My favorite Mr. and Mrs. Lincoln interaction comes from right before he died, actually. They were sitting in Ford’s Theater watching the play. They’re holding hands (and remember, this is the 1860s, where PDA between men and women was a no no). She looks at him and says, “What will Ms. Harris (the other worman in the booth) think about my holding on to you like this?”
He looks at her and says, “She won’t think anything about it.”
I’m convinced the Lincolns hated each other sometimes, but they loved each other a lot more.
His last words, iirc. And as you mentioned, they were words of affection to her. (He’d also surprised her earlier in the day by saying he wanted to go to Jerusalem when his presidency was done, which made her ecstatic [she loved travel]).
Something I notice is that many biographers tell PART of a story but don’t seem to investigate the underlying matters that may contribute. An example:
-In several “Mary was a hellcat” accounts an incident is mentioned from the first days of their marriage. They lived in a boarding house where people were served at one sitting, and she was constantly late and thus people had to wait on her. One morning when she was late as usual he chided her about it, and she responded by tossing a pot of hot coffee on him. This is used to demonstrate “Mary was a high strung bitch”.
HOWEVER, accepting that as true, something that the same biographers for some reason don’t seem to connect, even though they mention Robert’s birthdate, is this: they lived in that boarding house for about 11 months after they married, basically from their wedding night to not quite their first anniversary. Simple math: their son Robert was born 9 months and 3 days after their wedding. This means that Mary was either pregnant when the incident occurred, or she had a newborn, either of which can play hell with a woman’s moods (this is an era with no psychotropic meds or even reliable nausea medication and nobody’s ever heard the term postpartem depression [though I’m sure they knew people who had it]) and either of which can give a woman very just cause to be continually late to breakfast (morning sickness, cramps, backache, nursing, seeping breasts, etc.). I’m not saying Mary didn’t go coocoo for cocoa puffs upon occasion (her famous insane jealousy of the officer’s wife who dared ride a horse next to her husband for instance), but there sometimes were extenuating circumstances.
Just because a label didn’t exist at the time doesn’t mean that the thing the label describes didn’t exist. The fact that Otzi didn’t know what carbon-14 was doesn’t mean that we can’t date his remains.