Lincoln's Wife

MARY LINCOLN--Carl Sandburg & Paul M. Angle--Ear court, Brace ($3). In Chicago's big pan. 15 years ago. one of the brightest literary flashes was Poet Carl Sandburg. His precepts (such as his famed definition of poetry as "the achievement of the synthesis of hyacinths and biscuits") were taken as seriously as his examples. A later day will probably rate his biological work on the Lincolns as his most considerable performance. In Mary Lincoln's 159 pages he telescopes the life of Lincoln's termagant wife as a little companion book to his 604 pages on her husband. Co-Author Angle's part was editing the documents (mostly letters from Mary Lincoln). Sandburg's account will not change the picture U. S.-history readers have already formed of Lincoln's chubby, pathologically bad-tempered wife, but may add a few particulars to their knowledge. Sensitive to appearances--especially to the appearance she and her lanky husband made together--Mary Lincoln would never allow a photograph to be taken of them as a couple. Her three half-brothers all fought in the Confederate army, giving rise to such rumors of her anti-Union sympathies that Lincoln once felt called upon to testify in person, before a Congressional investigating committee, to her loyalty. When she lost her temper, which she did frequently, she completely lost control of herself, regardless of witnesses. Once when Lincoln, tired out, had allowed himself to be dragged to an unimportant mass meeting on the understanding that he was not to be called on for a speech, the crowd insisted; Lincoln gave a brief, uninspired talk. Afterwards, in front of a friend, Mrs. Lincoln burst out: "That was the worst speech I ever listened to in my life. How any man could get up and deliver such remarks to an audience is more than I can understand. I wanted the earth to sink and let me go through." The brain disease to which Biographer Sandburg attributes most of Mary Lincoln's shrewishness finally became too much for her; in 1875 her family had her committed to a sanatorium in Batavia, Ill. Set free a year later, she wandered un happily abroad, came home, hid in her sister's house in Springfield to wait for a leisurely death.

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