mary todd....

ok, so....the lincoln special produced by ket aired last night....for 3 hours when one factored in pledge breaks......but an instructive and valuable program for this adoptive kentuckian.....i never learned anything but the basics in elementary school when one studied these things....but then there appears to be a lot we never learned about lincoln in school.....such as the fact that he was to marry a woman named anne who died of some sort of fever, and then there was a woman he courted, who had bad teeth according to letters he wrote, that he backed away from....and even with mary todd, a native of lexington.....they courted and broke up before finally tying the knot.....she was an unusual woman for her day......being educated nearly 12 years......she was by all accounts very ambitious for her new husband....and sadly, lacking in social graces.....she arrived at the white house when the nation was at war...the object of distrust by both the north (3 of her half-brothers were fighting for the confederacy and she was widely thought to be their spy) and the south (who viewed her as a traitor) .and rather than focus on some sort of first lady war effort she set about re-doing the public areas of the white house for parties and traveling to nyc to buy expensive clothing......which did not go over very well at all...she did actually do many good things in washington, but these were overshadowed by her spending habits.......after lincoln was assassinated she kept up this buying spree back in illinois, and her oldest and only living son had her institutionalized for a time thinking her malady must be mental......the program featured an expert on m.t. lincoln, and she surely has written some sort of biography that i can read. Bookclub has never spent much time on her native sons or daughters.....this might be a good time to do so......