Mary Todd Lincoln died in Springfield, Illinois, on July 16, 1882, at the age of sixty-three, on the thirty-third anniversary of her beloved father’s death and one day after the eleventh anniversary of her son Tad’s death. Modern physicians and historians theorize that she died of a stroke, possibly caused by a ruptured blood vessel in the brain, and that complications of untreated diabetes contributed to her final illness and death.
On July 19, Mary’s body lay in repose in the parlor of the Edwards residence, the same room in which she had married her beloved Abraham almost forty years before. Lying in a casket draped in black velvet and surrounded by fragrant flowers, she was attired in a beautiful white silk dress, a posthumous gift from her sister Elizabeth. On her finger she wore her wedding band, engraved with the phrase Love Is Eternal—a tenet that had sustained her throughout her long, lonely years of widowhood.
So many mourners attended Mary’s funeral—including family, friends, dignitaries she had known as first lady, and countless sympathetic strangers—that the First Presbyterian Church of Springfield could not accommodate them all. After the opening hymns from the choir, a scriptural reading, and prayer, Reverend James A. Reed offered a biographical sermon. “In introducing his subject,” the Chicago Tribune reported, “Mr. Reed drew a comparison in which the life and career of Abraham Lincoln and his now deceased spouse were contrasted with the growth and decay of two pines which he had observed standing side by side on a rocky ledge in the Allegheny Mountains”:
The trees which he recalled to mind grew from the same rocky crevice, their roots intertwining and gaining subsistence from the same source, and the trunks almost joined at the base, so as to appear as two branches springing from one trunk. Near the ground one of these trees had been blasted, and, as if in sympathy, the companion had wasted slowly away, until in a few years it too had died. It seemed to have been killed when the fatal blow fell on its mate, and its after subsistence was merely a living death. Similar was the course of life with the illustrious Lincoln and his mate as pictured by the speaker. Mrs. Lincoln, he thought, might be said to have been killed by the fatal bullet which ended the life of her husband.
Hymns and prayers followed the sermon, and then a long, solemn procession conveyed Mary’s remains to the monument on the lovely wooded knoll at Oak Ridge Cemetery, where she was interred with her beloved husband and sons Eddie, Willie, and Tad.
In death, Mary Lincoln at last received a measure of the sympathy and kindness often denied her in life. “By the death of Mary Todd Lincoln . . . there is removed from the stage of life a figure always invested with a certain historic and tragic interest,” the New York Times observed. “It would be well for those who have been disposed to judge harshly of some of the personal characteristics of Mrs. Lincoln to remember that few women have ever been more devoted to their husbands, and that few have ever suffered so awful a shock as she when he was killed by her side.”
Elizabeth’s death six years later at the age of seventy-four was as sudden as Mary’s had been prolonged. One morning a week after she and Ninian celebrated their fifty-sixth wedding anniversary, Elizabeth welcomed two friends for a brief visit and invited them to join her for lunch later that afternoon. After her callers departed, Elizabeth set out on an errand, but fainted and collapsed in the yard. “She returned to the house unassisted,” the Chicago Tribune reported, “and was helped to the sofa where she expired within five minutes. Her husband, who is in feeble health, was at her side. He is greatly prostrated, and some anxiety is felt about him.” Those fears proved prescient: Ninian died eighteen months later, at age eighty, at the home of his son Albert Stephenson Edwards. He was buried beside his beloved wife in Oak Ridge Cemetery in Springfield.
In March 1891, Ann Maria Todd Smith died at the age of sixty-seven in San Francisco, where she was visiting her sons Edgar T. and Allen H. Smith. Her remains were returned to Springfield, where she was interred beside her husband, Clark, who had died in 1885.
Frances Todd Wallace passed away at her home on Second Street in Springfield in August 1899 at the age of eighty-two. “She was essentially self-reliant and strong, but kindness and love ruled her life,” an obituary lovingly eulogized her. “She was never so happy as when doing some good for others. The precept that it is more blessed to give than to receive was exemplified in her daily life. Her quiet home was a central place for the entire neighborhood, and young and old alike loved to seek her society. The delight she felt in the companionship of her neighbors was reciprocated to the fullest degree. Her reminiscences of people and events of the old times were of a most interesting character, and her memory to the last was remarkable in their [sic] fidelity to details as well as the force and vividness of the impressions conveyed.”
Less than a year later, Frances’s younger brother, George Rogers Clark Todd, died in South Carolina at the age of seventy-four, estranged from his siblings to the last. Four years later, in March 1904, Margaret Todd Kellogg died of heart failure in Daytona Beach, Florida. “A Distinguished Lady’s Death,” the headline lamented, noting that Margaret had traveled to Florida for her health two months before, accompanied by her three daughters and a son-in-law, who was also her physician. “Mrs. Kellogg came from one of the most renowned and distinguished families in American history,” the article noted, with some inaccuracies, “being the sister [sic] of the late lamented and martyred President, Abraham Lincoln, who was cruelly assassinated in April, 1865, at the closing of hostilities in the unhappy but sanguinary conflict between the North and South. She like her noble brother [sic], was loved and adored for her ennobling traits of character and God-loving, Christian devotion.”
Mary and Abraham’s beloved Little Sister, Emilie Todd Helm, survived all of her siblings and half-siblings, passing away in February 1930 at her home, Helm Place, on the Bowman’s Mill Pike in Kentucky at the age of ninety-three. Two days later, the Louisville Courier-Journal warmly eulogized her in a piece titled “Little Sister”:
It was a happy turn of fate that Mrs. Ben Hardin Helm, Mary Todd Lincoln’s half-sister, should have been spared these many years and that she was able, both verbally and by her diary and correspondence, to correct many false impressions of circumstances surrounding the lives of Abraham Lincoln and his wife in a day when public interest in them runs high. Many books have been written about the Lincolns, husband and wife, in these last ten years, and not the least of them was that of Katherine Helm of Lexington, based largely on her mother’s recollections, letters and writings.
Mrs. Helm’s death, at the age of 93, removes a woman who was well beloved by the “boys” in gray, at many of whose reunions she had been an honored guest. She was an impressive figure at that time when, after General Helm was killed at Chickamauga and she was granted a pass through the lines from Atlanta, Union officers at Fortress Monroe sought to force her to take the oath of allegiance. Tearfully, yet firmly, the young widow refused. The authorities communicated with Lincoln, who had granted the pass. “Send her to me,” wired the President, and Mrs. Helm went to the White House, to be reunited with her sister.
“I had just lost my husband,” she wrote in her diary. “Mary had lost her son, Willie, and we both had lost three fine, young brothers in the ranks of the Confederate Army.”
Lincoln was very fond of “Little Sister,” as he had called Emilie Helm ever since that day in 1847 when, returning from Congress, he visited the Todd home at Lexington and gave her that pet name as he caught her up and held her at a terrifying height from the floor. Mary Todd was very fond of this child, and because of her confidences, the younger sister was able in later years to refute the cruel story first told by William Herndon that Lincoln had failed to appear at his own wedding, supposedly planned for January 1, 1841.
It was in April, 1861, that Lincoln offered Ben Hardin Helm, then 30 years old and ten years out of West Point, a paymaster’s commission in the Union Army, with the rank of major. That same day in Washington Ben Helm talked to Robert E. Lee and learned he had resigned his commission. Helm’s father, Gov. John L. Helm, was a slave owner, but a Union man. Mary wanted her beautiful sister to live in the White House with her. The place offered was much coveted and Helm realized his opportunity might readily lead to advancement. He thanked Lincoln and asked for time. Returning to Kentucky he was convinced by Simon Bolivar Buckner that he should cast his lot with the Confederacy, and so he wrote the President, after “a bitter struggle with myself.” Two years later Lincoln broke the sad news of Ben Helm’s death to his wife, then in New York, and Senator David Davis described the President as much moved by the tragedy. “Davis,” he said, “I feel as David of old did when he was told of the death of Absalom.”
“Lincoln’s affection was even deeper for ‘Little Sister,’” the remembrance concluded, “even though while at the White House and until the surrender she remained a ‘loyal little rebel’ to the last.”
Rebels and Unionists though they indeed had been, in the end the Todd sisters proved to be, above all other loyalties, sisters.