The following is an edited, excerpted version of Maureen McKinney’s interview with her longtime friend Stacy Lynn, about the Lincoln scholar’s new book, Loving Lincoln: A Personal History of the Women Who Shaped Lincoln's Life and Legacy.
You've written books, including the biography of Mary Lincoln, but this book is different. You've taken an entirely new approach, where you're fusing your own life with the Lincolns and your experience with grief. So I'm curious how you came to this format.
It is kind of an unusual approach, and it wouldn't have occurred to me until very recently. Is there something that you discover in your life as time goes by and you wake up one day and you realize this is the story that I want to tell.
So, in 2016, two years after my daughter died, I lost my job at the Lincoln papers, and it was like a grief on top of grief and and then Hillary Clinton lost the presidency that same Fall, and I was feeling just so overwhelmed by my just my life sort of had fallen apart, and I was feeling overwhelmed, not only for myself, but I was grieving for the nation.
And I started writing as kind of a remedy, and I wrote this 130 page screed about Lincoln and passionate politics and how we've lost that in modern America. And it made me feel better, but it wasn't, anything that could possibly have been published.
A couple more bad years in my life, and I finally started to kind of come out of my fog of grief in 2018 and kind of started all over again, and then the pandemic happened, and I had a great deal to sit around and think about during the pandemic, and I kept coming back to Lincoln. I kept coming back to the stories of the women in Lincoln's life that I had collected over the years, and I there was such solace in in being with Lincoln again, and in the trauma of losing my job at the Lincoln papers, I kind of was finding myself back to Lincoln, and he was not only a solace for me, but also a motivator.
And I remembered an acquisition editor at SIU press had told me years ago to call her first when I was ready to write my book about Lincoln. And I did. I called her and the book that was written, it kind of just magically happened. Maureen, honestly, I sat down to write a collective biography of all these women, these stories of women's mothers and sisters and friends of Mary Lincoln, of the women who Lincoln helped in his law practice … and the women who came to see Lincoln when he was president, asking him to help them with their sorrows, to get a loved one back from a battlefield, or to help them find a job in the government.
The book that I wrote ended up being this kind of collection of essays about women, and what I realized after I wrote it is that I was one of the women. And so the there were these five essays about the women who shaped Lincoln's legacy, like Ida Tarbell and Mary Lincoln, who had him buried at Oak Ridge, and Sally Field, who played his wife in the movie Lincoln.
And there was Stacy Lynn, too, as a woman who had been a Lincoln scholar for 30 years and who also had found great inspiration in the life of Lincoln. So what I ended up writing kind of happened by accident, and it was this kind of beautiful, weird, crazy, cool, kind of an approach to Lincoln. So it kind of blurs the lines of biography and also memoir. And I think the result is this selection of stories of all of these women who loved Lincoln into being, and the women like me who continue to be inspired by him today.
You've experienced great loss in your life, particularly the loss of (her daughter) Mackenzie in 2014. Did your experience with grief inform how you looked at the Lincolns?
Yes, it really did. One of the things that we are taught when we're trained to be historians, we're trained to have distance from the past, to treat the past like it's a foreign country, to treat people who lived before us as somehow other, and to maintain an objective distance. And what I increasingly found over the course of my career, is that my enthusiasm for history and my empathy and my just kind of love for the historical characters that I studied was losing something in translation because I was like stiff-arming my kind of relationship to these people, and by writing this book, what I discovered is that my grief in losing my daughter was not really different at all from the grief that the Lincolns felt when they lost their first baby, Eddie, and then, of course, the devastating loss of Willie, right in the middle of the Civil War.
And when you read Mary Lincoln's letters about grief, I mean, it sounds like me. I mean, it sounds so much like my experience. And what I learned is that that shared humanity, that connection that I had to the Lincolns was even deeper than it had been before, and I think I understood them better as a result of giving in to that.
But I also, by the time I finished … this book, what I realized is that I want people to not only read this history that I've written, but also to feel it, because I do think we are connected to the people of the past, and if we have empathy for the past, then it matters more, and we can also, I think if we have empathy for the past, if we can connect and relate to the people who lived before us, then maybe history can be more useful in the modern context. And I argue in this book that some of our human characteristics, our love, our loss, our grief, our experiences, are not so different.
In the book you talk about older male scholars not being always particularly welcoming. What has being a woman scholar of Lincoln meant?
It’s kind of meant everything for a number of reasons. It was difficult to be a woman in Lincoln studies; it's a male-dominated profession. Every year there are new books written about Lincoln, and very rarely are they written by women. They're almost all written by white men of a certain age. I was always chafing against this paradigm in Lincoln studies that Mary Lincoln was horrible, that she was crazy, that she was this great man's greatest mistake, that while Lincoln's melancholy fueled his greatness, Mary Lincoln's mental frailty at times, her emotionalism, her feminine passion, was considered nuts, and so I always chafed at that, and I it put me in a position to always kind of be on defensive in Lincoln studies.
The other thing that it did is it made me afraid to write a biography of Lincoln, to tackle a Lincoln book, because I was told over and over again that by the actions and the comments of people within Lincoln studies, that I had no I had nothing to say. If I was going to defend Mary Lincoln, what possibly could I say?
And when I started writing this book, and when these stories of these women started flowing out of me, I realized that it had been an armor to focus on the periphery of the Lincoln story, to write a biography about his wife, to write articles and to study when I was editing his papers, to study the women In his law practice –- did it to kind of protect myself, and what it ended up giving me was a different voice that in writing this book.
Now I'm really proud and happy that that's the way it has turned out, because it has made my story here in Loving Lincoln, a unique story, a different gaze, some troubled waters in my time in Lincoln studies, I don't regret any of it, because it brought me here to this book and these stories and telling it with my own female gaze, which I think is valid and appropriate and in some ways empowering.
Tell me some of the stories of the women you've included in the book. Some of your favorites.
Oh gosh, that's so hard. There's about 90 women whose stories I tell in the book. So picking a couple of favorites is hard, but one that I will talk about is this woman named Susannah Weathers. She was an old widow living in Indiana when the Civil War broke out, and she made her president a pair of socks, and she wrote this letter, and she sent it off to Washington with her socks.
And Lincoln got the socks. He loved the socks, and he wrote her a letter that I think is one of the most beautiful letters in all of Lincoln's correspondence. He just writes this, this letter of gratitude and respect and common connection with this woman who was from Kentucky and had made these socks in a way that he recalled, you know, from his own mother's making of socks, and it's just this beautiful, compassionate, heartfelt letter and her story.
This is a humble gift, a pair of socks, but it meant everything to her to help you know her president and his poor cold feet, but also too, it's reflective of Lincoln acknowledging this woman who had done this kindness for him on a day in the life of an American president who's worried about a nation at war. I just think it speaks to Lincoln's political ethos, and it's definitely one of my favorite stories.
Another favorite story is a woman by the name of Susan Dugger, who was a young woman in Southern Illinois. She lived in Carlinville, and when the war broke out, her brother went to war, and she was living with an aunt and uncle. She heard somehow that women could get jobs in Washington, D.C.
So she goes to Washington, D.C, and she gets a meeting with Lincoln, and he helps her get a job in the Treasury Department. Because during the Civil War, Lincoln put a lot of women, maybe as many as, like, 450-500 women, to work in the federal government. And this young woman became one of those workers, and she went on to have like, a 40-year career in the Treasury Department of the United States.
So I love that story too, because it helps, it gives a sense of Lincoln here helping this young woman get a job in 1861 and then in 1912 when she's retiring, she still has this letter that Lincoln had written that referred her to somebody in the Treasury Department for a job. And so that story, connecting not only to Lincoln, but this young woman becoming a professional woman as a part of a group of women who are going to work during the war is another one of my favorites.
Tell me a little bit of how your read of Mary Lincoln differs so much from a lot of your colleagues.
I think my understanding of Mary is born of a deep knowledge of her life story that a lot of historians who are writing Lincoln biographies are less interested in delving into. And so one of the things that I credit to Mary that I think sets her apart in a lot of ways, and I think it's one of the things that made her so attractive to Abraham Lincoln, is this really unusual education that she had. So she had 10 years of what counted as formal education for a woman at a time when most girls, I mean, if they had a couple of years of school, they were probably pretty lucky. And a lot of women still, even at this time were illiterate.
And here's Mary Lincoln, who grew up in a wealthy household that believed in women's education, and so she had all this education. She had a father who encouraged her to have opinions, and then to share her opinions. And then she goes to Springfield, and that's who she is when she gets to Springfield.
And I think Lincoln gravitated towards her because of that. There was something about her intellect and her spirit that appealed to him. And the other thing that I think sets me apart is that I see the Lincoln marriage. Marriage as kind of in the middle of, kind of an old fashioned Victorian marriage and a modern kind of a marriage where, you know, there's really quality between partners. The Lincolns were, in some ways, very traditional, and that's fine. Mary Lincoln was not a feminist at all. She had no interest in those kinds of things. She saw her life in a domestic, kind of a context where, I think Lincoln biographers want to just see her okay, this is the 19th century. She's supposed to be the little woman being good and whatever at home.
And Mary Lincoln is kind of caught in between. And I not only do I give her credit for having her opinions and having confidence in her voice. Even after she goes to Washington, she involves herself in politics wherever she can because she's obsessed, like her husband, with partisan politics, and she's interested, and she's a patriot, and she wants to be involved, but also, too … she's not, she's not Elizabeth Cady Stanton advocating for equal rights.
So she kind of sits in this middle that, and that's nuance that Lincoln biographers don't have time to give the female characters in a biography of Lincoln. And one of the things that I argue in my book Loving Lincoln is that as soon as we do that, as soon as we take women out of the story, we lose so much because there are no great men without a woman who birthed them and fed them and diapered them, women who loved them, women who were their friends and inspired them and who they shared confidence with. There are no lawyers without clients, and Lincoln had lots of female clients. There are no leaders without people willing to follow, and Lincoln had a whole contingent of those as well. Half of the country were women, and Lincoln saw them as part of his constituency, and they informed his thinking. And as soon as we take women out of the equation, we lose a great deal in the telling of the story. And unfortunately, in biography, it's not just the not a problem with Lincoln biography. It's a problem with the biography of great male figures that the women fall away and a lot of the humanity of the story is lost.
