In addition to her role as a mother and housewife, Lincoln was absorbed in politics and worked to promote her husband's career. She wrote patronage letters, advocated his election, and even followed legislative choices in his senatorial campaigns. After Abraham Lincoln was elected president in 1860, she ambitiously sought for herself the role of an influential first lady. Wearing stunning gowns and shawls, she tried to define American fashion.

James Miller McKim was neither a gifted speaker nor an especially talented writer, but for twenty years he was the man who got things done for the antislavery cause in Pennsylvania. One antislavery colleague termed him a "prudent rash man," and he has been well described as an administrator who "applied a fundamentally conservative temperament to the prosecution of a radical cause" (Brown, p. 72). Once the Civil War began, McKim played a more independent and influential role in shaping events.