Herndon, put it, “a burning, scorching hell.” “An American Marriage” forcefully argues this thesis in a series of lively chapters designed to discredit the possibility that the Lincoln marriage was happy, functional or loving. But Michael Burlingame, a leading expert on Abraham Lincoln and a professor of Lincoln studies at the University of Illinois at Springfield, believes this sympathy is misplaced and has obscured a central truth about Lincoln: that his home life was, as Lincoln’s law partner, William H. Most scholars have approached Mary Lincoln’s shortcomings with compassion, excusing all but the worst of her sins on account of her traumas and mental illness. The Untold Story of Abraham Lincoln and Mary Todd can be expected to be more than gossip. The author of a two volume Lincoln bio that seemed to leave no anecdote on the cutting room floor, this new book AN AMERICAN MARRIAGE: Michael Burlingame has written a full-blown history of their marriage. No major biography of Abraham fails to have an opinion of Mary and their marriage. Abe Lincoln and Mary Todd were the sort of power couple we now recognize in FDR and Eleanor or Bill and Hil.
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