The Letter From an 11-Year-Old Girl That Changed Abraham Lincoln’s Appearance

In October 1860, a never-before-bearded Abraham Lincoln was a few weeks from winning the presidency. Then a letter arrived in Springfield from Westfield, New York, a small town in Chautauqua County, written by an 11-year-old named Grace Bedell. Her father had just come home from the fair with a campaign picture of Lincoln and his running mate, Hannibal Hamlin, and she had notes.

Mental Floss has covered the exchange before as one of five letters that changed the world, but the full paper trail is stranger, and a little more political, than the version that usually gets told.

What Grace Actually Wrote

Bedell’s letter, dated October 15, 1860, is now in the Burton Historical Collection at the Detroit Public Library, and it reads like a campaign memo from a very confident 11-year-old. She told Lincoln she had four brothers, that some of them would vote for him anyway, and that if he grew whiskers she would work on the rest: “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.” She also asked whether he had any little girls her age, complimented the rail fence around his picture, and mentioned that her baby sister was “nine weeks old and is just as cunning as can be.” She signed off with an order: “Answer this letter right off.”

He did, four days later. “I regret the necessity of saying I have no daughters,” Lincoln wrote on October 19, before listing his three sons. On the whiskers, he was skeptical: having never worn any, he asked, wouldn’t people call it a silly affectation to start now? Transcriptions of that sentence differ by a word or two, and the original is in private hands.

The Letter Nobody Mentions

Grace wasn’t the first to bring it up. Three days before she wrote, on October 12, an anonymous group calling themselves “True Republicans” mailed Lincoln a request from New York City. They wore his picture on campaign badges, and after studying it they’d concluded, “these medals would be much improved in appearance, provided you would cultivate whiskers, and wear standing collars.” Their postscript was blunter than anything an 11-year-old wrote: “We really fear votes will be lost to ‘the cause’ unless our ‘gentle hints’ are attended to.” That letter is in Lincoln’s papers at the Library of Congress.

Within about a month of hearing from Grace, Lincoln stopped shaving, and by mid-November his friends were teasing him about it. A Chicago photographer named Samuel G. Alschuler caught the early stages of the beard on November 25, 1860. The Library of Congress says flatly that it’s impossible to know what actually made Lincoln put the razor down, or how much Grace had to do with it.

The Meeting in Westfield

Lincoln got his own say on February 16, 1861, when his inaugural train stopped in Westfield, and he described the letter to the crowd. The Philadelphia Inquirer reported his words: “She advised me to let my whiskers grow, as it would improve my personal appearance; acting partly upon her suggestion, I have done so; and now, if she is here, I would like to see her.” A boy perched on a post yelled, “There she is, Mr. LINCOLN,” and Lincoln stepped down from the car and “gave her several hearty kisses” while the crowd cheered.

In January 1864, Grace wrote to Lincoln again, this time asking for help getting a job at the Treasury Department, and there’s no record that he ever answered. She later married a Union veteran named George Billings and moved to Delphos, Kansas, where she died in 1936. Her letter and his reply finally shared a display case in 2009, when the Detroit Public Library and the Benjamin Shapell Family Manuscript Foundation lent them to a Library of Congress exhibition for Lincoln’s bicentennial: as far as the curator knew, it was the first time the two had ever been shown together.

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