'Hellcat or Helpmate': The Mary Todd Lincoln Saga

Three of her four kids didn't live to adulthood, and her husband was shot as he held her hand. If anyone ever deserved to go crazy, it was Mary Todd Lincoln, wife of the 16th U.S. president. "She had the most tragic public life in American history," says James Cornelius, curator of the Lincoln Collection at the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library in Springfield, Ill.

But was she truly insane? That question is raised—but not answered—by the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum's special exhibit, "Mary Todd Lincoln: First Lady of Controversy," running through Nov. 30. "We invite you to draw your own conclusions," says a sign at the beginning of the show. "It's hard enough to diagnose mental illness when the patient is alive," says Lincoln expert Tom Schwartz, the Illinois state historian. "You might be able to attach it to mental illness …You can also explain it according to events and circumstances. It doesn't have to be mental illness."

The exhibit comes as the 200th anniversary of Abraham Lincoln's birth approaches, in February 2009. Steven Spielberg is working on a movie, based on Doris Kearns Goodwin's book "Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln," with Liam Neeson as Abraham and Sally Field as Mary Todd. And having been dead for  more than a century hasn't spared the Lincolns from more tabloid-style reassessments, either. "Americans love to have their public leaders' private lives spilled out into the headlines," says Civil War historian Catherine Clinton, who's writing a new book about Mary Todd Lincoln. "And the Lincolns are no exception, as we have had major books in the past few years asking 'Was Lincoln gay?,' 'Was Mary crazy?,' 'Were one or both of them bisexual? Bipolar?' And the second-guessing game goes on."

In any event, Mary Todd Lincoln, not just her husband, remains an important and relevant historical figure. "In many ways Mary Lincoln is a symbol to me of things that happen to human beings that are beyond our control," says Goucher College history professor Jean Baker, author of "Mary Todd Lincoln: A Biography." She was no wallflower. "She doesn't stay upstairs, where Abigail Fillmore and Jane Pierce were for most of their time as First Ladies. She's downstairs, trying to fix up those grand rooms of the White House so she could contribute to the social life of politics during the Civil War," says Baker. Extremely well educated, and fluent in French, Mary Todd Lincoln gentrified her husband—and told him he would be president. He read all his speeches to her. When the returns came in from Pennsylvania during his presidential bid, he said, "'Mary, Mary, we are elected,'" says Baker. "This was a political marriage. It's sort of like Bill and Hillary—a sense that this is something we can do together." Clinton agrees: "She was his political adviser all the way through … She saw the greatness that Abraham Lincoln would become."

The Springfield exhibit begins dramatically, with the bed where Mary Todd Lincoln slept in 1875, when she was involuntarily committed to Bellevue Place, a private sanitarium in Batavia, Ill. Her eldest son said, and a jury agreed, that she was insane, after hotel parlor maids testified that she wandered the halls at night and sewed money into her nightgown. She spent four months at Bellevue Place before a second court restored her legal right to control her affairs. "She is misunderstood, but I also believe that she had serious, serious mental illness," says Jason Emerson, author of "The Madness of Mary Lincoln" (Southern Illinois University Press, Oct. 2007), who argues that she suffered from bipolar disorder throughout her life. Other prominent historians disagree. "She's neurotic and narcissistic, but I don't go with this insanity bit," says Baker.

The next room in the exhibit showcases many items, including the blood-stained ivory-and-white-silk fan she carried at Ford's Theatre on April 14, 1865, when the prominent actor John Wilkes Booth shot her husband during the British comedy "Our American Cousin." The bloody fan, like about half the items in the special exhibit, came from the collection of Louise Taper, the world's leading Lincoln collector. (Taper recently sold some pieces to the museum; others are on loan for the special exhibit.)