Virtue scores
Review
SECTION ONE For 160 years, Mary Todd Lincoln has occupied a fixed role in American memory: the difficult, possibly unstable wife who embarrassed her husband, overspent on White House furnishings during wartime, and scandalized Washington society before descending into a conservatorship her own son engineered. Lois Romano's biography argues that this portrait is a fabrication assembled by political enemies, a hostile press, and the systematic erasure of a woman whose intelligence and influence Abraham Lincoln himself relied upon. Romano draws on letters, congressional testimony, and period journalism to show that the charges against Mary Todd -- disloyalty, financial corruption, mental incompetence -- were applied selectively, often by men who had their own reasons to diminish her. The book is written for general readers who know Lincoln well and know almost nothing about the woman beside him, and it asks a single uncomfortable question: what happens when the historical record is shaped by people who needed her to be guilty? SECTION TWO - **Created**: Romano's central argument rests on an implicit claim about irreducible human dignity. Mary Todd Lincoln is treated by the historical tradition as a problem to be managed rather than a person to be understood; Romano insists on restoring her as a subject -- a woman with specific political knowledge, personal convictions, and a formed identity that preceded and survived her husband's fame. This is the anthropological move the CCMMP calls the imago Dei: the refusal to reduce a person to her public uses or public failures. - **Fallen**: The suffering Romano documents is not abstract. After the assassination, Mary Todd watched her husband die beside her, was immediately displaced from the White House, was publicly accused of stealing government property, and spent her remaining years in financial precarity and social isolation. The book traces how the disordered exercise of public power -- by politicians, journalists, and eventually her son Robert -- compounded her grief into a condition that looked to contemporaries like madness. The fallen condition here is not primarily Mary Todd's; it belongs to the mechanisms that punished her grief. - **Fallen (concupiscence in the observer)**: Romano does not ignore Mary Todd's own disorders. Her compulsive spending, her volcanic rages, her political meddling, and her paranoid episodes are documented without evasion. From a CCMMP standpoint, these read as disordered passions -- concupiscence operating in a person whose emotional formation was never stable and whose losses were objectively catastrophic -- rather than as evidence of moral depravity, which is how the 19th-century record treated them. - **Redeemed**: Romano's account of redemption is secular: posthumous historical correction rather than interior transformation. Still, the act of writing such a biography participates in the virtue of justice-just-correction -- the measured, evidence-based defense of a person wrongly maligned. Readers encounter, however implicitly, the idea that truth eventually reasserts itself over consensus, which is a form of hope. - **Prudence (memory)**: The book is an exercise in what Aquinas identifies as the integral part of prudence called memory -- the disciplined recovery of past experience to correct present judgment. Romano asks readers to hold two accounts of the same woman simultaneously and to weigh the sources behind each. That is a training in practical wisdom, not merely historical curiosity. SECTION THREE The retrieved passages surface two genuine conversation partners. Carnegie's account of Lincoln himself[^1] -- the president who almost never criticized anyone, who responded to harsh words about Southerners with 'they are just what we would be under similar circumstances' -- throws Romano's subject into relief: the charitable Lincoln of popular memory was shaped partly by contrast with the caricature of his wife, and Romano's project implicitly asks what Lincoln's own charity would require us to extend to her. Lewis's[^2] observation in *Mere Christianity* that 'every one says forgiveness is a lovely idea, until they have something to forgive' applies with some pressure to the book's readers: the historical condemnation of Mary Todd was often performed by people who felt genuinely wronged by her, and Romano does not ask us to pretend otherwise -- she asks whether the punishment fit the offense. ## References 1. Carnegie, Dale (1936). *How to Win Friends and Influence People*. Chapter on Lincoln and criticism. -- "Lincoln, 'with malice toward none, with charity for all,' held his peace." 2. Lewis, C.S. (1952). *Mere Christianity*. Chapter 7, Forgiveness. -- "Every one says forgiveness is a lovely idea, until they have something to forgive."
✓ Strengths
- ✓Romano restores the dignity of a woman systematically stripped of her public standing, treating Mary Todd Lincoln as a person whose grief, intelligence, and political acuity deserve historical accounting rather than dismissal.
- ✓The biography takes seriously the psychic cost of sustained public contempt -- Mary Todd's documented anxiety, sleeplessness, and erratic behavior after the assassination -- as a coherent response to catastrophic loss, not mere pathology.
- ✓By reconstructing the specific accusations leveled against her (war profiteering, disloyalty, extravagance) and placing them against primary sources, Romano practices the virtue of justice-truthfulness in a way most Lincoln-era biographies have withheld from her subject.
- ✓The book implicitly trains the reader in prudence-memory: revisiting received historical verdicts and asking what was omitted, who had reason to suppress it, and what the record actually shows.
- ✓Romano's rehabilitation project participates in the broader Catholic instinct that every human person, however publicly disgraced, retains an irreducible dignity that no crowd consensus can cancel.
⚠ Considerations
- ⚠The book's framework is secular-historical; it offers no transcendent account of suffering or restoration, so the Redeemed arc remains largely undeveloped -- healing is framed as posthumous vindication rather than interior transformation.
- ⚠Romano's corrective energy, while warranted, risks trading one hagiographic distortion for another: readers may not find Mary Todd's disordered behaviors -- compulsive spending, explosive rages, manipulative political interference -- given sufficient moral weight alongside the sympathetic account.
- ⚠The absence of any theological or virtue-ethical scaffolding means the book cannot fully answer why Mary Todd's suffering mattered in the order of meaning, only that it was misrepresented in the order of history.