Mary Todd Lincoln

Mary Todd Lincoln married an ambitious, awkward country lawyer in 1842 over her family's objections and spent the next two decades pushing him toward exactly the future she had predicted for him. Raised in a prosperous, slaveholding Lexington, Kentucky household, she was unusually well read for a woman of her generation, fluent in French, and sharply attuned to politics at a time when women were expected to stay well clear of it. She managed Abraham Lincoln's law-office finances, coached his public speaking, and needled him toward the ambition he sometimes lacked on his own, arriving at the White House in 1861 determined to prove that a frontier lawyer's wife belonged there.

The Civil War White House tested her in ways few First Ladies have faced. Three of her own half-brothers died fighting for the Confederacy, feeding rumors of divided loyalty that dogged her throughout the war despite her open support for the Union and for abolition. She redecorated the Executive Mansion lavishly and ran up bills Congress refused to cover, drawing newspaper mockery while soldiers died by the thousands nearby. Grief compounded the pressure: her young son Willie died of likely typhoid fever in the White House in February 1862, and she fell into a mourning so severe that she turned to spiritualist mediums seeking contact with him.

She was sitting beside her husband at Ford's Theatre on April 14, 1865, when John Wilkes Booth shot him, and she never recovered her footing afterward. Grief, debt, and the earlier losses of two other sons hardened into behavior her surviving son, Robert, found alarming enough that in 1875 he had her committed to a private asylum in Illinois. She was released within months and spent her final years estranged from Robert, dying in 1882 at her sister's house in Springfield, the same town where she had married Lincoln 40 years before.