for the Union war effort.
In the early 1870s, Congress finally granted her an annual pension, but she never regained sound financial footing. The publication in 1868 of “Behind the Scenes, or, Thirty Years a Slave and Four Years in the White House” by Elizabeth Keckley compounded her distress. Keckley, a formerly enslaved woman who had worked as Mary’s dressmaker and become a close confidante, revealed intimate personal details about Mary and her late husband.
Mary considered the book a serious betrayal, and many at the time found it in bad taste.
The death of her son Thomas, known as Tad, in 1871—possibly from tuberculosis or a heart condition—sent Mary’s mental health into steep decline. She became erratic, paranoid, and prone to delusions. The crisis came to a head in 1875 during a visit to her only surviving son, Robert, in Chicago.
Mary became convinced that Robert was gravely ill when in fact the opposite was true. She told him someone had tried to poison her on the train. She spent large sums on items she never used and walked around the city with tens of thousands of dollars in government bonds sewn into her clothes.
Robert, alarmed and exhausted, decided to have his mother committed.
An insanity trial followed, drawing intense public attention because it involved a former first lady. Shortly after the court proceedings, Mary was in such a distressed state that she attempted to take her own life. She visited several pharmacies and ordered enough laudanum to 𝓀𝒾𝓁𝓁 herself, but an astute pharmacist recognized what she was doing and gave her a placebo instead.
Mary was initially committed to Bellevue Place, a private asylum in Batavia, Illinois. Complications soon emerged. Robert controlled his mother’s finances, and many observers—possibly unfairly—suspected him of ulterior motives in seeking her commitment.
In 1876, Mary was declared competent enough to manage her own affairs and was released.
The episode left deep scars. Robert’s character was publicly questioned, though there is little doubt that Mary’s psychological state in the 1870s was severely compromised. After the insanity case, she returned to Europe and spent several years traveling in France and elsewhere.
Her health declined further, worsened by several falls during her travels.
By the early 1880s, still only in her early sixties, she was back in America and increasingly confined to her sister’s house in Springfield, Illinois. She died there on July 16, 1882, after suffering a fall that quickly led to a coma and a heart attack. She was sixty-three years old.
One of the few consolations of her final years was a reconciliation with Robert shortly before her death.
Historians have generally judged Mary Lincoln as an average or even poor first lady, arguing that her difficulties distracted her husband during a time of national crisis. In recent decades, however, a more sympathetic portrait has emerged, helped in part by Sally Field’s portrayal of her in Steven Spielberg’s 2012 film “Lincoln.”
That reassessment frames Mary not as a madwoman but as a grieving mother and widow who endured the deaths of three sons and a husband murdered beside her, all while living under relentless public scrutiny. Her story raises enduring questions about how the nation treats women in power, how families handle mental illness, and whether history has been fair to the woman who urged Abraham Lincoln toward the presidency.
The insanity trial of 1875 remains the starkest symbol of her suffering—a former first lady, once the hostess of the White House, fighting in a courtroom to prove she was sane enough to keep her freedom and her money. The verdict, in the end, was hers: she won her release, her liberty, and, ultimately, a measure of historical redemption.