Jean H. Baker. Mary Todd Lincoln: A Biography. New York: W.W. Norton Co., 1987. Pp. 369 plus notes and index. $19.95

Mark E. Neely Jr. and R. Gerald McMurtry. The Insanity File: The Case of Mary Todd Lincoln. Carbondale, Ill.: Southern Illinois University Press, 1986. pp. 144 plus appendix, notes and index. $19.95

To read these two recent books on Mrs. Abraham Lincoln is to confront the difficulty in achieving a balanced perspective on our most maligned first lady. Taken together, the books illuminate the woman whose life represents triumph and tragedy on a grand scale.

While Jean Baker presents Mary Todd Lincoln warts and all, her book also attempts to rescue Mary from the shrewish caricature inflicted on posterity by William Herndon. Baker portrays Mary as daughter and stepdaughter in a large, affluent Kentucky family; as sister and friend; as wife, mother and mother-in-law in Springfield, Washington and European exile. Baker agrees that Mary was not a feminist, but argues that she was a strong, assertive woman in a male-dominated world. Through Baker's narrative we see how Mary's unconventional interests and strengths helped Lincoln achieve his political ambitions, even as Mary's assertiveness offended some of his closest male colleagues, including Herndon. Baker's compelling portrait depicts an intelligent girl-woman of animating personality, outgoing yet insecure, wounded by the premature deaths of those closest to her, mourning too much and too long.

The insanity trial on May 19, 1875, was the greatest humiliation of Mary's life. Whatever Robert Todd Lincoln's culpability in this painful confrontation with his mother, and despite secretiveness like his father's, Robert preserved the private documents relating to the trial. In studying these crucial materials, only recently discovered, Mark Neely and R. Gerald McMurtry throw new light both on Mary and on Robert.

They agree with Baker in emphasizing the male-dominated world of medicine confronting Mrs. Lincoln. But in examining the diagnosis and treatment of mental illness as well as the legal issues faced by mental patients and their families at this time, Neely and McMurtry conclude that in the spring of 1875 Mary was insane. While they fault certain procedures used by Robert and his team of lawyers and doctors, Neely and McMurtry believe that Mary needed to be protected from herself. Robert's remedies under Illinois law dictated a jury trial to prove Mary's insanity and to give him legal control over his mother and her property, objectives Neely and McMurtry regard as honorable given the circumstances. Neely and McMurtry minimize the significance of Robert's total control over Mary's legal defense at the trial and downplay that the medical evidence rested on only one doctor's direct examination of Mary.

Baker, on the other hand, carefully probes these strategems. Without Robert's control of the proceedings, Baker contends, Mary might have been acquitted, exposing Robert and his lawyer, Leonard Swett, "as double villains who had tried to take advantage of a widow at the same time that they had dishonored the memory of Abraham Lincoln." Though supplying incriminating evidence on Mary's mental condition, Baker never reaches a conclusion on her sanity while indicting those who found her insane.

Given the feminist defensiveness of Baker in dealing with Mary's struggles, it is interesting to read Neely's and McMurtry's conclusion that the real heroine of the final chapter of Mary's life was her sister, Elizabeth Todd Edwards. Baker appears ambivalent about Elizabeth, from the early days when she and her husband Ninian Edwards opposed Mary's marriage to Lincoln, to the dark last decade when Elizabeth was her sister's major protector. Yet from the insanity file documents, Aunt Lizzie emerges as the long-suffering, loving sister, sensitive to Mary's mental condition. Moreover, she understood Robert's situation, caught between an unstable mother, whose foibles made national news (to his supreme embarrassment), and a fragile wife who was almost suffocated by her mother-in-law. Aunt Lizzie became the intermediary between mother and son after Mary was released from Bellevue, the private asylum where she was confined for four months, into her sister's care in Springfield.

Given her feminist perspective, Baker also shows surprisingly little sympathy for Robert's wife, Mary Harlan Lincoln. Baker repeats the unsubstantiated rumors of Mary Harlan Lincoln's alcoholism as if to justify Mary Todd Lincoln's exasperation with her daughter-in-law and even the threat by Mary to kidnap granddaughter Mamie. Neely and McMurtry, however, print nearly 30 of Mary Todd Lincoln's letters to her daughter-in-law from 1869 and 1870. The letters detail the unending flow of gifts from Mary in Europe to Mary in Chicago. Moreover, mother-in-law offered daughter-in-law the silk, lace, sheets, blankets, hats, gloves, dresses, shawls and jewelry that Mary Todd Lincoln had bought to assuage her grief over Eddie's, Willie's, Abraham's and Tad's deaths.

To take sides in these complicated conflicts at this late date is to ignore the real tragedy of this family of our greatest leader — and to lose a sense of proportion, the very quality that kept eluding Mary, despite her remarkable strengths. Although published before Baker's book (she was shown their page proofs before finishing her work), Neely and McMurtry's book supplies the balance needed in order to gain this sense of proportion. "Mrs. Lincoln was indeed a much maligned woman," Neely and McMurtry admit, "but an habitual sympathetic approach to each event in her unhappy life can only make Robert malign, the Illinois legal system malign, mental medicine malign, and many of her old friends and relatives malign. History is rarely so simple as that."

Baker, for her part, supplies a comprehensive picture of Mary from childhood to death in contrast to the Neely/McMurtry study of a brief chapter in Mary's eventful life. Together, the two books help create a larger framework within which to comprehend Mary Todd Lincoln.

Christopher N. Breiseth is president of Wilkes College in Wilkes-Barre, Pa. While professor of history at Sangamon State University from 1971 to 1983, he published several essays on Abraham Lincoln and the Civil War era.