Today in History—February 16: A 12-Year-Old Girl Meets Her Very Famous Pen Pal

“I have a little correspondent in this place, and if she is present will she please come forward?”

And so it was, with that request on February 16, 1861, that Grace Bedell met her famous pen pal—President-elect Abraham Lincoln.

Their correspondence began four months earlier, when Lincoln was merely a presidential candidate, running on the Republican ticket. Grace’s October 15, 1860, letter read, in part:

Dear Sir:

I am a little girl only eleven years old, but want you should be President of the United States very much so I hope you won’t think me very bold to write such a great man as you are.…I have got 4 brothers and part of them will vote for you any way and if you will let your whiskers grow I will try and get the rest of them to vote for you; you would look a great deal better for your face is so thin. All the ladies like whiskers and they would tease their husbands to vote for you and then you would be President.

Four days later Lincoln returned her post:

My dear little Miss:

Your very agreeable letter of the 15th is received.…As to the whiskers, having never worn any, do you not think people would call it a piece of silly affection if I were to begin it now?

Was it Grace’s astute political advice that caused Lincoln to grow a beard and become the first U.S. president to do so? History is inconclusive on that point, but we do know this: He grew a beard. And, on November 6, 1860, Lincoln was elected president, defeating three challengers and winning the popular vote by nearly half a million votes. Coincidence or causation?

As Lincoln traveled from Springfield, Illinois, to Washington, D.C., for his inauguration, his train stopped in Westfield, New York—the Bedells’ hometown. Grace (now 12 years old) and her sisters attended Lincoln’s appearance, where the president-elect called to her from the rear platform of the train.

At the age of 82, Grace Billings (née Bedell) recounted what happened next: The president stepped down to shake Grace’s hand and kiss her, saying, “You see [pointing to his beard], I let these whiskers grow for you, Grace.”

Flustered by the cheering crowd and embarrassed by the president’s attention, Grace ran all the way home, clutching a bouquet of roses intended as a present for Lincoln. Although Grace did not comment on Lincoln’s appearance, she did recollect, “It seemed to me as the president stooped to kiss me that he looked very kind, yes, and sad.”

Maybe that was young Grace’s thought in the moment—or perhaps it was a memory shaped decades later by all she knew that was to come. The Battle of Fort Sumter lay two months ahead. Four years after that, at the American Civil War’s end, more than 750,000 soldiers would be dead. Lincoln’s son Willie died in 1862, likely of typhoid, a loss from which his parents never fully recovered, having buried another son 12 years earlier. And in 1865 Lincoln himself would be killed by an assassin’s bullet.