Encounters
''votary'' ▫ᴱᴺ｜encounter｜ENC｜20260904152658-33-•
Although such evidence of Mary Todd’s attitude toward her family is not conclusive, it does suggest that she harbored a rage she was unable to vent directly. It also suggests that she might seek a surrogate father; indeed, she may have married Lincoln in part because she saw in him a benevolent paterfamilias who would indulge her and fill the void created in her life when Robert Smith Todd began a second family. More than a foot taller and nearly ten years Mary’s senior, he radiated the quality of being old. During Lincoln’s early years in Springfield, one observer said that the lanky attorney called to mind “the pictures I formerly saw of old Father Jupiter, bending down from the clouds, to see what was going on below,” especially when Lincoln conversed with young women at parties: just “as an agreeable smile of satisfaction graced the countenance of the old heathen god, as he perceived the incense rising up—so the face of L[incoln] was occasionally distorted into a grin as he succeeded in eliciting applause from some of the fair votaries by whom he was surrounded.” Among such “fair votaries” was Mary Todd, a young woman likely to be attracted to a man resembling Father Jupiter, a man who would take care of her like a kind father.
Source: Abraham Lincoln ∶ A Life ▫𓂃
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