Mary Todd Lincoln had the misfortune of being the most unpopular first lady in United States history. Not only was she constantly criticized for her every action, she also suffered the loss of two young children, and witnessed the murder of her beloved husband. Mary’s struggles with her mental health were splashed across newspapers, articles accusing her of lavish spending, and daring to simply show grief in public, while millions of people lost their loved ones in the midst of an aggressive, bloody and expensive war.

No one could envy the life that Mary Todd Lincoln led. She experienced not only three deaths of her four children, she also witnessed her husband’s murder. Mary spent the rest of her life after Lincoln’s death, desperately trying to avoid the sorrow that weighed her down and caused her to feel hopeless and lost. Even turning to her last surviving son, Robert wasn’t helping.  He did his best to make her comfortable, but at the end of the day, her mental illness caused him to seriously fear that she was going to harm herself irrevocably, and so he put her into a mental institution. Mary wasn’t to take this lying down though, and she did everything in her power to gain her freedom from that situation and was successful. Mary focused a lot of her energy on spiritualism, finding comfort in looking into her past, attempting to speak with her dead sons or husband.