Mary Todd Lincoln said her son Robert’s actions made her hair turn white.
Robert Todd Lincoln had his mother legally committed to a private insane asylum in 1875, but a Chicago newspaper forced her release.
After her release, she wrote to her friend Myra Bradwell: ‘I asked him to look upon my bleached hair, which he had entirely caused with the past sorrowful year.”
Always politically savvy, Mary marshalled the power of her spouse against her eldest son when she wrote: “This one, as my beloved husband always said, was so different than the rest of us.”
The mother and son reconciled about a year before Mary Lincoln died at her sister’s Springfield home in 1882.