In August, Prince Napoleon noted that at a White House dinner “Mrs. Lincoln was dressed in the French style without any taste; she has the manner of a petit bourgeois and wears tin jewelry.” Three months later, the prominent English journalist William Howard Russell recorded in his diary: “Poor Mrs. Lincoln [—] a more preposterous looking female I never saw.” In February 1862, he wrote that at a grand White House party she resembled “a damned old Irish or Scotch (or English) washerwoman dressed out for a Sunday at Highbury Barn.” Oregon Senator James Nesmith was equally appalled by the First Lady’s appearance at that event: “The weak minded Mrs Lincoln had her bosom on exhibition and a flower pot on her head, while there was a train of silk or satin drag[g]ing on the floor behind her of several yards in length.” Nesmith “could not help regretting that she had degenerated from the industrious and unpretending woman that she was in the days when she used to cook Old Abe[’]s dinner, and milk the cows with her own hands.” Now, he acidly observed, “[h]er only ambition seems to be to exhibit her own milking apparatus to the public eye.” A guest at a White House reception noted that the First Lady “wore a very low-necked dress, reminding me of the ‘French fool’ fashion.” A Democratic newspaper described her on one occasion as a “coarse, vain, unamiable … sallow, fleshy, uninteresting woman in white robes, and wearing a band of white flowers about her forehead, like some over-grown Ophelia. … She has less taste than any woman in the land of her half pretensions. She does not distinguish the grande monde from the demi monde.” At a later reception she struck a Massachusetts economist as “a dowdy little woman.” Mary Clemmer Ames told readers of the Springfield, Massachusetts, Republican that the “very dumpy” First Lady “stuns me with her low-necked dresses and the flower-beds which she carries on the top of her head.” Another female correspondent for that paper noted that Mrs. Lincoln had “a beautiful bust, which was largely shown to admiring gaze” at a White House reception. A general’s wife was scandalized by the “bad manners” of the First Lady, who was “preposterously attired” and said “ ‘yes ma’am,’ and ‘no ma’am’ like a servant-woman.”
Source: Abraham Lincoln ∶ A Life ▫𓂃