(CAPITOL CITY NOW) – Lois Romano wants to give Mrs. Lincoln her due.
Contrary to the stereotype of, say, “an alcoholic cabaret singer,” Romano’s new book, An Inconvenient Widow, she says, tries to capture Mary Todd Lincoln as a true woman behind the man. “I take the position very strongly that (Abraham Lincoln) wouldn’t have been president without her,” Romano said. “He was missing some polish, and he was a depressive. He was a very depressed man.” And, rather than being the wrong woman for him, Romano posits that Mary Todd was exactly the right woman for him — that, in the words of a former Lincoln law partner, Todd’s drive and Lincoln’s brilliance “did the deed.”
Romano, who covered first ladies as a reporter for the Washington Post, saw a story which must get out. “She was just sort of perceived as a crazy person who didn’t contribute to Abraham Lincoln; in fact, was a burden on him, and I knew that to be false. And when I started to do some research, I found that my thesis was right,” Romano said.
Born into Kentucky high-society, Todd had a larger-than-life personality at a time when such personalities were frowned upon in American women. And Romano says President Lincoln’s passing posed the perfect opportunity for the men in Lincoln’s circle to tamp down the widow’s influence by, among other things, slow-walking the settlement of the President’s estate. But no man may have been a greater enemy to Mrs. Lincoln than her own son, Robert, who institutionalized her. “Robert was constantly undermining his mother,” said Romano. “I could read it in his letters. Then I would read unsigned newspaper articles that were clearly coming from Robert, because the same language he was using in the letters was showing up in newspapers.”
Romano, whose Mary Todd Lincoln biography is her first book, said a quarter into the 21st Century, there is still a place for a book. “They’re able to step back and get all this information and pull it together,” she said, “but also, you have perspective.”
Romano is scheduled to visit the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum in October.
