Mrs. Lincoln balanced husband’s interests

Their personalities were vastly different, but Abraham Lincoln and his wife, Mary Todd Lincoln, shared a mutual interest in politics, according to a historian who studied and wrote a biography of the first lady.

“They balanced well,” said Jean H. Baker, author of “Mary Todd Lincoln: A Biography.” “They complemented their differences.”

And there were plenty of differences, Baker told about 185 people Wednesday night at Kansas University’s Dole Institute of Politics. She was the fourth in a series of speakers to discuss the nation’s 16th president during the 2004 Lincoln Week Lecture Series.

Lincoln was tall and Mary Todd Lincoln was short and sometimes plump. He was melancholy; she was excitable and loud. He was scruffy; she was fashionable, Baker said.

“He was humble and self-confident; she was egotistical and a self-doubter,” said Baker, who has been a visiting professor at the University of North Carolina and Harvard.

Mary Todd Lincoln also was a strategist and a counselor to Lincoln concerning politics, Baker said.

“Their mutual interests and ambitions brought their private lives together,” she said.

Born into a Kentucky aristocratic family, Mary Todd Lincoln, ironically, was courted by Lincoln’s political opponent in Springfield, Ill.: Stephen Douglas, Baker said. She was attracted to Lincoln despite many who considered him ugly and ill at ease with women.

“No matter how heroic and romantic he seems to us today, the Lincoln in Springfield wasn’t a great catch,” Baker said.

The final talk in the Lincoln Week series will be given at 7 p.m. today by James McPherson, professor of history at Princeton University who won a Pulitzer Prize for “Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era.” He also won the Lincoln Prize for “For Cause and Comrades: Why Men Fought in the Civil War.” The lecture will be in the Kansas Union Ballroom at Kansas University.

The Lincolns also shared the duty of raising their three children, Baker said. A fourth child died before he turned 4.

The Lincoln’s children made reputations of their own. Their father’s law partners recalled times when the children came to the Springfield law office and spilled ink and pulled legal files without a word of reprimand from Lincoln, Baker said.

During Lincoln’s presidency, their son Tad found a Confederate flag, made his way to the roof of the White House and began waving it, Baker said.

After Lincoln’s assassination on April 14, 1865, Mary Todd Lincoln traveled and lived for a while in France. She also spent time in a mental institution, which Baker thinks was orchestrated by her “skunk” of a son, Robert Todd. She died in 1882 at the home of a sister in Springfield.

Baker’s interpretation of Mary Todd Lincoln was welcomed by Anne Poggie, Lawrence, who was among those in the audience.

“I’ve always been fascinated by her (Mary Todd Lincoln), and I think she was maligned by a lot of historians,” Poggie said. “I do believe they had a very strong romance.”

Baker, a member of the Society of American Historians who has written many other books, signed some of them and talked with people from the audience after her lecture.