Mary Todd Lincoln pushed Abe into presidency, may have hastened his murder
“An American Marriage” (Pegasus), out now. “Lincoln may never have become president if his wife had not turbocharged the restless engine of his ambition,” Burlingame writes. And, he reveals, Mary’s madness would also open the door to her husband’s assassin in 1865. Born in 1818, Mary Todd grew up in material comfort yet called her childhood “desolate.” Six years old when her mother died, she felt rejected by her merchant-politician father and the stepmother he quickly married. “She came to think of herself as unloved and unlovable,” Burlingame writes. “Out of those feelings, it would appear, grew a hunger for .