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00:00The American Pronunciation Guide Presents «How to Pronounce Abraham Lincoln»
00:16Late one August evening in 1864,
00:19Abraham Lincoln was riding from the White House to the soldiers' home,
00:23where he and Mary were spending their third summer.
00:30Lincoln was still convinced he was going to be defeated in the presidential election,
00:35now just weeks away.
01:00Someone had fired a shot, Lincoln told his wife.
01:10But it must have been an accident,
01:12maybe some hunter emptying his gun before going home.
01:16Mary Lincoln was terrified.
01:22Mr. Lincoln's life is always exposed.
01:28No one knows what it is to live in constant dread of some fearful tragedy.
01:33The President has been warned so often that I tremble for him.
01:37I have a presentiment that he will meet with a sudden and violent end.
01:43THE END
02:00In spite of the war, the presidential campaign of 1864 went ahead with all the usual excitement.
02:22It's a full-blown American political campaign,
02:28complete with barbecues, fireworks, parades.
02:32It looked almost like the nation hadn't fallen apart.
02:44With the survival of the nation still in the balance,
02:47Lincoln's faith in democracy remained unshaken.
02:52It's the people's business.
02:54The election is in their hands.
02:56If they turn their backs to the fire and get scorched in the rear,
03:00they'll find they've got to sit on the blisters.
03:03Lincoln believed that the people would vote against him
03:07unless his army began to win clear-cut victories.
03:10Then, on September 2nd, 1864, he got a message from William Tecumseh Sherman.
03:18It would turn the election around.
03:24Atlanta is ours and fairly won, it said.
03:29Everybody sees the fall of Atlanta as signaling that the Confederacy is dying.
03:35People can see that the war is winding down.
03:39And if they will simply stay the course a little bit longer,
03:42that victory will be had.
03:48Election day, November 8th.
03:52That evening, while Mary Lincoln waited nervously inside the White House,
03:56Lincoln and his secretary splashed across to the War Department to follow the returns.
04:02The first results gave Lincoln Philadelphia and Baltimore.
04:08Lincoln asked that the encouraging news be sent over to Mrs. Lincoln.
04:13She, he said, is more anxious than I.
04:17As more and more good news rattled in, Lincoln and a few friends settled into a quiet celebratory supper.
04:23The president, his secretary remembered, went awkwardly and hospitably to work,
04:29shoveling out the fried oysters.
04:42Lincoln carried every state but three,
04:44and won a popular majority of nearly half a million votes.
04:48Four years earlier, Lincoln had been little known and often laughed at.
05:03Now, with a clear mandate to fight on to victory, he resolved to fight another battle as well.
05:10The Emancipation Proclamation had freed only those slaves living in rebel territory.
05:19Lincoln wanted an amendment to the Constitution banning slavery forever from every part of the United States.
05:26If Negroes stake their lives for us, they must be prompted by the strongest motive, even the promise of freedom.
05:43There have been men who have proposed to me to return to slavery, the black warriors of Port Hudson.
05:54I should be damned in time and eternity for so doing.
05:58The world shall know that I will keep my faith to friends and enemies, come what will.
06:04Lincoln was determined that Congress passed the amendment before Inauguration Day, as a symbol of national unity.
06:17He was certain of victory in the Senate, but first he needed a two-thirds majority in the House of Representatives.
06:24Lincoln put all the powers of his office and of his recent re-election behind this amendment.
06:31He called congressmen into the White House, and then he began arm-twisting.
06:36Probably promising some kind of federal patronage position, post-mastership, customs office.
06:44Basically what he did was to work the congressmen one by one by one until he got enough of a majority,
06:50and then he persuaded even some Democrats to say,
06:53look, this is going to be done next year, if not this, let's get on with it.
06:56By three votes, the two-thirds majority is achieved.
07:06And the House chamber just breaks into a wild celebration.
07:13Congressmen got up and cheered.
07:17The galleries cheered, with, by the way, blacks in the congressional galleries for the first time.
07:27It was one of the greatest occasions in the history of Congress.
07:33And the House, in honor of what they called this great historic occasion, voted to take the rest of the day off.
07:39The Thirteenth Amendment pronounced a death sentence for slavery.
07:47Ratification by three-quarters of the states seemed assured.
07:51The president was so pleased, he insisted on signing the resolution,
07:57even though his signature was not legally required.
07:59The great job has ended.
08:00I congratulate myself, the country, and the whole world upon this great moral victory.
08:13For all of the hedging that he did about the Emancipation Proclamation, about black troops,
08:20it's ultimately Lincoln's skill and Lincoln's commitment that leads to the Thirteenth Amendment.
08:30That night, a White House servant remembered,
08:34the president slept as he had not slept in months.
08:37With the fall of Atlanta, the nature of the war changed.
09:00Sherman began burning homes and destroying crops as he marched through Georgia toward Savannah and the sea.
09:07It became a very different kind of war.
09:16War against civilians and not just soldiers.
09:26War waged on southern farms.
09:29Take from them what they have and feed your own troops with it.
09:33But what you can't take, burn and destroy.
09:38Lincoln comes to the view that this is the only way the South can be conquered.
09:44And he saw very clearly that we can't conquer the minds of these people.
09:50And the only thing we can do is make war so terrible that they'll eventually give up.
09:58While Sherman cut a path through Georgia, General Philip Sheridan stormed through Virginia's fertile Shenandoah Valley,
10:09plundering farms, torching barns, tearing up rail lines.
10:13At the same time, Northern troops began to come upon Union prisoners of war.
10:24Many in desperate condition because the rebels had run out of food to feed them.
10:28Lincoln himself carried a photograph of one of them, ready to show it to anyone who objected to the harsh treatment his commanders were now meeting out to the South.
10:43As the suffering continued, Lincoln read and re-read the tragedies of Shakespeare and turned to the Bible.
10:59He had a Bible on his desk at all times.
11:05He knew it almost by heart.
11:09And during these terrible months, he read the Bible more carefully, more frequently than ever.
11:16On one occasion, Elizabeth Keckley saw him reading the Bible.
11:23And she found an excuse to go behind the sofa and to see what he was reading.
11:28And he was reading Job.
11:30Inauguration Day, March 4th, 1865.
11:49All the bloodshed, all the agony.
11:53Lincoln turned them over and over in his mind.
11:56At Gettysburg, he had given the fighting a higher purpose.
12:01Now, in his second inaugural address, he would try to find an explanation for the last four years of pain and suffering.
12:10Lincoln's second inaugural address was personally meaningful for him because it matters to him to explain things.
12:19It matters to find the right words.
12:22But it also mattered for the country.
12:26This is why we had a war.
12:30As Lincoln began to speak, the sun broke through the clouds.
12:37Four years ago, all thoughts were anxiously directed to an impending civil war.
12:42All dreaded it.
12:46All sought to avert it.
12:49And the war came.
12:52Victory seemed close now.
12:55And he might have been expected to exult.
12:59Instead, he questioned.
13:00Both sides read the same Bible and pray to the same God.
13:13And each invokes his aid against the other.
13:17It may seem strange that any man should dare ask a just God's assistance in wringing their bread from the sweat of other men's faces.
13:28But let us judge not, that we be not judged.
13:33The prayers of both could not be answered.
13:36That of neither has been answered fully.
13:39The Almighty has his own purposes.
13:41Lincoln felt that God had given both the North and South this bloody retribution for the sins of the nation.
13:55The sin of the nation was 250 years of enslavement of African Americans.
14:02And God was punishing them for this.
14:05Fondly do we hope.
14:08Fervently do we pray.
14:11That this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away.
14:15Yet if God wills that it continue.
14:19Until all the wealth piled by the bondman's 250 years of unrequited toil shall be sunk.
14:26And until every drop of blood drawn with a lash shall be paid by another drawn with a sword.
14:35As was said 3,000 years ago, so still it must be said.
14:41The judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.
14:45It is the Old Testament of a just and righteous God who wreaks on his enemies what they deserve.
14:55And this, in some sense, Lincoln found very consoling.
14:59If this is what God wills, it is not just what I, Abraham Lincoln, will.
15:05I am carrying out his wishes in seeing that this war is prosecuted to a very bitter end.
15:11He always got the sense with Lincoln that he was wrestling with his own guilt.
15:22That he was wrestling with death.
15:25The death, the destruction, the apocalyptic nature of this war is incomprehensible.
15:34He has to turn this over to God.
15:42When God wills that it ends, it will end and not tell them.
15:49The second inaugural address is a spiritual thing.
15:53But it is also a call for unity.
15:57We are almost there. We are almost there.
15:59You know, God has brought us this far.
16:02Stay the course, and when we are done, let us not exact recriminations on one another.
16:10The Union remained sacred to Lincoln.
16:15He wanted once again to make it whole, to bring the South back.
16:18But he knew it would not be easy.
16:23Four years of bloody war had left many Northerners raw with anger, bitter and vengeful.
16:32Even his own wife spoke privately of revenge.
16:35Mary Lincoln could not forgive the South for starting a war that had fractured the Union,
16:42turned her own brothers into her enemies, and threatened to overwhelm her husband.
16:47Mary wants to somehow make up for all that she has lost, and the only way to do that is to punish the South.
16:54She can't see what Lincoln has come to.
16:56She's taken a different path during the war than he has, and they both come out sadly in very different places.
17:06With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right, as God gives us to see the right,
17:16let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation's wounds,
17:24to care for him who shall have borne the battle, and for his widow, and his orphan,
17:31to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and a lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.
17:46As Lincoln finished his speech, he looked out over the enormous crowd.
17:57Standing alongside whites were African Americans, who had by now come to see the President as something like a savior.
18:06Lincoln must have been touched as he looked out to see the large number of blacks watching, listening, honoring him.
18:16Those were his constituents, you see, just as others were there as his constituents.
18:26And I think that by this time, having gone through what he went through,
18:30I'm not certain at all that he was making a great distinction between this group of constituents and the other.
18:36That evening, at the inaugural reception, police tried to bar the way of a black man who insisted on being admitted.
18:46Lincoln told them to let the man pass.
18:48Frederick Douglass was the first African American ever to attend an inaugural reception, and the President greeted him warmly.
19:00What had he thought of the speech?
19:03Mr. Lincoln Douglass replied,
19:05That was a sacred effort.
19:20On March 23rd, the Lincolns boarded the River Queen at Washington and set out for Grant's headquarters at City Point, Virginia, just 20 miles from the Confederate capital.
19:30The President was worn out, but he wanted to visit the army that now seemed so close to victory.
19:42Mary insisted on going too.
19:45She needed to be near him.
19:46She lived in fear, she wrote a friend, that the deep waters through which we have passed will overwhelm me.
20:00Three days later, Mary and Mrs. Grant were scheduled to join their husbands at a grand review of the Union Army.
20:06As their carriage bumped slowly along deeply rutted roads, jolting the two women, Mary grew more and more agitated.
20:16Her pent-up anxieties and closely guarded fears were about to explode for all the world to see.
20:23By the time Mary reached the parade ground, her husband was already riding down the line of troops.
20:39Mrs. Edward Ord, the commanding general's wife, was at his side, in Mary's place.
20:46Mary erupted in fury, loudly accusing the innocent woman of flirting with her husband.
20:54Mrs. Ord burst into tears.
20:57There was not the slightest hint that the President was flirting with Mrs. Ord.
21:01It is true, however, that Mary worried about flirtations even when they didn't exist.
21:06Mary was an incorrigible flirt, and I think she projected her own tendencies, which were just to make her feel better, make her feel younger, perfectly innocent.
21:13But she projected those fantasies in dead seriousness onto other women.
21:22Then Mary shouted at the President himself, demanding that he remove the woman's husband from his command.
21:29Mrs. Grant tried to restrain her, but Mary was out of control.
21:34It was the first really open public display of their differences that they had ever permitted themselves since he became President.
21:50At dinner on board the steamer that evening, Mary resumed her tirade.
21:54Embarrassed guests tried not to look.
21:59Lincoln bore it, one remembered, as Christ might have done, with an expression of pain and sadness that cut one to the heart, but with supreme calmness and dignity.
22:11He called her mother with his old-time plainness, till she turned on him like a tigress, and then he walked away, hiding that noble, ugly face that we might not catch the full expression of his misery.
22:27The Lincolns stayed on at city point while the President conferred with his commanders.
22:37He ordered Grant and Sherman not to let the rebels get away this time.
22:42But he also urged them to offer the most generous terms of surrender.
22:46Let them all go, officers and all.
22:52I want submission and no more bloodshed.
22:55I want no one punished.
22:58We want those people to return to their allegiance to the Union.
23:05After her humiliating outburst, Mary Lincoln did not leave her cabin for three days.
23:11The President explained she wasn't feeling well.
23:13Then he sent her home to Washington.
23:17She later claimed her husband had had a dream that the White House had burned down, and had asked her to go and see if it were true.
23:29Lincoln remained behind.
23:31He did not want to miss the all-out attack on Petersburg that was about to begin.
23:36He hoped it would be the final battle of the war.
23:43On April 2nd, at 4.20 in the morning, while Lincoln watched and listened from city point, Grant hurled his army against the Confederate trenches.
23:58The Rebel lines broke.
24:03Among the dead left behind were boys as young as 14.
24:12Richmond now lay undefended, and Union troops marched into the city.
24:18Lee headed west with what was left of his army.
24:22But this time, the Federals were right behind him.
24:25The next day, Lincoln was in high spirits as he and his son, Tad, headed up the James River to Richmond.
24:38He could not resist having a look at what had once been the capital of the Confederacy.
24:43It's a kind of a funny expedition.
24:46They start on a real ship, and then it has to be diverted.
24:50So then they put him on a tugboat, and that pulls him a little bit further, and something happens to it.
24:55And so they put him in a little rowboat and row him into Richmond.
24:58He tells a friend that I'm reminded of a story from my patronage days of the man who came to me and said,
25:08I want to be Secretary of State.
25:10And I said, I'm sorry, that job's already taken.
25:12Well, he said, you could make me ambassador to England.
25:15No, that job's already taken.
25:17Well, he said, you could make me consul to France.
25:19No, that job's already taken.
25:21Well, to the man, you could at least give me a pair of old-used trousers.
25:24It pays to be humbled, said Lincoln, in his rowboat as he arrives in Richmond.
25:54Much of the Confederate capital lay in ruins, destroyed by retreating rebels and looted by hungry mobs.
26:11As Lincoln made his way through the smoky streets, hundreds of former slaves surrounded him.
26:17Some knelt at his feet.
26:20Lincoln was embarrassed.
26:22Don't kneel to me, he said.
26:24You must kneel to God only, and thank him for your liberty.
26:32While Tad waited outside, Lincoln entered the abandoned official residence of Jefferson Davis.
26:38For a time, he sits in Jefferson Davis's chair, and he sees finally total victory within his command.
26:48This was the triumphal scene of his life.
26:53Five days later, on the evening of April 9th, his Secretary of War brought him the telegram he had been waiting for.
27:00General Lee surrendered the Army of Northern Virginia this morning, it read.
27:08Four years of civil war had ended.
27:11The crowds around the house have been immense.
27:12In the midst of the bands playing, they break forth into singing.
27:13The crowds around the house have been immense.
27:14In the midst of the bands playing, they break forth into singing.
27:15The crowds around the house have been immense.
27:16In the midst of the bands playing, they break forth into singing.
27:17The crowds around the house have been immense.
27:34In the midst of the bands playing, they break forth into singing.
27:37In the midst of the bands playing, they break forth into singing.
27:46If the close of that terrible war has left some of our hearthstones very, very desolate,
27:52God has been, as ever, kind and merciful in the midst of our heavy afflictions.
27:59It's a day of tremendous rejoicing.
28:02There are bonfires, there are fireworks, there are rallies, there are songs.
28:07And people crowd up to the White House, and they want to congratulate the president.
28:15A mighty cheer went up when Lincoln appeared.
28:18Surprising everyone, he called upon the Marine Band to play the unofficial anthem of the Confederacy.
28:27While Tad frantically waved a captured rebel flag from an upstairs window.
28:33I've always thought Dixie one of the best tunes I've ever heard.
28:37Our adversaries over the way attempted to appropriate it.
28:41I presented the question to the Attorney General, and he gave it, as his legal opinion, that it is our lawful prize.
28:48The next evening, a happy crowd gathered on the White House grounds.
28:58With Mary watching from a nearby window, Lincoln stepped forward to speak.
29:03Illuminated by a single flickering candle, his face was pale, Elizabeth Keckley recalled, but his soul was flashing through his eyes.
29:16As Tad knelt out of sight at his father's feet to catch each page of the speech, Lincoln began to read.
29:25Reuniting our country is fraught with great difficulty.
29:32Unlike the case of a war between independent nations, there is no authorized organ for us to treat with.
29:39No one man has authority to give up the rebellion for any other man.
29:46And we, the loyal people, differ among ourselves as to the mode, manner, and means of Reconstruction.
29:55It's not what the crowd wanted.
29:58They wanted a celebration of how great we are, what wonderful things have happened, how everything is going to be happy from now on out.
30:06Instead, Lincoln gives them a carefully reasoned speech about Reconstruction, of how we're going to rebuild this union.
30:14With the North deeply divided, as to how to reunite the country, and how the former slaves were to be treated, Lincoln wanted to steer a cautious course.
30:25He practices the art of the possible, just as he had moved step by step on emancipation.
30:32That's what he was doing, I think, on Reconstruction and on the question that became central to Reconstruction, what was then called Negro suffrage.
30:39Lincoln told the crowd that he favored giving the vote to some freedmen, the very intelligent, he said, and those who serve our cause as soldiers.
30:51No other president had ever dared suggest that any African Americans be allowed to vote.
30:57He thought that blacks would become a kind of comfortable farming class in the South that could get along in a reconstructed Southern society.
31:08Their future would depend on themselves and their own exertions.
31:12And you have to remember that he thought, after all, I, Abraham Lincoln, have been a self-made man.
31:18These blacks can become self-made men, too.
31:25Listening in the crowd that evening was a young Confederate sympathizer who believed fervently that America was formed for the white, not for the black man.
31:35Lincoln's talking nigger citizenship, he muttered to a companion.
31:42That is the last speech he will ever make.
31:50John Wilkes Booth was a well-known actor.
31:53Lincoln had admired his performance in Shakespeare's Richard III and once said he would like to meet him.
32:00Two nights later, Lincoln had a dream.
32:15He seemed, he said later, to be in some singular, indescribable vessel,
32:21moving with great rapidity towards an indefinite shore.
32:25It was a familiar dream.
32:31He had had it before the great victories at Antietam and Gettysburg.
32:35Always, he said, it meant good news.
32:38The next afternoon, April 14th, was Good Friday,
32:53and Mary and Abraham Lincoln went for a carriage ride.
33:13The war was over.
33:16At last, the weary couple could relax and rejoice.
33:19They sat and talked about the future.
33:28And Lincoln said,
33:30Between the loss of our darling Willie and the war,
33:33we have both been very miserable.
33:35We have to be more cheerful.
33:37And all the misery was going to go away,
33:39and they would be happy again.
33:44Dear husband, Mary told him,
33:45You almost startled me by your great cheerfulness.
33:52She felt wonderful after this carriage ride.
33:56And that happiness,
33:58that pleasure that all the horror was over,
34:01was with them the night they went to the theater.
34:03That evening, the Lincolns attended Ford's Theater
34:16with a young major named Henry Rathbone
34:19and his fiancée, Clara Harris.
34:25The play was a knockabout farce
34:27called Our American Cousin.
34:28The president seemed to enjoy it.
34:42Mary nestled against her husband.
34:46What will Miss Harris think
34:48of my hanging on to you so?
34:50She won't think anything about it.
35:15But then we are now at Rome,
35:18where she left us from.
35:20As Lincoln fell forward, Mary screamed.
35:30John Wilkes Booth had shot the President of the United States.
35:39The unconscious President was carried across 10th Street into a rooming house.
35:45Mary sat by his bedside, imploring him to answer her.
35:50To take her with him, not to leave her alone.
35:58At 7.22 on the morning of April 15, 1865, Abraham Lincoln died.
36:07Others would now have to try to bind up the nation's wounds.
36:11Lincolns' body rested in the East Room, where the Lincolns had so often received their guests.
36:29Mary remained upstairs in her bedroom, unable to see anyone,
36:33unable to attend her husband's funeral, inconsolable.
36:39Elizabeth Keckley stayed with her, listening helplessly to what she called
36:44the unearthly shrieks, the terrible convulsions.
36:48She was in a daze.
36:51She couldn't even speak.
36:52She couldn't even communicate.
36:53There was no getting close to her grief.
36:55Tad tried to comfort his mother, too, but her loud weeping frightened him.
37:04Don't cry so, Mama, he begged her.
37:06Don't cry, or you will make me cry.
37:10You will break my heart.
37:11On Wednesday, April 19, Lincoln's coffin was carried from the White House to the Capitol,
37:26past government buildings draped in black.
37:28Lincoln lay in state all night, and all the following day, as long lines of citizens shuffled slowly by.
37:44I don't think there's ever been such an outpouring of emotion in American history.
37:50Lincoln is shot within days after Lee's surrender.
37:54Victory is had, and the man who represents everything that that victory symbolizes is struck down.
38:06On April 21, Lincoln's final journey began.
38:14The morning went on for 16 more days, as his coffin was slowly borne home to Springfield,
38:21along the same tracks that had carried him to Washington.
38:35Huge, grieving crowds received the cortege in cities all across the country.
38:40One senses that the country understands that when he dies, their anchor has been taken away.
38:57And they realize that something very special has passed out of their lives,
39:01and their reaction is extraordinary.
39:04So intensely felt, so deeply expressed.
39:07He was just a simple man with simple parents,
39:17and he made it all the way to the President of the United States.
39:25He freed three and a half million people
39:29who had been born into permanent bondage.
39:33He had an abundance of patience,
39:39an iron strength, and will, and a tenacity.
39:44He was the great hero who saved the Union.
39:47A Brooklyn poet named Walt Whitman,
40:02who had often paused to watch as the President passed along the streets of Washington,
40:08captured the people's sorrow and his own.
40:10When lilac's last in the dooryard bloomed,
40:17and the great star early drooped in the western sky in the night,
40:22I mourned,
40:23and yet shall mourn with ever-returning spring.
40:29Here, coffin that slowly passes,
40:32I give you my sprig of lilac.
40:34On May 3rd, the funeral train arrived in Springfield.
40:45The next day, at Oak Ridge Cemetery on the outskirts of town,
41:02Abraham Lincoln was laid to rest at last,
41:06alongside his sons Eddie and Willie.
41:09Mary Lincoln did not accompany her husband's funeral train to Springfield.
41:24She was unable to leave her room.
41:28For over a month, she remained there.
41:31Then, heavily veiled and dressed in black,
41:34she left the White House for the last time.
41:39It was so unlike the day when the body of the President
41:43was born from the hall in grand and solemn state,
41:47Elizabeth Keckley remembered.
41:50Now, the wife of the President was leaving the White House,
41:54and there was scarcely a friend to tell her goodbye.
41:59The silence was almost painful.
42:01That same day, the mighty Union Army marched up Pennsylvania Avenue
42:18in celebration of its victory,
42:21while Mary Lincoln with her sons Robert and Tad
42:26boarded a train and headed for Illinois.
42:28Unable to face the memories that would have surrounded her in Springfield,
42:35she remained secluded in a Chicago hotel
42:38and gave herself over to grief.
42:43Day by day,
42:44I miss my beloved husband more and more.
42:48How I am to pass through life without him,
42:51who loved us so dearly,
42:52it is impossible for me to say.
42:57I must patiently await the hour
42:59when God's love shall place me by his side again,
43:03for I have almost become blind with weeping.
43:07Her grief became her chief preoccupation.
43:12She reminded herself of it constantly.
43:14She would not let herself forget it.
43:16She would not let her friends forget it.
43:19She couldn't believe what had happened to her,
43:21because you must understand
43:22that not only did she lose the man she truly loved,
43:25her great partner in life,
43:27but the man who had made her
43:29the First Lady of the Land,
43:31the man who gave her status,
43:33the man who gave her importance and identity.
43:35As Mary mourned,
43:47the life of the man she had loved
43:48was already becoming the stuff of myth and legend.
43:54No American president had ever been assassinated.
43:58And in a country in which 600,000 men
44:02had died in just four years,
44:04the death of this one man became transcendent.
44:14Lincoln was soon memorialized
44:16as a hero as great as George Washington himself.
44:20Mary had to have basked in his reflected glory.
44:32And it had to have been part of what helped sustain her.
44:38But her life after his death
44:39is an unremitting series of pain and suffering and tragedy.
44:46For six years,
44:56Tad Lincoln was his mother's constant companion
44:59and only source of comfort
45:01as Mary moved restlessly from rented room to rented room.
45:06Then, in 1871,
45:12Tad contracted tuberculosis
45:14and died.
45:18He was only 18.
45:22Mary's fragile grip on reality
45:25finally slipped away.
45:26She began to wander hotel corridors in her nightgown,
45:39was certain someone was trying to poison her,
45:43complained that an Indian spirit
45:45was removing wires from her eyes,
45:48and continued her frantic spending,
45:51purchasing yard after yard of elegant drapery
45:55when she had no windows in which to hang it.
46:04Then, on the evening of March 12, 1875,
46:09Mary Lincoln hurried into a Western Union office in Florida
46:12and sent a telegram to her only remaining son, Robert.
46:17My dearly beloved son, Robert T. Lincoln,
46:21rouse yourself
46:22and live for my sake.
46:26All I have is yours from this hour.
46:29I am praying every moment
46:30for your life to be spared
46:32to your mother.
46:37Carrying thousands of dollars in securities
46:40sewn into her dress,
46:41Mary hurried to Chicago
46:43to be at her son's side.
46:46She was convinced
46:47that he was dying.
46:54But Robert was perfectly well.
46:57He was sadly accustomed
46:59to his mother's irrational behavior,
47:01but now he was convinced
47:03that she had lost her mind
47:05and went to court
47:07to have her committed.
47:08Mary was given no chance
47:12to prepare a defense.
47:13It took just three hours
47:15for the jury to find her insane.
47:18The question one asks about Mary
47:21is, was she crazy?
47:24Was she a schizophrenic?
47:25You don't just develop schizophrenia
47:28in late middle age
47:30around the death of a child.
47:34But you can hallucinate
47:36and be psychotic
47:37without being schizophrenic.
47:39her life was an unending series
47:43of losses.
47:46And at a certain point,
47:49she broke.
47:52Mary found the verdict
47:54so painful
47:55she tried to kill herself
47:57by swallowing poison.
47:58She was committed
48:03to Bellevue Place,
48:04a private sanitarium
48:06for disturbed
48:06but well-to-do women
48:08in Batavia, Illinois,
48:09where she was a model patient.
48:13After three months,
48:14she was released.
48:15She was well-treated,
48:19she was listened to,
48:21and she could calm herself
48:23sufficiently
48:23to return
48:25to being fragile
48:28and troubled
48:29but not being psychotic.
48:33But she turned
48:34on her son Robert,
48:35the man who had committed her.
48:38She felt indignant
48:41and infuriated.
48:43She just couldn't understand
48:43why he would do this to her.
48:46And she never really forgave him.
48:57Mary Lincoln had lost everyone
48:59she ever really cared about.
49:02Eddie,
49:05Willie,
49:07her husband,
49:11Tad.
49:13all taken from her.
49:19And Robert,
49:20her last surviving son,
49:23she now rode out of her life.
49:34Mary Lincoln lived
49:35for six more years,
49:38wandering aimlessly
49:39from city to city.
49:40In 1882,
49:47tired and ill,
49:49she returned
49:49to her sister's home
49:51in Springfield
49:51and was given
49:53her old bedroom
49:54above the parlor
49:55in which she had married
49:56Abraham Lincoln
49:5740 years before.
50:04She was 64,
50:06nearly blind now,
50:08and partially paralyzed
50:10from a fall.
50:13She was careful
50:14to sleep on one side
50:15of the bed,
50:16she said,
50:17because she wanted
50:18to leave a place
50:19for her husband.
50:23Time does not
50:24soften my grief,
50:27nor can I ever be
50:28reconciled
50:29to my loss
50:30until the grave
50:33closes over
50:34the remembrance
50:35and I am again
50:37reunited with him.
50:42At 8.15
50:43on the night
50:44of July 15,
50:461882,
50:48Mary Todd Lincoln
50:49died.
50:52After 17 years
50:54of waiting,
50:55she could at last
50:56rest in peace
50:57alongside her sons
50:59and her husband.
51:13In the years
51:14that followed,
51:15Mary Lincoln
51:16was largely forgotten.
51:20Abraham Lincoln,
51:22the frontier farmer's
51:24son,
51:25the prairie lawyer,
51:26the shrewd politician
51:28and stern commander-in-chief,
51:31became America's
51:33secular saint.
51:47His home
51:48in Springfield
51:49became something
51:50like a shrine.
51:51and it became
52:07hard to believe
52:08that a real
52:09flesh-and-blood couple
52:10once lived here,
52:13raised their sons,
52:16quarreled,
52:18mourned,
52:19and loved
52:21one another.
52:22And loved one another.