In Washington City, Mary Todd Lincoln is a shrewd collector of honest, even-tempered souls—the kind she can trust, charm, and manipulate. In hymn writer Fanny Crosby, she recognizes those very qualities and draws her into her small circle. Rejected by Washington society and unpopular in the press, Mary's emotional balance eludes her, and it will bring her to a courtroom where her own son argues she is insane. Mary dominates the story, bringing along President Lincoln.

Portrait of First Lady Mary Todd Lincoln made in the Mathew Brady studio in Washington, DC, based on the presence of studio props. The occasion has not been confirmed, though the date is probably 1861.

Twenty years younger than Mary and Fanny, Phoebe Knapp presides over a gilded mansion in New York City where presidents, generals, and bishops come to dine, and hosts Mary on her journeys to visit a son at Harvard. Phoebe composes melodies with no words to carry them. She turns to Fanny, and the two women do what no two women have ever done—write one of the most beloved hymns in America, “Blessed Assurance.”

New York City, the eve of the Civil War. Hymnist Fanny Crosby, blind and in her forties, farm-born but now living in a slum with her distant husband, does not merely wish to be near greatness—she means to become it. “My ambition has always been boundless. My desire has always been to live for some intense purpose for the world and to make for myself a name that should endure. Whenever an opportunity comes to meet a noted statesman, a masterful musician, literary leader, artistic mortal, I avail myself of it every time. I crave for the great as the heart panteth for the water-brooks.”

Fanny trails the newspapers for any word of her heroine—the President’s wife, a woman she cannot stop admiring. She admits to being prideful and boasts of her patriotism, tracing her line to the Plymouth settlers.

Alexander Van Alstyne is also blind. He doesn’t seem to mind that Fanny keeps her maiden name. What he minds is riding on her fame—he's a musician and composer in his own right. Cordial is the word for them. Not warm. Two darknesses, side by side: his quiet, unreachable, hers bright and always aimed at something bigger than the room they share.

Underneath the humor, President Lincoln is melancholy—he wears his sadness quietly and let hers be loud. He's patient with his wife, indulgent, even, of her storms, without ever being weak, loving her plainly and never asking her to be easier to love.

Elizabeth Keckley had bought herself, thread by thread, out of a life of slavery, and works her way up through the corridors of the Executive Mansion as Mary's seamstress—fitting Mary’s gowns, also holding Mary’s sorrows. There's rarely room left over for her own, which she wears quietly, and mostly alone.

A lithograph from 1865, Abraham Lincoln's Last Reception, depicting the reception (possibly in the East Room) following his second inauguration. Vice President Andrew Johnson, General Ulysses S. Grant, and his wife Julia Grant did not attend the event. Created possibly by Anton Hohenstein.

Elizabeth Keckley, 1861, dressmaker to Mary Todd Lincoln. Moorland-Spingarn Research Center, Howard University

Fanny Crosby, Photographer unknown, Public Domain

Fanny Crosby and Alexander Van Alstyne, Photographer unknown, Public Domain

Phoebe Knapp, Photographer unknown, Public Domain

Currier & Ives hand-colored lithograph created in 1867. Mary, Robert, Tad, Abraham Lincoln

Each has buried a child, and each carries that grief differently: one in raging grandeur, one in relentless usefulness, one behind a practiced smile, one woven into the First Family's mourning. Each has her own way of wrestling with faith, and each woman is certain the other has the thing she lacks. A true American story written with deep psychological insight. The story is funny and slyly educational.

By the time they reached the White House, they had already buried a son—Eddie, not yet four. But they still had each other, and two boys who ran loud and alive through the halls. Tragedy was waiting—an undercurrent felt like premonition, dimming any glimpse of a turn of happiness, sure another was around the corner.

The Peacemakers. On March 27, 1865, President Lincoln meets with Union generals Ulysses S. Grant and William T. Sherman at City Point, Virginia, to plot the last stages of the Civil War. Artist: G.P.A. Healy, 1868

Abraham Lincoln Raising Flag and Speaking to Crowd from Platform by Jean Louis Jerome Ferris

War, assassination, scandal, and grief carry these women through the ruin of a nation remaking itself into the glittering Gilded Age.

"Mary Todd Lincoln in Mourning Attire," Date: ca. 1865-1882, Creator: J. Ward & Son