mercifully, not all of these 14 children were born to the same mother. the first six children, liz belt, francis, levi, mary, ann and george were bought to eliza parker. immediately after george was born, eliza came down with a child bed fever. no one really knows where the origin of this fever per se, but this is an era which doctors themselves didn't wash their hands after autopsies even before delivering babies. when oliver wendell holmes presented a paper that suggested maybe they should wash, the president of a major medical college said sir, i'm a gentleman, and a gentleman's hands are clean. so this is the likely origin of her child bed fever. she died within days, within weeks robert is looking for a new wife. he eventually marries betsy

humphreys who has eight children before slipping mercifully into menopause. [ laughter ] now, some i think have tried to claim that this is two families. that there's a first iteration of todds and a second iteration of todds. i think that is an enormous mistake. in this era, it was all too common for a woman to die in childbirth and a widower always remarried, especially if he had six children. this is fairly common for a family in that period. so i think we need to do them the honor of reading their own letters. they don't use half brother, half sister, stepbrother, stepsister. that language is not used by

them or anyone else in referring to them. it's clear they understand themselves and were understood by the rest of the country as one family. so it's fair to understand them in that light ourself. now, they're from kentucky, and like most kentucky families, the todds are thrown into domestic pandemonium by the civil war. you all know kentucky fought the brother's war more completely than any other state. secession has divided states and counties, one kentuckyian noted and produced discord among neighbors and families. a gloom is over this once happy land. another witness noted the division of house against house, foretold by our lord was never more complete and utter. of course, ironically, kentucky

state's motto adopted in 1792, was united we stand, divided we fall. what had been a pledge of unity becomes a predictor of disaster for the state of kentucky. okay, so what did this mean for the todds? they're broken almost in half by secession. eight of the siblings side with the confederacy. six with the union. now, when i first heard of this story, you have abraham lincoln, a divided family, you have the civil war. why has no one written this book already? and the answer i figured out almost as quickly as i signed the book, the records were scattered and relatively thin. and the todds weren't very likable is the other thing. the heroes of my story were going to be problematic. they were very litigious. some of them definitely drank

too much. some could be cruel. sometimes studying the antics of this family, i felt they were the kind of people that would would be on jerry springer slowing chairs at each other if they were around today. tragedy sometimes befalls families who partly deserve it. sam was shot through the bowels and died on the second day at shiloh. alec was killed in a friendly fire incident outside baton rouge. of course, two todd sisters lost their husbands. mary's husband, of course, was murdered while she was holding his hand. if you move to just after the war itself, three of the todd girls die in childbirth. and two todd boys die during the war or immediately after in what i'll call hard living. but what i mean to imply is that this is a family who suffered for their sins.

this is a sad family. a train wreck, really. and what i decided is that they are, in a sense, suffering the partly deserved self-inflicted misery of the civil war and its aftermath. all right. you wouldn't want a story of 16 todds today, and so i'm just going to tell you two of their stories. and their impacts on the lincolns. one, who had a negative impact on mary lincoln herself, and the other, a positive impact on abraham lincoln. we'll start with david todd. david todd was born in 1832, even as a kid, he was difficult to control. he grew up wild. at 14, he ran off to fight in the mexican war and never came home, never returned to school, never really returned to kentucky. his father hoped at least in the army he would get some army discipline. robert didn't know much about the army that fought in the

mexican war, what david learned was to smoke, chew, curse, gamble and worse. and he was sort of swept early into this hyper masculine world, a marshal world really of sinning and hard fighting. after the mexican war, he didn't want to go home, so he joined the california gold rush. i don't think he found very much. i found him in the census in 1850 listed as a farm hand in california. when that didn't pan out, as it were -- [ laughter ] i don't know i went there. he shipped out as a soldier for hire. if you know about the 1850s, there are a lot of these free booting enterprises. so he's involved in what's called the first secession revolution in chile in 1851. and he bears the mark of that experience on his body forever.

the chilean national flag tattooed in full color on his left arm. this wasn't his only tattoo. over the years, he accumulated an anchor on his right arm, crossed guns on his right breast and a heart pierced with an arrow. as i say in the book, by 25, david was a highly decorated soldier in america's rogue army. this is the kind of humor that historians throw around. i lose track of him after the chilean revolution, and i pick him back up in 1857. he's in new orleans. this makes sense for him, as the city is easy to get to, easy to get away from, a sinning city. he's working for w.w. crane and company, which is a carriage reposito repository. i found some ads for crane and company. carrying a complete assortment of karnls from the best manufacturers.

crane advertised itself as the home of guaranteed low prices and encouraged purchasers to come on down and examine our stock before making selections elsewhere. he's a car salesman, essentially. so when the war breaks out, he's a now tough talking, hard drinking, belligerent car salesman. but, but he had been -- he's a veteran of the mexican war. he had tough talking friends in the confederate war department. so he's fairly assured of coming up with a position. the position they give him, however, is frankly impossible for me to understand. so he's appointed the commandant of richmond's early jail system in july of 1861, just in time, to take charge of 1,421 prisoners, union prisoners taken at bull run.

this is a logistical nightmare that will require an enormous amount of organization and tact. these are not david's long suits. the captured yankees created a city wide sensation. guests raced to the windows of their hotels just to get a peep at them. they were spat upon. people called out for them hung. crowds of idlers, churchgoers, society women all rolled by straining to catch a glimpse of this somehow foreign thing, a yankee. the square was for weeks packed with rebels, recalled an inmate. when they caught sight of a federal officer, they hooted at them and insulted him. the frenzy was fully supported by the local papers. yankees were compared to zoo animals, lunatics or worse. behold how they multiply noted the richmond wig of the yankee.

they multiply like the chinese and all the other pests of the animal kingdom. pull the bark from a decayed log and you'll see a mass of maggots full of vitality and eternal gyration, creeping under one another, all precisely alike, all intently engaged and preying upon one another and you have an apt illustration of yankio equality and yankee prowess. now, another reporter pointed out the obvious absurdity here. one would think live yankees must have undergone a wonderful transformation. of course, a wonderful transformation had occurred. brothers were now enemies. northerners were now infidels, invaders, and pests. david really embided this spirit

and passed it on to his subordina subordinates, one of whom was henry werts, executed for war crimes. according to prisoners, todd took personal delight in human blood and suffering. werts was his ever willing pupil. there was something in todd's voice and manner, recalled another, that always indicated a desire to commit some cruel wrong. over the next month, david would make himself the deserving scapegoat for all of this prison system's problems. specifically i'll outline three charges that were laid at david's door in his short tenure as commandant. first, that prisoners were unofficially executed as a result of his orders. you have to know something, this isn't really a jail. these are tobacco warehouses

that have been hastily converted. so they just put bars on the low erwin does and don't worry about people jumping. but it's july. these are unseasoned soldiers, so they're getting their first camp diseases in a jail. and it's stifling hot in july in richmond. so they're all hanging out of these windows trying to get fresh air. but david hated that. he didn't want his jail to become a spectacle. he loathed they were engaging in shouting matches across the yard with richmond citizens. so his order was that if there was an arm sticking out of a window, it would be shot. if there was a head sticking out, it would be shot also. again, it's not his personal responsibility, but when an order comes down from on high to give them permission to take a bead on any yankee that sticks his head or arm out of the window, you know what's going to happen. and the richmond papers make jokes about it, that a soldier

has died of concussion of the brain because a bullet went ke through it. that's exactly right. so at least three and probably more soldiers were killed as a result of this particular order. second charge that can be fairly laid at david's door was that he allowed an epidemic to rage in his jail. they didn't know anything about germ theory or disease, so he couldn't be sure exactly why this was happening. but it was made far worse by a result of his own orders. again, concern for security, he said that you could only be led to a legitimate latrine, two at a time, and no one after lights out. and what that means is that all of these soldiers are cueing up in line, cramped bowels, waiting to get to a latrine, so they have to create sinks inside the jails. all of this means that they poison their water supply. they all have dysentery, so the

problem is getting worse and worse. david didn't care. the richamond papers didn't car that they were dying in frightful numbers. they lamented they wouldn't be around for their trials to be eventually hung. david didn't like the smell of dead yankee, however, so he ordered to have the corpses to be buried in negro graveyards among their friends. the third charge, and this is what got him dismissed is that he desecrated corpses. that's no small charge. after he had succeeded in cleansing his jails of bodies, yet another prisoner died, you know, the -- the guards on watch didn't know what to do. they knew he didn't like these guys hanging ornldz. so they brought the body to his headquarters. they couldn't carry the body and ring the bell, so they dropped the body on the porch.

david can't believe he's got another corpse on his hands, so he kicked the body out into the street where it laid overnight. everyone the rebel public was dimly aware that david had gone too far. prisoners they felt should be gawked at, spat upon, maybe hung. but it crossed the line of christian decency after a perp had died. the scene was almost pitiable and that was the last thing they were in the mood to feel. david had proven himself a public liability. it would not be enough to replace him. he would need to be dressed down. so on august 9, after a short stent as commandant, he was arrested and by august 18, he had been relieved of command.

ultimately, this episode has no impact on his career. he goes on to serve with distinction at vicksburg. the story that hasn't been told is the impact that this has on mary lincoln and her growing unpopularity as a first lady. okay. so really understand the timing of all this, you have to realize the bull run prisoners are taken in july, yes. but they're not released to tell the story of this demonic jailer until the spring, until january and february of 1862. so what happens is that the news of david, the sadistic jailer brother of mary todd lincoln, that news hits home at the exact same moment as two other disasters of mary's own making are unfolding in the press. so it becomes that perfect storm that crystallizes washington's

opinion of their new first lady for the rest of the war. a little bit about these other scandals of mary's own making. the first scandal, of course, involved financial malfeasance. mary, as we now understand, was probably bipolar, she was definitely a shop aholic. so if she's in a depressed phase, she has a tendency to buy things that give her enormous comfort. they're pretty things. they don't die. they don't talk back to her. they make her feel better. when she's in her manic phase, she just splurges. and splurge is exactly what she did in her early months as first lady. as we all know, she burns through the $20,000 appropriation that is supposed to last four years for upkeep of the white house, she burns through it in a week in an orgy of purchasing and maybe more

with the commissioner of public buildings. lincoln gets a letter warning him if wood continues as commissioner, he will stab you in your most vital part, a veiled reference to infidelity. mary accepted bribes to get people's job in her husband's administration. $20,000 bought a port collectorship, diamonds bought a naval agency. that's the way things were done. it was a free wheeling era, and really mary's conduct is not that much more crooked than most politicians in the period. it is, though, far less savory than the conduct of her own husband, whom she called a monomaniac on honesty. lincoln could affo because she taking the low one as she put it.

and that is where most politics is unfortunately conducted. i do think, though, that mary occasionally sank too low, as with the commissioner of public buildings and as with cooking the books with the white house gardener, john watt. with watt's help, she overcharged the interior department for state dinners, sold off white house furniture, drew money on flowers not delivered and labor not perfo performed. so each before the prison scandal breaks, americans are beginning to get this idea that mary lincoln is financially discrete and covered over that, that she's too involved in her husband's political career. the second scandal of mary's own making was far more serious and involved something closer to treason. mary's inner circle had quite a

few shady characters in it. i call them the i call them the blue rumors because that's where they met politics. they called her the queen essentially in her beloved french. mary had an appetite for flattery, and i think these guys flattered her. they admired her too, but they wanted something. some of the people who penetrated mary's inner circle, one of them, of course, was daniel sickles. he, according to a witness, was one of the bigger bubbles in the scum of the legal profession. [ laughter ] >> swollen and windy and puffed just sounds painful. sickles, of course, is infamous for having his men almost a mile

out of position and he guns down his wife's lover in front of witnesses in broad daylight, and this isn't just anybody. this is phillip barton key, a nephew of the chief justice of the united states, the son of francis scott key, the author of "the star-spangled banner." we know he gets away with it with the first ever use of the insanity defense. even with a murder on his rap sheet, you know, daniel sickles isn't really the biggest rogue to penetrate mary's salon. that honor goes to henry wickoff. wickoff had kidnapped a tobacco heiress in italy and spent some time in prison for it. his account of this great my courtship and its consequences was reviewed as the least

credible volume ever produced by an american. no less an authority than p.t. barnum credited wickoff of teaching him his first-ever lesson in the art of hook 'em. wickoff was washington insiders noted variously a terrible liberti northeast, a whore monger and swindler, an unclean bird, a vile creature, a social pariah, a man with a singular facility for thrusting his diplomatic fingers into other people's pies. it's a disgrace to american society, wrote lincoln's secretary, that it suffers such a thing to be at large. well, among his other shifts, wickoff was a spy for the new york world, and in early 1862 he somehow gets a copy of lincoln's annual message to congress and leaks it to the press. you can imagine any president in any day does not like to see the speech he has not yet made in

the newspaper as he is drinking his morning coffee. congress subpoenas information. wickoff it admits some, but he refuses to name his source. give him a couple of days, see if his memory becomes more fresh, and then they throw him in the old capital prison. now, the blue rumors have to scramble to save their queen. sickles, of course, is a lawyer. he appoints himself wickoff's counsel. he shuttles between the white house, the prison, and john watts' house, the white house gardener. there they concoct a wildly improbable story. this one i love. watt has to give testimony. as the white house gardener, i have access to the executive mansion. i was preambulating in the home, and i happened to see a parchment on the president's desk and a literary man, of course, he decides to read this document, and he has one of the

most remarkably retentive memories in the 19th century because he happens to recall it word for word from a single glance. then later in the casual morning conversation that he has with wickoff, he happens to roll through this entire speech completely word for word, and wickoff, again, another mental gymnast happens to remember every stitch of this thing and repeats it to somebody else. it is a ludicrous story in every particular, and by the time it gets told, everybody knows how someone would have access to this particular speech. it had to be mary lincoln. she had to have given them access. well, lincoln knows it too, and so he intervenes with some of the republicans on a committee. and he says this needs to go away. and it does. but not within washington society. it's that moment where they start to get these first

reports, new york newspapers, but diaries of ex-prisoners about the first lady's brother who is a sadistic jailer in richmond, and it creates a perfect storm of bad press for mary. rumors circulate that watt was a rebel sympathizer. that wickoff was a foreign intriguer. which he probably was. probably in league with the confederacy. if mary lincoln is giving state documents to such men as these, wasn't it possible that she was a rebel too? the charge is ridiculous. we have no evidence that she was anything other than perfectly loyal to her husband and to the union, but there were spies in washington. mary had behaved at least imprudently, and she did have a brother who liked to kick dead yankees. so the public may have misconnected the dots. they definitely didn't invent them. not a few bitter tongues remembered witness began to roundly assert that mrs. lincoln herself was in constant

correspondence as a spy with the chiefs of the rebellion. through her they obtained the secrets of the cabinet and plans of generals in the field. it is from that moment forward even as she's about to lose one of her sons, because of that potomac river water that's pumped into the white house, even though she's in a period of mourning, it's already fixed, their opinion of her in washington d.c. i think we haven't appreciated the degree to which the role that david played a role in that. i want to turn to a more pleasant story. a story of a positive impact on the lincolns. this time on abraham lincoln himself. this is emily todd. she was born in 1836. she was by common consensus the prettiest of the todd girls. i find this court case in kentucky of a couple who kidnapped her when she was 3 years old and they haul a couple before the judge and ask why they did it, and they said, well, look at her. she's just that cute.

not much of a defense, frankly. now, unlike david, emily was very close with the lincolns before the war. now, they didn't meet her -- lincoln didn't meet her until 1847 when he came through lexington on his way to congress. lincoln was clad in a long black cloak, a mammoth fur cap. emily is a little girl then, and she's just terrified. she thinks this guy looks like the giant of jack and the beanstalk. she hides behind her mother's skirt while the giant makes all of his introductions around the room. finally he peers around betsy and he spies emily, and he sweeps her up into his arms, and he says, ah, here's little sister. and that's the name that he will use for her for the rest of his life. kind of have to understand that mary lincoln did not like her husband to be around pretty women. but she made an exception for emily. emily was a guest of the

lincolns in 1855. she spent six months in illinois, and it was hoped that she would find someone to marry in springfield and would settle there with the other sisters because they were all so fond of each other. ultimately emily does not. she goes home to kentucky and marries benjamin harden-helm. the lincolns also grew close to helm. harden and lincoln were from the same region, around knob creek, kentucky. they knew the same families. both were political moderates, helm even on slavery. so when lincoln is elected, mary really hopes that emily will come to be an ornament in her court. abraham lincoln offers harden a job with a paymaster corps as a major. you kind of have to know your rankings and what this would mean in an era where everybody wants a job. this is the highest ranking, highest paying job, abraham lincoln can give without the permission of congress.

so he's really offering harden an alternative vision of his life. he even says, we can post you to the west. we can post you to mexico rather than raise arms against us. harden has a difficult decision. he consulted with many people. perhaps including robert e. lee. i had a bitter struggle with myself, harden admitted to a friend. the most painful moment of my life was when i declined the generous offer of my brother-in-law. instead, of course, harden helm goes on to be brigadier general of the oregon brigade. he is killed in 1836 rallying a third charge on the union center at a battle. when lincoln first heard of harden's death, he said i feel as david of old when told of the