In August 1861, a New York politico echoed Mrs. Child, expressing disgust with Mary Lincoln because at a time when “the country was in the throes of revolutionary travail she was coolly buying china and dresses in New York: and now that wounded men pant for Florence Nightingales in Washington she is relaxing at Long Branch [on the New Jersey shore] from—the cares of state.” She “is as meddling & injuriously officious as she is conceited & ill-bred,” according to a young Bostonian, Robert C. Winthrop, Jr. An antislavery clergyman, Henry W. Bellows, called Mary Lincoln “ambitious” and “vulgar.”
Source: Abraham Lincoln ∶ A Life ▫𓂃
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