Encounters
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Mary Todd’s youthful qualities may have appealed to Lincoln. A woman in Washington during the Civil War believed that the president saw in his wife, “despite her foibles and sometimes her puerileness, just what he needed.” Those foibles included “natural want of tact,” “deficiency in the sense of the fitness of things,” “blundering outspokenness,” and “impolitic disregard of diplomatic considerations.” That very puerileness was perhaps what attracted him to her; with his deep paternal streak, he enjoyed children and child surrogates. Mary Todd fit that role well; as Helen Nicolay put it, Lincoln’s “attitude toward his wife had something of the paternal in it, almost as though she were a child, under his protection.” Thus, when Lincoln proposed to Mary Todd, he did so because, in all likelihood, he believed she wanted him to do so and because he desired a “child-wife.”
Source: Abraham Lincoln ∶ A Life ▫𓂃
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