Sexuality of Abraham Lincoln - Relationship With Mary Todd Lincoln

Relationship With Mary Todd Lincoln

Lincoln and Mary Todd met in Springfield in 1839 and became engaged in 1840. In what historian Allen Guelzo calls "one of the murkiest episodes in Lincoln’s life", Lincoln called off his engagement to Mary Todd at the same time that the legislative program he had supported for years collapsed, his best friend Joshua Speed left Springfield, and John Stuart, Lincoln’s law partner, proposed ending their law practice. Lincoln is believed to have suffered something approaching clinical depression. Lincoln's Preparation for Greatness: The Illinois Legislative Years by Paul Simon has a chapter covering the period that Lincoln later referred to as "The Fatal First", which was January 1, 1841. That was "the date on which Lincoln asked to be released from his engagement to Mary Todd". Simon explains that the various reasons the engagement was broken contradict one another and it was not fully documented, but he did become unusually depressed, which showed in his appearance, and that "it was traceable to Mary Todd". During this time, he avoided seeing Mary, causing her to comment that he "deems me unworthy of notice".

Jean H. Baker, historian and biographer of Mary Todd Lincoln, describes the relationship between Lincoln and his wife as "bound together by three strong bonds – sex, parenting and politics". In addition to the anti-Mary Todd bias of many historians engendered by William Herndon’s (Lincoln's law partner and early biographer) personal hatred of Mrs. Lincoln, Baker discounts the criticism of the marriage as both a basic misunderstanding of the changing nature of marriage and courtship in the mid-19th century and attempts to judge the Lincoln marriage by modern standards.

Baker notes that "most observers of the Lincoln marriage have been impressed with their sexuality". Some "male historians" claim that the Lincolns’ sex life ended either in 1853 after their son Tad’s difficult birth or in 1856 when they moved into a bigger house, but have no actual evidence for their speculations. In fact, there are "almost no gynecological conditions resulting from childbirth "other than a prolapsed uterus (which would have produced other noticeable effects on Mrs. Lincoln) that would have prevented intercourse, and in the 1850s "many middle-class couples slept in separate bedrooms".

Far from abstaining from sex, Baker suggests that in fact the Lincolns were part of a new development in America that saw the birth rate declining from seven births to a family in 1800 to around 4 per family by 1850. As Americans separated sexuality from child bearing, forms of birth control such as coitus interruptus, long-term breast feeding, and crude forms of condoms and womb veils, available through mail order, were available and used. The spacing of the Lincoln children (Robert in 1843, Eddie in 1846, Willie in 1850, and Tad in 1853) is consistent with some type of planning and would have required "an intimacy about sexual relations that for aspiring couples meant shared companionate power over reproduction".