Encounters
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Other siblings betrayed signs of mental instability. Mary’s eccentric, heavily tattooed half-brother David, who ran away from home at the age of 14, also mistreated Union prisoners. Stationed briefly at Libby Prison in Richmond as a captain in the Confederate army, David Todd was known as one of the most brutal officers in that grim facility. He slashed a POW with his saber and kicked the corpses of the Union dead, calling them damned abolitionists. In 1871, David died, supposedly of wounds sustained at Vicksburg, but some friends maintained that “he had been shot in a whore house brawl before he went to War—… and that this old wound had more to do with his early demise than the Yankee Minie [bullet].” Mary’s brother Levi, two years her senior, was described by his wife as an improvident drunkard with a “Cruel and inhuman manner.” He alienated family and acquaintances and died friendless in 1865. Mary’s “pugnacious, loud voiced” sister Ann, if not actually unbalanced, was “the most quick tempered and vituperative” of Robert Todd’s daughters. She was “usually in a temper.” Mary called Ann a woman who “possesses such a miserable disposition & so false a tongue” that “no one respects” her. Ann’s “tongue for so many years, has been considered ‘no slander’—and as a child & young girl, [she] could not be outdone in falsehood.… I grieve for those, who have to come in contact with her malice, yet even that, is so well understood, [that] the object of her wrath, generally rises, with good people, in proportion to her vindictiveness.” (When shown this assessment of her character, Ann replied with some justice: “Mary was writing about herself.”)
Source: Abraham Lincoln ∶ A Life ▫𓂃
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