{"id":3606,"date":"2011-02-16T08:52:32","date_gmt":"2011-02-16T13:52:32","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/housedivided.dickinson.edu\/sites\/blogdivided\/?p=3606"},"modified":"2012-03-12T07:23:00","modified_gmt":"2012-03-12T12:23:00","slug":"lincoln-meets-grace-bedell","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/housedivided.dickinson.edu\/sites\/blogdivided\/2011\/02\/16\/lincoln-meets-grace-bedell\/","title":{"rendered":"Lincoln Meets Grace Bedell"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Just 150 years ago today on Saturday afternoon, February 16, 1861<\/a>, President-Elect Abraham Lincoln met twelve-year-old Grace Bedell<\/a> on a train platform in Westfield, New York<\/a>.\u00a0 Showing off his new facial hair, he kissed the young girl and reportedly said, “\u201cYou see I have let these whiskers grow for you, Grace.”<\/p>\n

If you know this story, then you\u2019re either a Civil War buff or a very attentive sixth-grader.\u00a0 The year before Grace Bedell had written presidential candidate Abe Lincoln (whom she addressed as \u201cHon. A.B. Lincoln\u201d) in October 1860 from her family’s temporary residence in upstate New York, inquiring whether Lincoln had any daughters before urging him to \u201clet your whisker grow\u201d since \u201cyour face is so thin.\u201d \u00a0This is a charming story that many elementary school teachers describe in their classrooms because it conveys such an important message about empowerment. Young Grace had an endearing, childlike candor (\u201canswer this letter right off\u201d she wrote in closing) that apparently ignited the bored candidate\u2019s fancy because he responded within days.\u00a0 \u201cI regret the necessity of saying I have no daughters,\u201d Lincoln replied, adding, \u201cAs to the whiskers, having never worn any, do you not think people would call it a piece of silly affectation if I were to begin it now?\u201d\u00a0 The famous letters, however, have never before been exhibited in public until 2009 <\/a>when they were brought together by the Library of Congress in an exhibition that is currently traveling around the country.<\/p>\n

In Lincoln’s era,\u00a0 presidential candidates almost always stayed home and avoided making public statements.\u00a0 It was considered undignified and un-republican to seek the presidential office.\u00a0 Obviously a few things have changed, but at least one political truth has endured.\u00a0 Image mattered just as much then as now.<\/p>\n

Most school children hear this much of the Lincoln-Bedell story at least once during their academic careers, and every Lincoln scholar knows about it.\u00a0 But until recently, nobody really believed there was any more to the relationship.\u00a0 After the war, Grace Bedell married a Union army veteran named George Billings.\u00a0 The couple moved to Kansas and forged a life on the western prairie.\u00a0 They had one son and no daughters. Every so often until her death in 1936, Grace Bedell Billings would make an appearance, consent to an interview, or respond to some new correspondent seeking details about her encounter with Lincoln.\u00a0 Yet the gun-toting homesteader seemed mostly indifferent to her recurring fifteen minutes of fame.\u00a0 Grandson George Billings wrote to Time<\/em> magazine <\/a>shortly after her death, thanking the editors for orchestrating a dramatization about her experience with Lincoln, and claiming credibly that one of her favorite expressions had always been, \u201cI dislike making a fuss.\u201d\u00a0 Today, Billings descendants are trying to raise funds<\/a> to preserve her former home in Delphos, Kansas.<\/p>\n

This effort received a boost in 2007 when a diligent Lincoln researcher named Karen Needles discovered a new letter <\/a>from Grace Bedell to President Lincoln that was written in January 1864 and somehow had gotten overlooked in the voluminous files of the National Archives.\u00a0 \u201cDo you remember before your election receiving a letter from a little girl residing at Westfield in Chautauqua Co. advising the wearing of whiskers as an improvement to your face,\u201d Bedell asked, before informing the president in firm, clear handwriting, \u201cI am that little girl grown to the size of a woman.\u201d\u00a0 Young Grace had grown but her characteristic brashness remained.\u00a0 Reminding the president that he had signed his previous letter to her, \u201cYour true friend and well-wisher,\u201d Bedell asked, \u201cWill you not show yourself my friend now?\u201d\u00a0 It turned out that she wanted a job, but her reason was quite poignant.\u00a0 \u201cMy Father during the last few years lost nearly all his property,\u201d she confided, \u201cand although we have never known want, I feel that I ought<\/span> and could<\/span> do something for myself.\u201d\u00a0 She had heard about \u201ca large number of girls\u201d who were \u201cemployed constantly and with good wages at Washington cutting Treasury notes and other things pertaining to that Department.\u201d\u00a0 She wondered, \u201cCould I not obtain a situation there?\u201d\u00a0 The appeal closed by noting that her parents were \u201cignorant of this application\u201d and gently pointing out that she had sent an earlier query to him that had gone unanswered.\u00a0 \u201cDirect to this place\u201d was the line that closed Grace Bedell\u2019s third letter to Abraham Lincoln.<\/p>\n

She never heard back from the president and never once mentioned this application in any of her post-war accounts.\u00a0 Yet there is some reason to believe that President Lincoln did respond to Grace\u2019s request by writing to her parents directly.\u00a0 There have been many children\u2019s books written about Grace Bedell, and most are inconsequential, but there has been one serious historical account produced by Fred Trump, a native of Westfield who ended up settling in Salina, Kansas, not far from the Billings farm in Delphos.\u00a0 That coincidence apparently drove Trump, a retired Department of Agriculture official, to prodigious effort in his research.\u00a0 He turned up many local accounts that appear nowhere else but in his 1977 book, Lincoln<\/em><\/a>\u2019s Little Girl<\/a>. <\/em><\/p>\n

Toward the end of his book, Trump relates how some members of the Bedell family claimed that President Lincoln tried to adopt Grace during the war.\u00a0 The author quoted from multiple accounts produced by a woman named Jennie Macomber, who had been a little girl herself in Westfield in 1860 and who later befriended members of the Bedell family.\u00a0 She recalled how they told her that the president had written Grace\u2019s father during the war \u201cand offered to adopt her as his own daughter.\u201d\u00a0 Trump believed Macomber\u2019s story, and corroborated it as much as he could, but also dutifully quoted several Lincoln experts who coolly dismissed the tale as \u201cembroidery.\u201d\u00a0 The late Roy P. Basler, editor of Lincoln\u2019s Collected Works<\/em>, informed Trump, \u201cThe Abraham Lincoln papers include no correspondence between Lincoln and the parents of Grace Bedell. The collections in this division are not known to contain any information corroborating this story.\u201d<\/p>\n

That was in 1977.\u00a0 But in 2007, there appeared this newly discovered letter that does offer at least some corroboration of the old family gossip.\u00a0 After reading the 1864 letter from Grace, it is easy to imagine that Abraham Lincoln responded to the story of the Bedell family\u2019s financial struggles with a direct appeal to Grace\u2019s father.\u00a0 The president might well have offered to have the young woman live in the White House while she worked as one of the war\u2019s many Treasury Department girls.\u00a0 Too proud to admit his financial reversals, businessman Norman Bedell either declined or just ignored the unexpected offer. What seemed fanciful to Roy Basler, now appears more reasonable given this new letter.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Of course, the irony is that like so much else in history, with more information, our certainty about the past suddenly seems far less secure.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Just 150 years ago today on Saturday afternoon, February 16, 1861, President-Elect Abraham Lincoln met twelve-year-old Grace Bedell on a train platform in Westfield, New York.\u00a0 Showing off his new facial hair, he kissed the young girl and reportedly said, “\u201cYou see I have let these whiskers grow for you, Grace.” If you know this […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[77,172],"tags":[4756,160],"class_list":["post-3606","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-antebellum-1840-1861","category-letters-diaries","tag-contests-elections","tag-women-families"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/housedivided.dickinson.edu\/sites\/blogdivided\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3606","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/housedivided.dickinson.edu\/sites\/blogdivided\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/housedivided.dickinson.edu\/sites\/blogdivided\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/housedivided.dickinson.edu\/sites\/blogdivided\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/housedivided.dickinson.edu\/sites\/blogdivided\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3606"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/housedivided.dickinson.edu\/sites\/blogdivided\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3606\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4061,"href":"https:\/\/housedivided.dickinson.edu\/sites\/blogdivided\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3606\/revisions\/4061"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/housedivided.dickinson.edu\/sites\/blogdivided\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3606"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/housedivided.dickinson.edu\/sites\/blogdivided\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3606"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/housedivided.dickinson.edu\/sites\/blogdivided\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3606"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}