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The Lincolns: Portrait of a Marriage | 
 enlarge | Author: Daniel Mark Epstein
Publisher: Ballantine Books
Category: Book
List Price: $28.00
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Avg. Customer Rating:  14 reviews
Sales Rank: 66889
Media: Hardcover
Edition: 1
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 576
Shipping Weight (lbs): 2.1
Dimensions (in): 9.4 x 6.5 x 1.7
ISBN: 0345477995
Dewey Decimal Number: 973.70922
EAN: 9780345477996
ASIN: 0345477995
Publication Date: May 20, 2008
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
Shipping: International shipping available
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Amazon.com Review
From the Author: What's New in The Lincolns, Portrait of a Marriage? During the years I was researching and writing this book I was asked again and again: Have you found anything new, in facts or perspective? The answer is yes, and yes again. Everything is new in the sense that when one puts aside the stereotypes associated with the Lincolns, a rich and complex married life emerges. The stereotypes are: Mary was crazy, and Abraham was a saint. The most popular myth is that Lincoln married a madwoman, and suffered patiently and heroically through twenty-two miserable years of marriage. After my research, I reached two conclusions that shaped my portrait of the marriage. First, these two people loved each other deeply, from the time they met in Springfield in 1839, until his assassination in 1865. The second is that Mary was extremely interested in Abraham's career and speeches; whenever they could, the two of them talked about these things. She was a strong political partner for him. The rest of my work has been a careful gathering of details. Here again, there is a lot that is new. First, this is the only book about the marriage that recounts the Springfield years (16 years out of 22) in as much detail as the White House years. In Springfield the family achieved a delicate balance that was destabilized in wartime Washington. The story that began as a romance turns to tragedy. The Lincolns' courtship was stormy; he broke off their engagement in 1840, and they were not reconciled until 1842. New evidence indicates that Lincoln believed he had syphilis, and would not resume the courtship until he believed he was cured. I discovered letters from Mary's brother-in-law that shed light on the courtship, and the abrupt reconciliation and marriage in 1842. This is the first book to connect Lincolns reading of The Niles Register (a news magazine of the time) with his speeches against the Mexican War during his term of congress in 1847-48. In their Washington boarding house in 1848, the Lincolns witnessed the abduction of a black servant who was buying his freedom. Using newspaper accounts of the time I was able to detail this terrifying incident. Mary's physical abuse of her husband has mostly been a matter of rumor. In 1857 she is supposed to have hit her husband with a stick of firewood, injuring his nose. I was able to find store receipts for a gelatin plaster that Lincoln purchased on the date witnesses saw him wearing the plaster cast, on his nose, in court. Much has been written about the plot to assassinate Lincoln on his way through Baltimore for the inauguration. This book is the first to describe the danger to which Mary and her sons were exposed en route to Baltimore while Lincoln passed secretly from Harrisburg to Washington. The Presidential train with Mary aboard served as a decoy, and the journey through "mob city" was a nightmare. One of the most exciting moments of my research was in discovering a poem of Albert Laighton's that the Lincolns read together. It shaped the last lines of Lincolns' first inaugural address. Another was the discovery of a letter from a Washington physician describing Mrs. Lincoln's handling of a medical crisis in the White House (when her children had measles) that disproves the received opinion she was too unstable to handle such emergencies. There's a lot more that is new, but I don't want to spoil it here. I felt honored to be entrusted with these materials, and to tell the Lincolns' story. --Daniel Mark Epstein
Product Description
The first full-length portrait of the marriage of Abraham and Mary Todd Lincoln in more than fifty years, The Lincolns is a fascinating new work of American history by Daniel Mark Epstein, an award-winning biographer and poet known for his passionate understanding of the Civil War period.
Although the private lives of political couples have in our era become front-page news, the true story of this extraordinary and tragic first family has never been fully told. The Lincolns eclipses earlier accounts with riveting new information that makes husband and wife, president and first lady, come alive in all their proud accomplishments and earthy humanity.
Epstein gives a fresh close-upview of the couple’s life in Springfield, Illinois (of their twenty-two years of marriage, all but six were spent there). We witness the troubled courtship of an aristocratic and bewitching Southern belle and a struggling young lawyer who concealed his great ambition with self-deprecating humor; the excitement and confusion of the newlyweds as they begin their marriage in a small room above a tavern, and the early signs of Mary’s instability and Lincoln’s moodiness; their joyful creation of a home on the edge of town as Lincoln builds his law practice and makes his first forays into politics. We discover their consuming ambition as Lincoln achieves celebrity status during his famed debates with Stephen A. Douglas, which lead to Lincoln’s election to the presidency.
The Lincolns’ ascent to the White House brought both dazzling power and the slow, secret unraveling of the couple’s unique bond. The Lincolns dramatizes certain well-known events with stunning new immediacy: Mary’s shopping sprees, her defrauding of the public treasury to increase her budget, and her jealousy, which made enemies for her and problems for the president. Yet she was also a brilliant hostess who transformed the shabby White House into a social center crucial to the Union’s success. After the death of their little boy, not a year after Lincoln took office, Mary turned for solace to spirit mediums, but her grief drove her to the edge of madness. In the end, there was little left of the Lincolns’ relationship save their enduring devotion to each other and to their surviving children.
Written with enormous sweep and striking imagery, The Lincolns is an unforgettable epic set at the center of a crucial American administration. It is also a heartbreaking story of how time and adversity can change people, and of how power corrupts not only morals but affections. Daniel Mark Epstein’s The Lincolns makes two immortal American figures seem as real and human as the rest of us.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 9 more reviews...
 Way Too Biased in Favor of Mary September 29, 2008
The "portrait" of this famous couple's relationship is not an accurate portrayal, rather it is a whitewashing of Mary Lincoln's destructive role in it. While there can be no doubt that it began with great cherishing on both sides, Mary's narcissistic, violent and venal character twisted their love into something so meaningless that little survived it but tolerant loyalty on his part and hysteria on hers.
As the author admits, it is no longer fashionable to paint Lincoln as a saint and the movement to rehabilitate Mary has gained momentum of late, especially as evidenced by Epstein's own "Portrait." In truth, Mary represented a civil war within the Lincolns' personal lives and was the worst possible mate for this complex man.
Nonetheless, Epstein would have you believe that Mary gave Lincoln self-confidence, was his intellectual equal, provided a nourishing home life and partnered him in his ambitions. She had long ago determined to marry a "president" and by damn, she'd make her man one even if he was too gutless to do it himself. And thus you have Epstein's version of Mary the dynamo and Lincoln her bright but vacillating vessel.
The objective evidence of their lives (i.e., less advocacy-prone studies than Epstein's), indicate that the substantive merit was on Lincoln's part and Mary was at first helpful, then incidental and finally detrimental to his success. Long before they reached the White House, Mary had become an albatross; unstable and frightening.
At first she was an amazing catch for this gangly lad - pretty and vivacious, well-connected, educated and flatteringly adoring. But the flaws in her personality surfaced within months of their marriage when he, abstracted at breakfast one morning, failed to take note of her chatter and she threw a cup of scalding coffee in his face, witnessed with horror by several residents of their boarding house. Other incidents of hitting, screaming, and slapping followed - including one when she smashed his face with a piece of firewood and another when she attacked him with a kitchen knife. And these were pre-presidential public displays - God knows what happened when no one was present to report it.
And how does Epstein report such violence? "So she struck her husband from time to time..." Not a big deal. It was beyond her control. And Lincoln "sulked and brooded and grieved over it if he could not laugh it off." Like most domestic abusers, Mary was contrite, but repeated the addictive behavior. And thank God for servants because she could beat them with impunity and regularly did so.
Mary's violence was so notable that the Springfield sheriff reported that Lincoln would sometimes pick up one of the boys and walk away until Mary "returned to her senses". Epstein writes about this domestic horror like it was just a normal backyard tiff instead of Lincoln trying to escape his wife's violent rages and protecting his children from possible harm. Epstein hustles this ugliness offstage in preference to imaginary scenes of fireside bliss where the two of them read poetry and Shakespeare and Lincoln even reworked his political speeches until the astute Mary was satisfied.
What astonished this reader more than Epstein's scenes of fictional harmony in Springfield was his deliberate refusal to acknowledge Mary's latent and later, patently manifest, mental illness. She suffered bouts of "moodiness", yes he admits that, but bi-polar? Epstein never mentions it, even in view of today's understanding of Mary's severe mental illness. (See Robert Lincoln's "Insanity File", in which her son discloses during conservatorship proceeding Mary's post-assassination paranoia, obsessive/compulsiveness and bizarre hallucinations: iron pins coming out of her eyes, an Indian ghost who peeled back her skull and removed her brains, then replaced them, and endless purchasing of hundreds of articles of unused clothing and curtains.)
The minutiae of the Lincolns' political journey to the White House is exhaustively documented, as is the marital breakdown the couple sustained once they had achieved their presidential dream.
Lincoln did the best he could for the good of the union and suffered for it profoundly. Mary, meanwhile, indulged in expensive shopping junkets, embezzled government funds, took instantly to influence peddling for her family and friends, tampered with the White House payroll, and engaged in actual treason. She was seen by all who interacted with her as overbearing, strange and demonic, even evil.
But it wasn't Mary's fault! It was the lack of time with her husband, her natural innocence and lack of a moral compass! It was Willie's sad death and the pressure and frustration of the job of having to look pretty and entertain all those people. No one understood the headaches and work, the having so much money to spend, and her desperation in trying to hide it once it got out of hand. Mary's sojourn as First Lady is a nightmare to read, but really, urges Epstein, don't blame her.
Epstein manages to equate Lincoln's failure to share military/state secrets with his duplicitous wife to a justifiable quid pro quo refusal on her part to come clean on her secret spending and unsavory relationships. And while Lincoln worked in a coma of exhaustion, Mary's sole objective was to keep him from knowing how serious her underhanded deeds had become. And of course to keep spending, spending, spending.
Lincoln's assassination was both a shock and relief to Mary, a horrible thing to say even now. But Mary's self interest had clearly grown beyond her. Narcissistic, mad and self indulgent as she was, Lincoln had been the only person who gave her latitude, compassion and tolerance, and it is no wonder that she lost her small scrap of sanity when he died. Lincoln had reigned in, even controlled to some degree, Mary's most unmanageable and disturbed personality manifestations, and his death triggered a complete implosion that lasted until her death seventeen later.
Anyone who parses the endless Lincoln studies knows well that, however great his genius, Lincoln was tortured by his own neurotic, insecure and depressive nature. But he was not psychotic. Mary was, destructively so.
"The Lincolns: A Portrait of a Marriage" is a long read and a well-researched one, but too partisan for a healthy portrayal of Mr. and Mrs. Lincoln and the reality of their internal dynamics. Worse, it minimizes the damage Mary's madness and greed had upon a truly great man and a nation in shock at itself.
Five stars for research but one for conspicuous bias = two stars.
Adequate September 17, 2008
1 out of 3 found this review helpful
I have not finished this book yet but will soldier on through to the end. I have read so many books about Abraham Lincoln and also about Mary Todd Lincoln and have found them much more readable. I feel the author has tried to drag out the narrative to fill a 500 page book. The lives of A. and M.T. Lincoln are so compelling and the book should be as well. P
 Insightful and beautifully written August 17, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
One might have thought there would be little more to say about Abraham Lincoln, certainly not enough to fill a 500-page book. But that would be incorrect. Epstein's Lincoln is often distracted, sometimes depressed, always under stress, yet caring and psychologically in tune with his troubled wife. Although there were unexplainable tantrums, jealousies, and shopping sprees that he couldn't tolerate, he still drew on a deep reservoir of love. Long before we understood mental illness as we do today, Abraham Lincoln knew that Mary was a basically good woman who was suffering from a serious disease.
Epstein writes like the poet that he is, and he never loses sight of his goal -- to portray the marriage of these two fascinating people. Events such as the Gettysburg Address are hardly mentioned. We know something about them already, so Epstein looks at what was really going on in the White House living quarters at that time.
Epstein uses his sources seamlessly, drawing on letters and memoirs of obscure people to illuminate the Lincolns' marriage. This would have been a five-star review, except that I found the first 50 pages somewhat difficult to follow. Epstein plunges into the political and social spheres of Springfield, Illinois, bringing in dozens of characters, in a way that I found hard to keep up with. This problem quickly resolves itself, however.
 Very Intimate and Personal History of the Lincoln Maraige August 2, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
Well researched with excellent writing, Epstein catures the fascinating and complex relationship of Abe and Mary. Although much has been written on Abe, Epstein provides a full and human description of Mary who was a voluptuous, intelligent beauty in her youth that was well sought by many prominent beaus including Stephen Douglas. The courtship is fascinating by itself as the poor struggling lawyer appears no match for the well kept after Mary and his sudden break of their relationship is full of mystery as Abe becomes seriously ill and the author providess more than speculation as to the cause. The return to Mary in a secret courtship includes their intellectual sharing of poetry and reading, including guarded private moments that all lead to a sudden marraige followed by Robert's birth in quick time. Epstein details the life of Lincolns from their living in a small room in a rooming house while raising their small children, adding to personal stress, till they landed their own homw with Abe's better fortunes and assistance from the Todd family. The revelations of Mary's actions are quite fascinating as she was high strung, emotional and needed more attention than Abe could give that sometimes resulted in sudden and dramatic harsh treatment such as hot coffee to his face to a wrap across the nose with a piece of firewood. Honest Abe, from a variety of examined correspondence was not so political naive but could also play the political gameship well even in his runs for congress. The most fascinating part of the book is of course in the white house where Mary's desire for extravaant spending involveding finacial corruption, her interference with politics, her jealousy over her husband and her extended grief over the death of Willie creates serious strain between the couple. Abe's incredulous stress load only increases as he not only has the war and politics but his wife's often erratic behavior and personal vendettas that are other burdens he must carry as well as caring for young Tad. As Epstein discusses, Mary's head injury from a run away carraige may have caused brain trauma that may never have been resolved as demonstrated by severe outbursts most significantly just before Lincoln's death. And Lincoln's own behavior, dramatically limiting his personal security as noted to his walking into Richmond with a limited escort, his exposing himself at Fort Stephens in the face of Confederates and his toying with his cavalry escorts says something about his feelings of fate. There is no doubt that both loved each other very much but the Presidency, in time of war, certainly strained the relationship between the two as evidenced by Mary's mental health and Abe's physical. Just over 500 pages not counting notes and index and in heavy paper that make this hard back edition a collector's item. A very fluently written book that makes it hard to put down as the author is a great story teller, writer with the documentation to support his telling.
This will be the most talked about Lincoln book this season July 26, 2008
5 out of 5 found this review helpful
There certainly is no shortage of books on Abraham Lincoln. More than 140 years after his passing, Lincoln still scores as one of the best presidents we've ever had (if not the best), and is still revered as a visionary leader who saved our country from self-exploding. Ever since I was in fifth grade, I've had a peculiar fascination with the first bearded president that is almost unexplained. Even today, after reading millions of Lincoln books, I can't tell you the single reason why Lincoln fascinates me. Certainly, it's grown over the years in learning about his presidency, his successes and failures in freeing the slaves, and his family.
One would think that there couldn't possibly be any new information about Lincoln that would charm the socks of anyone with an Lincoln interest. However, in Daniel Mark Epstein's new book, "Lincoln a Portrait of a Marriage", paints such a complete and stunning picture of the marriage between two unlikely people, I left the book with such a sense of awe and wonderment, a deeper understanding of the life and times of mid 1800's America, and respect for both Mary and Abraham.
It isn't that Epstein presents new information, he takes the available information, places it in its rightful historical context, sprinkles in letters from Lincoln and people in his sphere, which suddenly makes this story pop alive. Normally, when authors include sections of letters, often long and laborious to read, I merely skip over the section and go back to the text. Epstein interlaces these so expertly that I found myself reading and rereading these sections, giving a deeper portrait. His knowledge of how people lived in his time and place in our history is complete, adding little bits of knowledge to my already overcrowded mind.
Epstein's Lincoln in this book starts out gangly, depressed, and ever bit the human that he was. That may be hard for people to believe, but knowing all the facts about the person (or as many as you can get) leads to illumination and humanity. Mary starts off being the coquettish belle, flirtatious, warm, with a cheery laugh (how many times is our Mary described like that?). Their pairing seems impossible, even more so when Lincoln first declares their engagement ending. Lincoln falls into melancholia; Mary, always the charmer, continues to see men without much interest. She wants to marry a president. How she sees Lincoln in that light 20 years before it happening, is beyond me. But I loved reading about both of them, and when they finally unite, and Lincoln's heart is full, I was actually smiling.
Epstein has managed to take a topic that could very well be overwrought and repetitive, and makes this enthralling, illuminating, and a true pleasure to read. For any Lincoln expert, or someone unfamiliar to Abraham or Mary, "Lincoln a Portrait of a Marriage" is the non-fiction book event of the season. Don't pass tis treasure up!
Also, as an aside, Dark Mark Epstein wrote another book that I adore, and I highly suggest you check this out:
Lincoln and Whitman: Parallel Lives in Civil War Washington. You WON'T regret it!
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