Welcome to the History Tricks, where any resemblance to a boring old history lesson is purely coincidental.

Welcome to the show! Today we are going to give you the second part of our coverage of Mary Todd Lincoln.

We highly recommend that you go back and listen to part one, but here is a tiny, teeny little recap,

comically short, that, well, I'll get you in the picture if you don't have time to go back right now.

Mary was born in Lexington, Kentucky. She was the daughter of a rich man, who married an up and coming politician,

based on I think nothing more than seeing his potential, and somehow together they formed him into a presidential candidate

a long shot who won the White House. And now Mary Lincoln and her husband Abraham are on their way.

And so we begin. Perfect recap. Now Mary had always craved attention her entire life, and as first lady, she was about to get it,

but a lot of it wasn't actually good. For instance, one of the first bits of attention she got was death threats,

including ones that were addressed to her. Letters were coming for them from southerners who were completely ticked off

that an anti-slavery president had been elected. And since Abraham Lincoln had been elected,

South Carolina had seceded from the union in protest of the Republican Party's platform that slavery is wrong as an institution.

So to them, Abraham Lincoln's win was just nothing more than a slap in the face to their way of life.

I should point out here that for those of you who are confused that the Republicans were the ones that were anti-slavery,

you should know, and I'll provide you a link to the explanation that at some point between Abraham Lincoln and say,

FDR, the Republican and Democratic parties switched their platforms nearly completely.

So we'll provide you a link to how exactly that happened. It's much too convoluted to explain here.

Early in February, before the inauguration, South Carolina, of course, Florida, Alabama, Mississippi, Georgia, and Louisiana formed the Confederacy.

This is not a good beginning for any president. It's a little bit stressful, shall we say?

It's a lot of it stressful. Within a month, Jefferson Davis was elected president of the Confederate States of America,

and then Abraham Lincoln was elected president of all the rest.

What confusion it must have been at the time.

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