Eddy’s death began in early December 1849, with a cough. It was slight at first but persistent, a little thing in Abraham Lincoln’s little three-year-old son. Lincoln might not have thought much of it, at least not right away.
He was now far removed from the “wilderness” of his youth. Panthers and bears did not stalk the streets of Springfield, Illinois (though dogs, chickens and the occasional pig were not uncommon), and the log cabins had given way to a sturdy clapboard cottage, a single story with a large loft that he later expanded into a full second story, on Eighth and Jackson Streets near the town’s central square—a respectable dwelling for a respectable man and his family.1
Nor was Lincoln any longer a penniless jack-of-all-trades, scraping by on whatever he could find. Rumor had it that he and Ann Rutledge had delayed their marriage until “certain studies” could be completed—law studies, with Lincoln burying himself in borrowed law books to pass an Illinois bar exam. This he accomplished in 1836, and soon thereafter he left New Salem for the bustling burg of Springfield.2
As he grew into middle age, Lincoln was steadily becoming a proper lawyer with solid prospects, and he had a proper wife in Mary Todd Lincoln. More than proper, she hailed from a wealthy Kentucky family, had attended a Lexington finishing school, and knew French, music, and manners. Theirs was a difficult courtship, but the marriage worked well enough to have produced two children by 1849, Robert and Eddy.3
They had been married for seven years in 1849. They were not poor by any means, but Mary was frugal; a neighbor remembered six-year-old Robert in patched pants and his mother being “very plain in her ways . . . [going] to church wearing a cheap calico dress and a sunbonnet.” Their house was a tight fit, but it was serviceable, “sweet and fresh,” and situated in a solid neighborhood. Robert was a strong, bright young boy; Mary was in the prime of her life, having just celebrated her thirty-first birthday; and Abraham, soon to turn forty-one, was entering a vigorous maturity with no serious health problems.4
But illness dogged their younger son. In one of the few surviving letters to her husband, Mary referred to Eddy’s having “recovered from his little spell of sickness,” but she offered no details. The previous summer, Mary and the children had accompanied Abraham on a speaking tour of upstate New England, where Eddy had also fallen ill, compelling Mary to devote much of her time and energy to nursing him.5
Now he had this cough, which grew steadily worse. If his parents were initially inclined to downplay its significance, believing it to be just one more unfortunate but manageable trial for their little boy, they were soon disabused of that notion. The coughing became ferocious, with Eddy experiencing ever greater trouble catching his breath. They might also have noticed spots of blood on his lips and chin or in a greenish-yellow phlegm he had begun to expel. They would have seen the problem growing ever more severe: at the kitchen table when Eddy dropped his fork from a coughing fit, perhaps, or as they tucked him into bed at night and listened to him gag and wheeze as he fell into an exhausted, rasping slumber. The sound would have reverberated throughout the little house, probably keeping his parents and brother awake on more than one night.
Mary may have at first tried to treat Eddy herself. Mothers in that day and age were expected to solve such problems on their own before consulting a doctor, and there was an extensive literature available to help them do so. Perhaps she possessed a copy of Gunn’s Domestic Medicine, or The Poor Man’s Friend, the most popular home medical guide of the day, written by a Tennessee doctor named John C. Gunn, who offered ready advice on everything from midwifery to heartburn. His recommendation for treating a cough was “antimonial wine,” or garlic juice made palatable with a little honey. Laudanum was useful, he also suggested, for severe coughing at night. Mary might have tried thickening egg whites in vinegar to create a homemade cough syrup. Commercial remedies were also available, such as “Hough and Halton’s cough candy,” sold at Snow, Hill and Company’s store on the west side of the Springfield town square.6
Not that Mary (or anyone else) understood what she was treating. This particular sickness had killed people for centuries, but no one knew why. Some people thought it wasn’t so much a communicable disease as a “constitutional” condition; it happened to those who were born physically weak.7 Others realized it was an affliction that had little to do with physical stamina or willpower. In 1720, an English physician named Benjamin Marten theorized that the terrible lung disease, “so endemick to this nation and generally fatal to those it seizes on,” was characterized chiefly by “ulcers” on the lungs and transmitted by “creatures” through the air. The result, as Marten described it, was “a wearing away or consuming of all the muscular or fleshy parts of the body.” Marten and those living in the Lincolns’ time called it “consumption.” This was a catchall phrase in those scientifically imprecise times, connoting any disease causing a consuming or a “wasting of the body.” Scientific classification was so vague that some historians have since wondered what exactly caused Eddy’s illness. Odds are that it was tuberculosis.8
Accompanying the coughing, the blood, and the mucus was fatigue, serious and prolonged, as Eddy’s never robust frame shuddered under the strain of fighting the deadly bacteria that was now devouring his lungs. The flow of blood and mucus would have continued, along with a general soreness accompanying the incessant coughing and labored breathing. He also would have developed a fever as the bacteria wrought havoc with his immune system—again, never a very strong system under the best of circumstances. Mary might, with an increasing sense of desperation, have applied cold compresses to Eddy’s forehead and face, paging through Dr. Gunn’s manual and other books for some type of fever treatment or scanning advertisements in the newspapers for potentially useful products such as John Sappington’s Fever and Ague Pills or Wallace and Diller’s Western Tonic, guaranteed to work in advertisements in the Sangamo Journal. Nothing would have helped much.9
Abraham and Mary consulted a doctor, though it is unknown exactly when and whom.10 They surely called on their family physician, William S. Wallace, who ran his practice and a drugstore in a space beneath Lincoln’s law office. A graduate of Jefferson Medical College in Philadelphia, Wallace was competent enough by the day’s standards. He was also motivated by a close personal tie to the patient: Eddy was his nephew, Wallace’s wife being Mary’s sister. Either he or another doctor did prescribe medication of some kind. Older remedies once included doses of mercury and various opiates, but these treatments had fallen out of favor. Consumptive patients were instead encouraged to seek climates where the atmosphere was supposedly conducive to less labored breathing—Colorado or someplace else out west with drier air, options that Eddy’s parents could not realistically pursue.11
By the end of January, everyone knew Eddy’s condition was grave. The wasting aspect of the disease would now have been evident. His skin would have had a whitish pallor (hence the name “white plague” attached by some to the disease), and his muscle tone would have been diminished, both from the blood’s decreased oxygen content and from what was likely by this point a prolonged period of time spent in bed. The difficult breathing and coughing spells continued, punctuated by hoarseness and a diminishing ability to speak. Night sweats were another common symptom, and some late-stage tuberculosis patients suffered bouts of diarrhea, adding yet a further dimension of misery.12
This merciless obliteration of a child was not an easy thing to watch. No written record survives of Eddy’s daily suffering, so we can only guess what life must have been like in the Lincoln home. Mary was doubtless busy, dealing with not only Eddy’s needs but those of Abraham and Robert as well, and she seems to have shouldered the load without domestic help. The Lincolns periodically employed servants, as did many other Springfield households, and two years previously they had hired a young girl named Ruth Burns Stanton as a live-in servant. But they let her go sometime in 1849, possibly to economize. “The Lincolns were poor then,” Stanton recalled. “After I left, Mrs. Lincoln had to do all of her own housework, for she could not afford to get another servant.” They do not seem to have hired anyone else until Abraham approached an African American woman named Mariah Vance about a job two months after Eddy died, apparently having scraped together enough money at that point.13
If Eddy had lived in a later age, he might have been taken to one of the tuberculosis sanatoriums with other consumptive patients, places that segregated the dying process with their own institutionalized rules and routines. Instead, he spent his last days at home.14 The neighbors would have known about his condition. They might have heard his coughs as they walked by the house or asked after him when they encountered Abraham or Mary on the streets. Perhaps they occasionally helped with the household chores or brought a meal after a particularly tough day. There was James Gourley, a shoemaker whose yard bordered the Lincolns and who became a good friend to the entire Lincoln family, joining Abraham on occasion for a game of handball and even sometimes staying the night at the Lincoln home when Abraham was away on the legal circuit and Mary felt insecure. It is hard to imagine Gourley remaining uninvolved in Eddy’s ordeal. There was also Mary Remann, a German immigrant whose husband, Henry, had died from tuberculosis not long before Eddy became ill. After Eddy died, his mother gave some of his clothes to Mrs. Remann, who had a little boy about the same age. Mary Remann’s sister-in-law, Elizabeth Black, lived for a while with her, and during her stay she gave birth to a baby boy who died shortly thereafter, of unknown causes. Mary Lincoln, by this point also grieving for Eddy’s loss, visited and prayed with Elizabeth, the two mothers commiserating over the loss of their sons.15
Mary also had family in Springfield: her cousin John Todd Stuart (Lincoln’s first law partner) and his wife and Mary’s sisters, Elizabeth, Frances, and Ann. Her eldest sister, Elizabeth, was a particularly important figure in Mary’s life. Mary moved to Springfield at her urging, Abraham courted Mary in Elizabeth’s parlor, and the sisters remained close thereafter (aside from a few difficult spots). As the eldest Todd living in Springfield and the wife of Ninian Edwards, a wealthy and successful Illinois politician, Elizabeth often assumed the role of quasi-matriarch and advisor; “you have . . . such an influence over Mary,” Abraham once told her. Surely she was involved in Eddy’s care, along with the other Todd sisters.16
But Mary was Eddy’s primary caregiver, and as the days took their toll, she must have been exhausted and nearly overwhelmed. “My wife is not well,” Lincoln remarked at the time, and he tied this directly to Eddy’s illness. However, there is no evidence that Mary was unequal to the task or that she suffered any kind of breakdown. She did what was necessary.17
Abraham was there to help. Throughout their married life, he performed various chores around the house: chopping wood, doing a bit of gardening, or attending to the family cow that was pastured near the house—“a domestic man by nature,” thought one friend. Gourley remembered him sometimes milking away in his slippers and an old pair of pants held aloft by only one suspender. He was accustomed to such work since his earliest days at Little Pigeon Creek, more so than Mary, who was raised in a wealthy slaveholding home.18
Yet he was also professionally a busy man. Ruth Stanton recalled that while she worked in the Lincoln home, she hardly saw him at all, so preoccupied was he with his law practice. No one in 1850 would have expected Lincoln, however attentive a husband and father, to significantly curtail his work schedule to care for a sick child at home, even a dying child such as Eddy. So on most mornings, Lincoln would have headed out the back door to work (he hardly ever used the more formal front entrance), the sound of his son’s endless coughing slowly fading away as he walked down Eighth Street, stooping a bit in the frigid weather and wrapped in a faded gray shawl.19
He did reduce his workload somewhat. From early December 1849 to the end of January 1850, he and his partner William Herndon litigated only five cases, and he engaged in no serious political or civic activities. By comparison, a year later during that same period, the firm of Lincoln and Herndon litigated twenty cases, and Lincoln closely monitored various activities related to both the Illinois Whig Party and bills pending in the state legislature. The year after that, he and Herndon were involved in only ten cases, but he was busy serving on two subcommittees at the state Whig convention and aiding a local Springfield organization that expressed sympathies for Hungarian revolutionary Louis Kossuth. December and January were typically hectic months for Lincoln, but during the winter of 1849–50, he took on relatively few additional responsibilities.20
Still, while he made an effort to cut back and stay closer to home, he also sustained a more or less normal routine. He went to work, argued cases, and wrote letters—all mundane tasks during the performance of which Lincoln betrayed no hint of anything unusual in his family life. He tried to bear his son’s ordeal as a “strong man,” remembered a friend, one “who had resolved to keep his feelings under firm sway,” a description reminiscent of his quiet reaction to his mother’s and his sister’s deaths.21
Sometime toward the end of January, he would have undertaken the practical preparations for the funeral he and everyone else knew was imminent. Springfield was not Little Pigeon Creek or New Salem, where dying was a primitive affair. Arranging for Eddy’s funeral would have involved a great deal more, and since these were primarily business transactions, and Mary was no doubt fully occupied with the day-to-day struggles in caring for Eddy, Abraham probably dealt with these matters himself.
Springfield had no funeral directors or homes at that time; the modern funeral service industry did not yet exist. There were people known as “undertakers.” The Springfield Steam Power Furniture Manufactory, on the south side of the town square, advertised its willingness to provide “undertaking, in all its branches.” The city directory also listed as an “undertaker” a man named Henry Brinkman.22 But undertaking was not a profession, exactly; it was a vague term attached to craftsmen who built coffins or transferred the body of the deceased from the site of the funeral to the grave. Some undertakers possessed an unsavory reputation as death’s mechanics, callous men who nailed boards together into a box or trundled away a corpse for burial and did so for a fee rather than with proper Christian sentiment.23
There were also ministers, of course. Lincoln had long since fallen away from his “Hardshell” Baptist upbringing, and he was not a regular church-going man (though Mary did occasionally attend Springfield’s Episcopal church). If he did ask a minister for advice concerning how to properly conduct Eddy’s funeral, it was most likely Dr. James Smith of Springfield’s First Presbyterian Church. An unidentified “lady friend” suggested that Smith call on the Lincolns at some point during Eddy’s final days to provide the family with spiritual comfort. Since the Episcopal minister who had performed the Lincolns’ marriage was out of town, they called on Smith to conduct Eddy’s funeral. They would have discussed with him at some point the order in which the events of funeral and burial should unfold, the proper methods of adornment, and other details.24
Lincoln also needed to buy a coffin, and for this he had numerous options. A cabinetmaker named J. Francis advertised his willingness to make “coffins at reduced prices,” as did fellow woodworkers D. E. Reickel and J. A. Hough. The Springfield Steam Power Furniture Manufactory advertised among its other products—“mahogany centre tables,” “fancy divans,” “plain and tufted sofas,” and the like—an entire “ware room” that was “devoted exclusively to ready-made coffins, of every quality, and all sizes.” One can imagine Lincoln slowly walking through a “ware room” on some winter day in late January, engaged in the melancholy task of finding a coffin small enough for his dying son. He probably chose a simple one constructed of plain wood, metallic coffins falling more within the province of wealthy families. A child’s coffin was sometimes adorned with special hardware: a lamb representing Christ’s love for innocence or a cut rose representing a life of potential suddenly and prematurely ended. It is not known whether Lincoln chose such an option for Eddy.25
Where would his child be buried? This was another grim but necessary decision, entailing more than placing the body on a sled and hauling it to a hilltop, as had been the case with Lincoln’s mother. At that time, Springfield possessed two cemeteries: a public cemetery on Adams Street at the western edge of town and the nearby Hutchison cemetery, owned by yet another cabinetmaker, named John Hutchison. Like Francis, Reickel, Hough, and the Steam Power Furniture Manufactory, Hutchison supplemented his furniture business by constructing coffins, but he went further, purchasing land near his house for a private burial ground and advertising that he could supply customers with a hearse and carriage and “all Funeral arrangements.”26
Neither cemetery was a terribly attractive place. Both were becoming crowded with the dead, even as Springfield became crowded with the living; Hutchison’s cemetery alone hosted several hundred graves by 1850. Modern ideas regarding cemeteries as idyllic and carefully planned garden spots were still some years in the future, and while Hutchison may have tried to keep his grounds reasonably weed free and clean, the place was probably a jumble of headstones of various sizes and shapes, with at best minimal landscaping. Organization would have been minimal as well, with general groupings of graves by family and kinship but nothing much more elaborate. This was all Springfield had to offer for Eddy’s burial.27
Eddy would also need a stone to mark his final resting place. When Lincoln discussed a tombstone with Hutchison or some other craftsman (perhaps a Springfield man named Patrick Flood who worked as a stonecutter), he arranged for a stone bearing what was considered an epitaph suitable for a child: an image of a dove, inscribed with Eddy’s name and the phrase “of such is the Kingdom of Heaven” from Matthew 19:14: “Suffer little children, and forbid them not, to come unto me: for of such is the kingdom of heaven.”28
Doves, Bible verses . . . these were terribly important, invested with an entire community’s collective sense of the sacred and the appropriate, the “civilized.” Lincoln’s community cared a great deal about the rites of dying and mourning because in that day, it often seemed as if the bustling and energetic new market and industrial economy was coarsening the everyday fabric of life. Elaborate funeral and mourning rituals were a counterweight, a balancing of the scales; by observing meticulous social rules for death and mourning, Americans in Lincoln’s day wanted to preserve a sense of the hallowed and the profound in an indifferent and even hostile modern world.29
This was particularly true regarding the fate of deceased children. The ancient belief that a dead child was doomed to spend an eternity in hell if not baptized or born into a particular church had given way by Lincoln’s time to the belief, popularized by the Swedish writer Emanuel Swedenborg, that children were inherently innocent and thus any child who passed away would be welcomed into heaven. It is not clear whether Lincoln read Swedenborg, but he was surely aware that the culture around him associated children with purity and innocence, so any mourning of a dead child likely would have reflected this sensibility.30
Lincoln could not afford to ignore these considerations. A man from humble farming roots who constantly strove to escape those roots and enter white middle-class respectability, Lincoln wanted and needed acceptance into polite Springfield circles. The memories of Little Pigeon Creek with all its “wilderness” primitiveness—not to mention his mother, sister, and Ann Rutledge in their awful suffering—could not have been pleasant, and Lincoln wanted to get as far away from that life as possible. He was an ambitious man on the make, and he had to do dying as well as living right.
There was a political element here as well, ironically centered on Lincoln’s perceived lack of faith. While running for Congress in 1846, he was accused by his opponent of agnosticism or worse—a serious charge in those days. Lincoln felt threatened enough to respond with a handbill reassuring voters that he had “never denied the truth of the Scriptures,” nor had he ever “spoken with intentional disrespect of religion in general, or of any denomination of Christians in particular.” He understood the immense power Christianity wielded in shaping Americans’ moral sensibilities, and he knew better than to challenge that power. “I do not think I could myself, be brought to support a man for office, whom I knew to be an open enemy of, and scoffer at, religion,” he declared. “Leaving the higher matter of eternal consequences, between him and his Maker, I still do not think any man has the right thus to insult the feelings, and injure the morals, of the community in which he may live.” Few events touched on the feelings and morals of the community more than death, especially the death of a child. People in those highly religious days noticed that Lincoln did not regularly attend church, and they would have noticed with disapproval had he shown an inclination to ignore the customs surrounding funerals and the mourning process.31
Eddy died at six in the morning on Friday, February 1, 1850, just four weeks shy of his fourth birthday. “We lost our little boy,” Lincoln wrote to his stepbrother. “He was sick fifty two days.” The funeral plans were already in place and ready to go, for they were able to hold Eddy’s service the very next morning at eleven o’clock. The body would not have been left alone during the night; someone—likely a family member—would have kept an overnight vigil.32
As was the custom of the day, the funeral occurred in the Lincoln home. Eddy’s body would have been prepared for viewing in the formal front parlor. He was probably not embalmed, an expensive process not yet widespread in America. He was washed and dressed, tasks usually performed by the deceased’s mother, with help from other women. In some communities, ladies advertised their services as “laying-out women,” but in all likelihood Mary was assisted by one or more of her sisters and perhaps a neighborhood woman like Mrs. Remann.
Mary also may have cut and preserved a lock of Eddy’s hair, a common act steeped in symbolism and intimacy. Americans saw locks of hair as tiny bridges to their deceased loved ones, curiously tangible and potent in their evocation of the dead. “How full thou art of memories, severed tress!” went a sentimental poem of the day.33 Some grieving mothers incorporated the deceased’s hair into brooches and other jewelry—usually fashioned from ebony—or elaborate funeral wreaths.34
Whether Mary was present at the service is unknown. Some writers have affirmed that she was definitely not present—there is no direct evidence one way or the other—and have used her absence as proof of her supposed mental and emotional instability. We do not know her exact state of mind that day, and in any event, her absence was expected. Women normally did not attend funerals in that era, since it was believed they could not properly control their emotions.35
The service was conducted by Reverend Smith, who likely spoke of Eddy’s essential innocence as a child called to God—possibly invoking the quotation from Matthew inscribed on Eddy’s headstone—and of the hope of salvation and resurrection in the hereafter. He might also have spoken of Eddy’s death as a relief from the child’s prolonged suffering. A Presbyterian guide to funeral services of the time instructed ministers to remind listeners of “the frailty of life, and importance of being prepared for death and eternity.” Smith possessed a strong Calvinist bent, and with this tendency toward fatalism, he may have intimated in his sermon that God shaped all ends and that his purposes, however inscrutable, were ultimately divine.36
Those present would afterward have been served food, a nearly universal practice at any funeral service. Traditionally, varieties of cold meats were common on such occasions—turkey, boiled ham, and roast beef—as well as whatever fruits were available in the winter season. Perhaps they also were given a bit of alcohol and some tobacco, though Lincoln customarily indulged in neither.37
This sharing of food was a way of incorporating the neighborhood into the grieving process, and there were other ways, which were (as always) bracketed by social mores and rules. Casual acquaintances of the Lincoln family were not expected to attend the service, but they were expected to visit the family within one week of the funeral, if possible wearing black silk or clothing that was plain and unadorned. Respectable families would also leave mourning cards with black edges, expressing their condolences, displayed on a table in the deceased’s home.38
After the service, the coffin was carried to a waiting hearse, probably provided by Hutchison. It would have been a simple affair, a black carriage drawn by two or four horses, possibly possessing the glass sides ordinarily associated with such vehicles—though this would become more common later in the century—and almost certainly sporting plumes. Plumes adorned nearly all hearses of the day, a modern outgrowth from the medieval custom of surrounding a dead body with tall candles. White feathered plumage was the accepted symbol for the death of a child.
The hearse drew Eddy away to the gravesite, with Lincoln, Reverend Smith, and the other attendees acting as a small cortege. Both of Springfield’s cemeteries were relatively near the Lincoln home, so the procession would not have lasted long or traveled far—a good thing, given the winter season. Immediate family members Abraham and Robert followed in the closest proximity to the casket, with more distant family and friends trailing silently behind, heads bare.39
Exactly where Eddy was buried, at least initially, is something of a mystery. In December 1851—nearly two years after his death—the Lincolns purchased a burial plot for their son in Hutchison’s cemetery. Where was Eddy’s body in the interim? Perhaps he was buried in Hutchison’s cemetery and the Lincolns made some sort of arrangement whereby they paid for the plot at a later date. Or possibly Eddy was first buried in Springfield’s city cemetery, a less expensive alternative to Hutchison’s privately owned affair, and then reinterred later when the Lincolns could afford Hutchison’s fee.40
Following the burial, the Lincoln family entered a period of mourning, for which society also stipulated a protocol. This varied according to circumstances. Poorer Americans tended to observe fewer and simpler mourning customs, and widows and widowers were subject to considerably longer and more complex rules than the parents, siblings, or grandchildren of deceased relatives. Location played a role as well; a town like Springfield, sophisticated by Illinois standards but rustic according to people living in, say, New York, probably fell somewhere between rigid and lax in its social rules for mourning.41
Men and women were subject to different rules. As the father of a dead child, Lincoln wore black clothing and perhaps a black armband or hat wrap for a while—a few months at most. This wasn’t much; men were supposed to suppress their feelings during the process of dying, and so too did they submerge their grief afterward. Had Lincoln worn mourning clothing for what his neighbors and friends considered an inordinately long period of time, he would have risked gossip that he had become excessively “feminized” in his grief. He was expected to maintain the outward appearance of keeping his emotions in firm control.42
For the most part, he seems to have done so. The people closest to him noticed a deep-seated sadness in the days following Eddy’s burial. “I found him very much depressed and downcast at the death of his son,” Reverend Smith later remembered when he visited Lincoln to further console him on his loss. This was hardly surprising. But Lincoln reserved the feelings of depression engendered by Eddy’s death for private encounters like Reverend Smith’s visit. There is reliable evidence of only one public outburst, when immediately after the funeral he saw a card with Eddy’s last medical prescription lying on a table. He picked it up, threw it away, and rushed from the room crying.43
Otherwise, Lincoln seems to have firmly maintained the self-control expected of him, and even this slight loss of emotional control occurred within his home. His professional behavior in the office and elsewhere was normal—neither his law partner nor other colleagues remarked otherwise—and his correspondence was entirely businesslike and ordinary. His only mention of Eddy’s death came in a brief letter on February 23, responding to earlier correspondence from his stepbrother: “As you make no mention of it, I suppose you had not learned that we lost our little boy,” Lincoln wrote. “We miss him very much.” Whatever turmoil he felt upon Eddy’s death he kept contained within himself and out of the public eye.44
For Mary, expectations were different. Women were expected to bear the heaviest burden of mourning lost loved ones, for they were the guardians of the family’s emotional and social propriety—keepers of the family “heart,” so to speak. Her mourning manifested itself in her dress. In the weeks immediately following Eddy’s funeral, Mary would have donned “deep mourning,” dresses made of somber, dull black material with crepe at the collar and cuffs, and no other trimming of any kind—no bows, ruffles, or flounces. She would have worn a black veil and bonnet, and black gloves made of silk or cloth—kid gloves were not allowed. She may even have carried black-bordered handkerchiefs. She would have worn no jewelry, and her hair would have been arranged in a “perfectly plain” manner, clasped with a single, plain locket.45
She remained in deep mourning anywhere from six months to a year; opinions varied regarding what was most appropriate. She then transitioned to “half mourning”: still a primarily black motif with crepe trimmings but now interspersed with gray, white, or muted lavender. Simple black or gold jewelry was now allowed. Other Springfield women who called on her were likewise expected to wear somber fashions; if not black crepe, at least colors of a more subdued, grayish type.46
Mary was playing a part here, almost as if she were acting out a play for Springfield’s benefit. Her assigned role was the anguished mother, working her way through her loss using the vehicles of fashion and clothing that were a woman’s primary means of expression in that era. Her friends and neighbors played roles as well. They were tasked with calling on Mary at an appropriate time and place, dressed appropriately and saying fitting words of condolence. They were also to decide when the time for mourning should come to an end and inform Mary when she should put her black crepe away and move on. They were to do so by gently reminding her of her familial obligations to the living. “The friends around a grief stricken mother [are] to tell her when it is time to make her dress more cheerful,” offered an advice column in a nineteenth-century magazine, “which she is bound to do for the sake of the survivors”—her husband and her other children.47
Mary’s grief was profound. The wife of Lincoln’s first law partner (and Mary’s cousin), John Todd Stuart, visited the Lincoln home one morning shortly after Eddy’s death, though exactly when is unclear. At this point, the Lincolns had hired a servant (probably Mariah Vance), and Mrs. Stuart helped the servant prepare breakfast. Abraham brought the meal to Mary, saying to her, “Mary, you must eat, for we must live.” But she refused. Abraham dined that morning alone.48
A long-standing tradition has Mary doing far more than refusing a meal. Some describe Mary collapsing in swoons of pain and anguish, shutting herself away in her bedroom, curtains drawn, and crying incessantly for days on end. While she would do such things (and more) later in life when confronted with the deaths of Willie and her husband, there is no reliable evidence that on this occasion she either isolated herself for prolonged periods in her room or cried in a hysterical manner. As deeply wounded and exhausted as Mary must have been, her behavior in mourning Eddy was neither overwrought nor all that worrisome to those around her. Americans expected a certain amount of distress from bereaved mothers. Even Abraham’s admonishment—“you must eat, for we must live”—fit the social script he and Mary were expected to follow. When he reminded her that they both had a duty to Robert, their living child, he was saying exactly what he was supposed to say.49
Whatever she did or did not do, her grieving took place within the privacy of her home. The silence of the historical record is telling. No friends or neighbors commented on a public misstep during this time from either Mary or Abraham, and none of the ugly rumors that later swirled around the Lincoln family life and marriage—everything from Abraham being driven by marital discord to sleep on his office couch to Mary chasing him out of the house with a knife—touched on Eddy’s death. They both behaved with what was at the time considered propriety.
This was no insignificant matter, for the social rituals surrounding dying and its aftermath were among antebellum America’s most rigidly proscribed and emotionally sensitive. Abraham and Mary were given a certain set of guidelines, cultural tools with which to navigate the dying process for their son. Those tools were partly designed to help ease personal grief, but they also allowed the community to assess the distressed parents’ character. People believed they could tell a lot about their neighbors’ values, beliefs, even the state of their very souls by watching how they handled death.
Abraham and Mary Lincoln, each in their own way and for their own reasons, cared about what the rest of Springfield thought of them. They were social creatures, after all, deeply embedded within their community. Their friends, relatives, neighbors, colleagues, and clients expected them to behave a certain way and follow established norms as they confronted their child’s death, an occurrence that was tragic and traumatic but not all that unusual. Child mortality rates were high in Lincoln’s time. Indeed, dying itself was a common thing. In a time cursed with multiple and lethal diseases—not just “consumption,” but repeated outbreaks of cholera, malaria, smallpox, diphtheria, measles, lethal forms of the flu—and crude medical knowledge, death was everywhere.
It was experienced not in specialized, isolated settings but directly at home, in the moment, and as an intimate part of everyday life. Abraham and Mary would have daily seen the death of their son, smelled it, felt it, and heard it—for fifty-one days. Certainly this was so for Mary (and Robert), but it was also true for Abraham, even as he left the place where Eddy was dying and went to work in his law office and the courtroom.
It was also practical as well as emotional, nuts and bolts as well as sentiment. It was about the many steps, large and small, that should be taken to treat an illness, the messy and difficult daily problems of caregiving, the sort of coffin in which Eddy should be buried, what should be on the tombstone, how the family might pay for the burial, and exactly what they might do and say to mourn him afterward. Death for Abraham Lincoln was not always an existential intellectual exercise or a search for a deeper meaning and purpose. Sometimes it was simply a matter of getting through the day, making the ledger balance, and trying hard not to offend anyone’s sensibilities by allowing brimming emotions to spill over and make a public mess. Those complicated and meticulous cultural rituals of funerals and mourning could be cumbersome and unforgiving, but all the available evidence suggests that both Abraham and Mary followed the rules with care.