The public also looked askance at Mrs. Lincoln’s friendship with Daniel Sickles, yet another acquaintance whose reputation was none too savory. When the president nominated him for a generalship, that gesture was thought to reflect Lincoln’s “desire to confer on him respectability because his wife condescended to be attended by Sickles at a Review in public when no other women in the country of unsullied character would have done such a thing.” A New Yorker reported that, because of her indiscretions, “Mrs. Lincoln is seen in society at the North to be the worst enemy” of her husband. A matron in the Empire State, Maria Lydig Daly, thought the First Lady “behaves in the most undignified manner possible, associating with Wyckoff and Sickles, with whom no lady would deign to speak; but she seems to be easily flattered. She is not a young woman by any means, but dresses like one.” Senator William P. Fessenden told his cousin that the First Lady “by common consent, is making both herself & her husband very ridiculous.” Philo S. Shelton, a Boston merchant and speculator, indignantly remarked that Lincoln “is a humbug & his wife worse [—] only think of such men as Wikoff & Gordon Bennett & Mrs. B[ennett] being the special guests of Mrs. Lincoln & of men placed in office thro[ugh] such influences.”
Source: Abraham Lincoln ∶ A Life ▫𓂃
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