Is it not strange that two of the people closest to Lincoln -- Stanton and Mary Todd Lincoln -- had peculiarly constituted, abnormal personalities? It's one thing to imagine Stanton's supervising the dressing of Lincoln's dead body. It's another to imagine him dressing and redressing the body of his first wife, who died in childbirth, until he was satisfied that she looked just as she did seven years before at the marriage altar. "She is my bride and shall be dressed and buried like a bride," said Stanton, who threw her valuable jewelry into her coffin.Stanton also had acted strangely after the death of his young daughter Lucy two years earlier. After she had been buried about a year, he had the remains exhumed, placed them in a metal box made for the purpose, and soldered it shut. He kept the box in his bedroom for a year. This is the same Stanton who unleashed a smear campaign of malicious lies against William T. Sherman; who lied to Lincoln about Thomas T. Eckert’s availability to accompany him to the theater; who used underhanded and illegal tactics to bring about the hanging of Mary Surratt; who barricaded himself inside his office after being fired by President Johnson; and who described Lincoln as a long-armed baboon.
SOURCE: Lincoln and Booth, H. Donald Winkler, 2003, pp. 317-8.