She also refurbished the White House at great expense. Every public and private room was redecorated, new china was bought, and the bills mounted until Congress had to pass two additional appropriations to cover the costs. Abraham was angry over the spending, and Mary’s purchases of fine jewellery only deepened the trouble. She bought pieces on credit from Galt & Bro., and by the time of his death a large debt remained, later waived when much of the jewellery was returned. These details made her a target, but they also show a woman trying to impose order and splendour on a nation at war. Even her generosity was practical: she visited hospitals around Washington, bringing flowers and fruit to wounded soldiers and writing letters for them to send home.

The war came closer still in her own body. Mary suffered severe headaches throughout adulthood, and they worsened after a carriage accident in the White House years left her with a head injury in 1863. She endured mood swings, public outbursts, and long spells of depression, and later interpreters would speak of bipolar disorder or pernicious anaemia. Whatever the name, the misery was real. Her grief over Willie’s death in 1862 was so overwhelming that she stayed in bed for three weeks, too broken to attend his funeral or care for Tad. Abraham had to employ a nurse to look after her. In that same strained household, the President and First Lady struggled on as the war ground toward its end.

On 14 April 1865, the end seemed to be peace. Robert E. Lee had surrendered to Ulysses Grant only days before, and the President was waiting for news from Joseph E. Johnston in North Carolina. The morning papers had already announced that Abraham and Mary would attend the theatre that evening. Mary had a headache and wanted to stay home, but Abraham said they must go because the papers had printed it. So they went, and in the box at Ford’s Theatre the last words she ever heard from him were about Clara Harris: What will Miss Harris think of my hanging on to you so? He smiled and answered, She won’t think anything about it.

After the shot, the scene became a blur of blood, panic, and duty. Mary clung to Abraham as he lost consciousness, and when doctors carried him out she briefly composed herself long enough to hand Major Edwin Eliaphron Bedee the President’s private papers from his pockets. She followed Abraham across the street to the Petersen House, where the Cabinet was summoned, except William Seward, who had been attacked by Lewis Powell the same night. Henry Rathbone and Clara Harris remained in the dreadful orbit of the event, and Robert, the eldest son, sat with his father through the night into the morning of 15 April. At one point Edwin M. Stanton ordered Mary from the room because her grief was so ungoverned.

Abraham Lincoln died at 7:22 a.m. on 15 April 1865, at the age of 56, after about nine hours in a coma. Shortly before seven, Mary was allowed back to his bedside. She kissed him, called him every endearing name, and watched the breath grow quiet and the face grow calm. John Hay later wrote that a look of unspeakable peace came upon his worn features, and Maunsell Bradhurst Field and others remembered the same strange stillness. For Mary, though, the peace belonged to everyone else. Her husband was gone, and with him the life she had spent two decades helping to build.

The world answered her loss with sympathy. Letters arrived from across the globe, and Mary tried to reply to them herself. When she wrote to Queen Victoria, who had lost Prince Albert four years earlier, she thanked her for tender sympathy coming from a heart that could understand intense grief. It was a rare moment of common ground between two widowed women, one in Buckingham Palace and one in the wreckage of the White House. Yet sympathy did not mend the practical shape of her life. Abraham had left an estate of $80,000, enough for comfort, but Mary’s finances were never secure in her own mind, and public patience with her had already begun to thin.

She returned to Illinois and lived in Chicago with her sons, but the next years only deepened the sorrow. In 1868, with money worries pressing and her habits of spending still unstable, she advertised in the New York World for aid and even tried to sell personal effects at auction, shocking the public. That same year she and Tad went to Europe and settled in Frankfurt for several years, helped by the Seligman family, who paid for the voyage, sent money, and advocated for her. Also in 1868, her former dressmaker and confidante Elizabeth Keckley published Behind the Scenes, or, Thirty Years a Slave, and Four Years in the White House. The book offered valuable insight, but Mary saw it as betrayal, especially because letters had been printed. Today it remains an important source on the Lincoln household.

The loss of Tad in July 1871 hit her like a second funeral for the same life. He died at 18 at the Clifton House hotel in Chicago, and with him went the last child who had shared the deepest years of her widowhood. Robert, now a rising young Chicago lawyer, became alarmed by his mother’s behaviour. In March 1875, while she was visiting Jacksonville, Florida, she became convinced that Robert was deathly ill and rushed north, only to find him well. She also claimed that someone had tried to poison her on the train and that a wandering Jew had taken and returned her pocketbook. She wore black, spent money on clothes she never used, and carried $56,000 in government bonds sewn into her petticoats.

That same year brought the most humiliating public crisis of her life. Robert began proceedings to have her institutionalised, and on 20 May 1875 a jury committed her to a private asylum in Batavia, Illinois. After the trial she attempted suicide, going to several pharmacies and ordering enough laudanum to kill herself, but an alert pharmacist thwarted her and finally gave her a placebo. Three months later she planned her escape from Bellevue Place, smuggling letters to her lawyer James B. Bradwell and to Myra Bradwell, his wife and her friend, while also writing to the Chicago Times. Public embarrassment mounted, Robert’s motives were questioned, and the director of Bellevue concluded she was well enough to live with her sister Elizabeth in Springfield.

Mary was released to Elizabeth’s care and in 1876 was declared competent to manage her own affairs. The old breach with Robert remained raw, and the two did not see each other again until shortly before her death. She spent the next four years travelling in Europe and lived in Pau, France, but her health was failing. Severe cataracts dimmed her sight and may have made her more prone to falls. In 1879 she suffered spinal cord injuries in a fall from a stepladder. In 1881, after the assassination of President Garfield reopened debate about pensions for presidential families, she went to New York to lobby for an increase to her own pension, facing hostile press about her spending and finances. Congress eventually granted the increase, with an additional monetary gift.

In her last years she was confined to the Springfield home of Elizabeth Edwards, the sister who had first brought her to Illinois in 1839. On 15 July 1882, exactly eleven years after Tad’s death, Mary collapsed there, lapsed into a coma, and died the next morning of a stroke at the age of 63. Her funeral was held at First Presbyterian Church in Springfield, and she was buried in the Lincoln Tomb, the National Historic Landmark where Abraham and three younger sons also lie. The woman once blamed for extravagance and disorder ended in the family vault, sealed beside the President she had loved, supported, lost, and outlived.