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Black Damask Wallpaper Biography
Mary Todd Lincoln's shopping trip to New York City in December 1860 was her second visit to the city. It was "her first excursion as a public figure with her own entourage," wrote biographer Jennifer Fleischner. "The to-do made over Mary Lincoln by solicitous merchants, who were quite happy to extend credit to the future Mrs. President, was an undeniably thrilling experience, and Mary did not hang back from picking out whatever she wanted. But even better was the fawning welcome of the city's leading citizens: powerful, wealthy, and sophisticated New Yorkers."1
"Mary repeatedly made trips to New York and Philadelphia to order damask, wallpaper, carpets and curtain materials, most of which were brought over from Europe," wrote Mary's biographer, Ishbel Ross.2 By 1864, the bills for Mrs. Lincoln's shopping trips, now more personal, were catching up with her and she was frightened. She complained to her black seamstress that if her husband were defeated for reelection, "I do not know what would become of us all. To me, to him, there is more at stake in this election that he dreams of."3
Historian Margaret Leech wrote of Mary Todd Lincoln that "like a drug for her tortured nerves, she indulged in her orgies of buying things. She hoarded her old possessions in innumerable trunks and boxes, keeping even outmoded dresses and bonnets she had brought from Springfield. The charge accounts for her purchases mounted to appalling sums — things she could never use, for which she could never hope to pay. A Washington merchant sent in a bill for three hundred pairs of gloves ordered in four months. At A. T. Stewart's New York department store, she bought furs, silks laces, jewelry, three thousand dollars for earrings and a pin; five thousand for a shawl."4 Biographer Fleischner wrote: "If Mary had a psychological need to accumulate things to try to replace lost human love objects, her acquisitiveness was also cultural. Her childhood town and all her neighbors were simply steeped in commercialism; it was one of the reasons Mary loved New York, a giddily commercial city."5
Although her shopping sprees drew criticism for their appropriateness during wartime, the New York Herald came to her defense, reporting that Mrs. Lincoln "came to the metropolis, visited the most modish stores, and — like the Empress Eugénie, who was as suddenly elevated in rank — displayed such exquisite taste in the selection of the materials she desired, and of the fashion of their make that all the fashionable ladies of New York were astir with wonder and surprise."6
Not all of the criticism of Mrs. Lincoln's shopping during the first year was warranted, according to another biographer, Jean Painter Randall. "Like flashes on a screen are the frequent newspapers items about her shopping trips to Philadelphia and New York that first year. The reporters sometimes showed excess of zeal. Mrs. [Elizabeth] Grimsley told of a pleasure trip to New York which she and Mrs. Lincoln made in May in which they 'had not even driven by the stores.' To their amazement after their return they read in the papers that they had been 'on an extensive shopping trip with the names of the various stories visited, that 'Mrs. Lincoln had bought, among other things, a three thousand dollar point lace shawl, and Mrs. Grimsley had also indulged, to the extent of one thousand, in a like purchase...' Mrs. Grimsley remarked dryly that was the nearest she ever came to having such a shawl."7

Black Damask Wallpaper