'Hellcat or Helpmate': The Mary Todd Lincoln Saga

Like Jackie Kennedy, Mary Todd Lincoln grew up wealthy and well educated—and loved to spend money on expensive clothes and decor. The exhibit shows many fine items, including silver ice tongs and silver spoons. She even bought chamber pots to match her White House china. (The pattern was purple, her favorite color.) "She really was the Jackie Kennedy of her day," says William D. Snyder, senior curator of the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum.

But unlike Jackie Kennedy, Mary Todd Lincoln did not go on to marry a wealthy suitor after her husband died. Immediately after Abraham died (without a will), she battled with Congress to try to get the remainder of her husband's salary. Ultimately, Congress decided to give her what was left of his 1865 pay: $22,000. The exhibit shows the actual money order—and the paper with the exact tally, $22,025.34. "They rounded it down," says Snyder. At the time, presidential widows did not receive pensions. "She always felt that she was never properly compensated by the American government," says Schwartz. "By modern standards she was screwed." She fought for a pension, and, in 1870, finally received one: $3,000 a year. As a result she set the precedent for other widows, like Lucretia Garfield, to get pensions too.

She was an unpopular First Lady. "In Washington everyone hated her, and that didn't help," says Emerson. "The Southerners thought she was a traitor, and the Easterners didn't like her because they thought she was some sort of Western rube."

But it was her spending that caused the biggest problems. She desperately wanted to renovate the White House, which was dilapidated when she moved in. The carpet was ripped, the walls had tobacco stains on them, and there were even rats. "She decides it's important to make it look like the house of a great nation," says Clinton, a history professor at Queens University in Belfast. "She was trying to bring elegance to the White House." Unfortunately, she immediately overspent her congressional appropriation for renovation. Her husband did not want to ask Congress for more money for draperies and French wallpaper when soldiers were suffering. When she was in the White House, she took gifts from people who wanted to influence her husband. To hide her spending problem, she padded groundskeeping expenses and even used a ghost payroll scheme to get a $100-a-month salary for the White House gardener's wife, who performed no services. She even used her housekeeper's name as a pseudonym when she wrote to merchants. Later, after her husband died, she was criticized for wanting to auction off her old clothes. (After Abraham's death she "dedicated her life to wearing black," says Clinton.)

Curators ultimately decided to call the exhibit "First Lady of Controversy." But they also considered naming it "Mary Todd Lincoln: Hellcat or Helpmate?" or "Mary Todd Lincoln: Hellcat or Heroine?" (John Hay, the assistant private secretary to Abraham Lincoln and later co-author of the 10-volume "Abraham Lincoln: A History," called her a "hellcat." He helped oversee White House expenditures.)

Mary Todd Lincoln's good deeds often go unnoticed. The first spouse to be called First Lady tried to set up a fund for runaway slaves (called contrabands). Her dressmaker, a close friend, was a former slave. "She never gets press for that," says Snyder. And she brought fruit and wrote and read letters to soldiers she visited in the hospital. Rather than courting favorable media coverage for these outings, she said reporters could not accompany her on what she considered to be private missions. "Mary got a bad rap," says Snyder. It didn't help that she was from Kentucky, which made many people think she sympathized with the Confederacy. And it didn't help that she followed the extremely popular Harriet Lane as White House hostess. (James Buchanan was single, so his niece served as his First Lady.) "Poor Mary Lincoln could do no right," says Snyder.