Letters from Mothers to President Lincoln

In the summer of 1818, when Abraham Lincoln was nine years old, his mother, Nancy, caught “the milk-sick,” a then-mysterious disease caused by drinking the milk of cows that had eaten white snakeroot. (We know it today as brucellosis.) Her breath grew shorter, her skin turned sallow and cold, her pulse faded and slowed. Within a week she was dead. In adulthood, Lincoln confided to a friend about how lonely he felt in the months afterward, and how he found solace in the Bible stories his mother had told him; the words restored her voice to his mind’s ear. “All that I am, or hope to be,” he said, “I owe to my angel mother.” Doubtless Lincoln thought of his mother when he received letters from women whose sons were fighting in the Civil War.