LITTLE SISTER Emilie Todd Helm and the Lincolns
LITTLE SISTER
Emilie Todd Helm and the Lincolns
by Angela Esco Elder
She expected to hear “Fee, fi, fo, fum!” He was tall, a stranger, walking in her home, shaking hands with adults in the wide hall. As her eyes tracked his every move, ten-year-old Emilie (sometimes spelled “Emily”) Todd became convinced he was the hungry giant of Jack and the Beanstalk. “I shrank closer to my mother and tried to hide behind her voluminous skirts,” Emilie later explained, but he found her. Abraham Lincoln, the newly elected congressman from the Prairie State, lifted her from her hiding place and exclaimed with a smile, “So this is little sister.” After his death, Emilie reflected, “I was always after that called by him ‘little sister.’”
The Civil War shattered many American families, but for the Todds and Lincolns, it was particularly ruinous. Of the fourteen Todd children, six sided with the Union, eight with the Confederacy. The war killed two of Emilie’s brothers, then her husband. Lincoln lost his son Willie in 1862, then his own life three years later. These two families were not alone in their grief—the war claimed an estimated 750,000 souls—nor unique in the way it haunted them. But looking at Emilie’s life as a Confederate wife and widow sheds new light on the Lincolns’ familial ties. The shared grief of a divided family reminds us not just of the pain war brought into households, but also that the home stretched across political lines. Yet for all the grief, it is also perhaps comforting to know that some familial love survived political division in a war so sad, so bloody, and so devastating. As messy as love within extended families often is, it nevertheless endured such traumas. Tracing the life of “little sister” through childhood, marriage, and widowhood reveals a familial relationship at its highs and its lows. The kinship of Emilie, Mary, and “Brother Lincoln,” as complicated as it became, reminds us that the bonds of family, even when stretched from White House to Confederate battlefield, were not easily severed.
This story begins in the 1830s, in a grand brick house in Lexington, Kentucky. More hive than home, this was a place buzzing with Todd children, from toddlers to teens. On November 11, 1836, the birth of Emilie brought the number of children living within the Todd household to nine. She was an exceptionally beautiful child. “I think you were too young to remember it,” one family friend began, recalling the time when Emilie was kidnapped by a childless couple. The event “turned the City of Lexington upside down” as the minutes ticked by “with untold agony.” Emilie would be discovered hours later, safely in the childless couple’s home. “The man and his wife were considered good people,” Emilie was told, “but your uncommon beauty overcame his sense of right.” As Emilie grew, she became more beautiful. But in a tornado of Todd siblings, that wasn’t enough; Emilie also developed a sharp wit. The Todds, as children and adults, were renowned and notorious, for better or worse. As Abraham Lincoln would chuckle one day in the future, “the child has a tongue like the rest of the Todds.”
Just before Emilie’s seventh birthday, her older sister married Abraham Lincoln. Mary, who once described herself as a “ruddy pine knot,” may not have been as beautiful as Emilie, but neither was her betrothed. Abraham’s face and frame were the subject of constant comment; even Emilie’s sister Frances called him “the plainest man” in Springfield, Illinois. Mary and Abraham had met at the home of her eldest sister Elizabeth, and after a tumultuous two-year courtship, said their vows in Elizabeth’s parlor. The cake turned out poorly, and the rain fell heavily, but on November 4, 1842, Abraham slipped onto Mary’s finger a ring engraved with the words “Love is Eternal.” Together, they immersed themselves in Abraham’s political career.
Over the following decade, Emilie too would blossom into adulthood and, like her sister Mary, marry. Her selection would be a West Point graduate and rising Kentucky lawyer-politician, Benjamin Hardin Helm. He was from a wealthy and well-connected family, he was handsome, and he was in love with nineteen-year-old Emilie, a woman “absolutely essential to my very being.” A friend, when hearing about the upcoming wedding ceremony, hoped Emilie “may possess a disposition as genial and pleasant as his [Helm’s] own.” This friend also compared marriage to losing one’s freedom and running “his neck into a noose.” Luckily for Emilie, Helm would not agree with the sentiment. After their wedding on March 26, 1856, Helm would write, “what a wonderful change we undergo in this world.” Together, they made a home in Kentucky. Like Mary, Emilie then spent her days devoted to motherhood, housekeeping, and her husband’s career.
As the nation fell apart in 1861, President Lincoln called his brother-in-law Helm to the White House and offered him a high-ranking position in the U.S. army. It was all Helm had ever wanted. Mary added an incentive, assuring him that “Emilie will be a belle at the White House receptions and we will be so proud of her.” The protection of his young wife and children was no small thing for Helm. “I never had such a struggle,” he told a friend, “and it almost killed me to decline.” When explaining her husband’s decision, Emilie would later say, “for weal or woe he felt he must side with his own people.” The problem was, no matter which side he selected, he would conflict with those he loved. Helm may not have wanted to “strike against his own people,” but ultimately, he could not avoid it. Helm aligned himself with the Confederacy, and the Todd family publicly tore in two.
The division within her family was hard for Mary, made harder by its public nature. “I see from today’s paper Mrs. Lincoln is indignant at my Bro. David’s being in the Confederate service,” wrote Elodie, another Todd sister. She recorded that Mary had declared “that by no word or act of hers should he escape punishment for his treason against her husband’s government should he fall into their hands,” but she then reflected, “I do not believe she ever said it.” In truth, Mary was quite upset by the betrayal of her siblings. “It is true,” Emilie would tell a reporter after the war, “that Mrs. Lincoln’s family ties were with the South.” Because of this, Emilie felt her sister was misunderstood during the war, accused of being sympathetic to the Confederacy, even though Mary “was the soul of loyalty to her husband, and to the cause which he represented.” In 1861, both sisters had much to worry about, as they supported their husbands. Emilie feared for the future of her family, extended and immediate, and about her husband’s Confederate service. “This separation I sincerely hope will not continue long,” Helm assured Emilie, but “I have gone in for the war and if God spares my life I expect to battle to the end of it.”
He would not be spared. On September 20, 1863, Emilie’s husband found himself at the Battle of Chickamauga in a “perfect tornado of bullets.” He had prepared for this, drafting a will in May 1861, to “bequeath to my beloved wife” his property “to be used by her in rearing and educating our children.” They had three now, born in 1857, 1859, and 1862. Though prepared, Helm still did not wish to die. A young captain from Kentucky celebrated when he learned of the Confederate victory, writing, “It is glorious news. It makes a fellow feel taller, stouter, fatter, better, lighter, heartier, saucier, braver, kinder, richer, and everything good & great. Hurra for hurra!!” But then he reflected on the price paid for that victory: “Gen Helm of Ky is killed. So the wail comes up with the shout of victory.”
According to Supreme Court Justice David Davis, an Illinois friend of Lincoln, some of that wailing came from the White House. “I called to see him about 3 o’clock on the 22d of September. I found him in the greatest grief. ‘Davis,’ said he, ‘I feel as David of old did when he was told of the death of Absalom. Would to God I had died for thee, oh Absalom, my son, my son?’” Lincoln, ever the deep reader, resonated with this biblical story of war and divided family. Davis had never seen Lincoln so moved, and upon witnessing this pronounced sadness, Davis decided to leave. “I closed the door and left him alone.”
Emilie would not be left alone, as a stream of condolence letters arrived in the wake of her husband’s death. These letters did many things, including reveal the expectations that southern society placed upon its widows. Prescriptive letters encouraged Emilie to accept empathy graciously, find solace in religion, allow physical assistance, and recognize that her loss was not her loss alone. A widow, in the ideal form, did all this and more. For example, Emilie’s community prayed for her to seek God, believing that “every tendril of your anguished heart that reached unto Him, will be greatly bound and healed.” Letters also encouraged Emilie to seek support, reminding her that “any thing or all I have would I most cheerfully yield for the relief of yourself or Hardin’s children.”
Condolence letters from family, friends, and neighbors sympathized with the new widow, but also reminded her that the death also affected Kentucky—and the Confederacy. “A great nation will bear on you its struggling heart,” wrote one, “and millions of hearts will vibrate with your sorrow. Your loss has been theirs.” As the wife of a Confederate officer, Emilie’s heartbreak would not belong solely to her. “While my heart bleeds for you,” wrote a Mr. Halderman, “I also feel the deepest anguish at the severe loss sustained by the service and the Confederacy in the death of your husband.” Condolence letters, with their complex catalog of directives and comfort, provided Emilie with her script. And in the decades to come, Emilie would prove to be “as good a wife as any man on earth could desire,” both “pure and lovely,” even without her husband present. Widowhood was a role she would play well.
But before beginning this formal work of mourning, Emilie wanted to return home to Kentucky. She had been traveling with her husband’s regiment and was in Georgia at the time of his death. Emilie turned to her brother-in-law in the White House. “At the instance of Mrs. E T Helm it becomes my painful duty to announce to you the death of General Ben. Hardin Helm—your Brother-in-law,” began Confederate financier E. M. Bruce to Lincoln, on October 3. Although fighting on opposite sides of the war, he felt that Lincoln would be satisfied to learn that Helm fell while leading his brigade, “honorably battling for the cause he thought Just, and righteous. . . . I know you can but admire him for his deeds.” Bruce then turned to Emilie’s situation. “Mrs Helm is crushed by the blow” and desired a return to her mother. “She asks that you order the war department to send her a pass to enter the Federal truce Boat at City Point.” Bruce concluded with a message for Mary—that “Mrs Helm desires to be affectionately remembered to her sister.”
Lincoln issued a pass for Emilie and her children, but unfortunately it was not enough. Emilie made it safely to Richmond, then boarded a boat to Baltimore. There, Union officials informed her that she would have to sign an oath of allegiance to the United States, or she would not proceed. Emilie refused. Her husband had just sacrificed his life in opposition to the United States, so how could she promise to uphold it? As Emilie’s daughter would later explain, “it was treason to her dead husband [and] to her beloved Southland.” Unable to persuade her, the officers telegraphed the White House for instructions. Lincoln supposedly responded with one line: “Send her to me.”
When Emilie arrived at the White House in early December 1863, and embraced her sister and brother-in-law, it was a tear-filled scene in which “we were all too grief-stricken at first for speech.” Emilie wore black, “a pathetic little figure in her trailing black crepe.” So did Mary, mourning the death of her son, Willie, who had died more than a year and a half earlier. Emilie and Mary dined together, steering the conversation to the past. The present was too painful, “like tearing open a fresh and bleeding wound.” Even with this strategy, Emilie felt the pressure of politics. “Sister and I cannot open our hearts to each other as freely as we would like,” Emilie wrote later in the week. “This frightful war comes between us like a barrier of granite closing our lips but not our hearts, for though our tongues are tied, we weep over our dead together and express through our clasped hands the sympathy we feel for each other in our mutual grief.” Though an awkward silence sometimes settled over the sisters, mutual misery and mutual sympathy became the tether that tied them.
Fondness, too, remained. Emilie wrote that her sister Mary “and Brother Lincoln pet me as if I were a child, and, without words, try to comfort me.” Abraham hoped she would take another trip to see them. “Little Sister,” he said, “I hope you can come up and spend the summer with us.” He believed it would be good for Mary, and good for her. Meanwhile, Mary shared her fears about Abraham’s health. He had lost weight, the strain of the war making him appear almost gaunt, ghoul-like to some. Emilie thought he looked “very ill,” but when Mary pressed her for her opinion, she only answered, “He seems thinner than I ever saw him.” This prompted Mary to reply, “Oh Emilie, will we ever awake from this hideous nightmare?” Emilie did not respond. She did not want to discourage her sister further. Even with their disharmonious political beliefs, conversations like this reveal how their affection endured.
In some conversations, Emilie and the Lincolns did address politics straightforwardly. “You know, Little Sister,” Lincoln began one of their many talks that week, “I tried to have Ben come with me. I hope you do not feel any bitterness or that I am in any way to blame for all this sorrow.” Emilie knew that her late husband not only respected but cared for Abraham Lincoln. She assured him as much. She even explained that her husband had felt “deeply grateful to him for his generous offer to make him an officer in the Federal Army.” The moment rested heavily between them. Eventually, Lincoln “put his arms around me and we both wept.”
Soon after arriving, Emilie would leave. Certainly, she was ready to return home. But also, her presence in the White House, even for a week, was an embarrassment for the Lincolns. Lincoln told his friend Orville Hickman Browning that he “did not wish it known” that she was in the house. Though they were willing to create a retreat for her, others felt the White House was no sanctuary for a Confederate widow, no matter who her brother-in-law may be. “Well, we whipped the rebels at Chattanooga and I hear, madam, that the scoundrels ran like scared rabbits,” jabbed Sen. Ira Harris of New York while on a visit to the president’s home. Answering “with a choking throat,” Emilie retorted, “It was an example, Senator Harris, that you set them at Bull Run and Manassas.” After a failed attempt to get a rise from Mary, Harris returned to prodding Emilie and informed her “if I had twenty sons they should all be fighting the rebels.” Forgetting where she was but not her Confederate loyalties, Emilie responded, “And if I had twenty sons, Senator Harris, they should all be opposing yours.” When the incident was relayed to Lincoln, he chuckled. He had spent enough time with the Todds to know that these were exactly the turns of phrase they were famous for. “You should not have a rebel in your house,” concluded Gen. Daniel Sickles, who had accompanied Harris and overheard the conversation. Drawing himself to his full height, the president replied in a quiet voice, “Excuse me, General Sickles, my wife and I are in the habit of choosing our own guests. We do not need from our friends either advice or assistance in the matter.” Even with this defense in place, Emilie decided to leave.
On December 14, 1863, Lincoln wrote out an amnesty document for Emilie which stated that she had taken an oath of loyalty. Emilie, perhaps falsely, later claimed that she had never signed such an oath. “Mr. Lincoln handed me the safeguard” she admitted later, but “nothing was said to me then or afterwards about taking the oath of allegiance” because “Brother Lincoln knew . . . this for me would be impossible.” Before leaving the White House, Emilie also requested “an order for the protection of some Cotton she had,” but this made Lincoln uncomfortable. As he shared with his friend Browning, “he was afraid he would be censured if he did so.” (This would not be the last Lincoln heard of the cotton.)
Emilie safely returned to Kentucky where, among other things, she visited Confederate prisoners of war. By August 1864, Lincoln’s frustration regarding the actions of his sister-in-law had grown. “I hear rumor to-day that you recently sought to arrest her, but was prevented by her presenting the paper from me,” Lincoln wrote in a telegram to Maj. Gen. Stephen G. Burbridge, in Lexington, Kentucky. That document from her December visit, as Lincoln recalled, was to protect Emilie’s travels as a Confederate widow. “I do not intend to protect her against the consequences of disloyal words or acts, spoken or done by her since her return to Kentucky,” Lincoln wrote. Lincoln then instructed the general: “deal with her for her current conduct, just as you would with any other.”
Lincoln’s frustration and weariness are evident in this telegram. The presidential election was looming—a contest he feared he would lose. The press was relentless in its attacks on his presidency, his decisions, his policies. He continued to lose weight. He wasn’t sleeping well. And much of Mary’s family continued to support the Confederacy, in word and deed. It had been a hard year for Emilie, too. She had not been arrested, but she had just passed the one-year anniversary of her husband’s death. Her bitterness and desperation had grown. As a widow, and a woman in the nineteenth century, her options for financial support were limited. In early October 1864, she made a quick visit to the Lincolns, a trip she would describe as “my long tedious unproductive and sorrowful visit to you.” She pleaded for a pass to travel south to collect her cotton, but she did not receive it. On October 30, home again in Kentucky, her mother sick, her brother dead from “utter want and destitution,” Emilie sat down to write a letter to Lincoln, to make the request again. Emilie knew Lincoln well, knew of his love for her, and aimed at his heart. “The last money I have in the world I used to make the unfruitful appeal to you,” she wrote, adding, “I also would remind you that your minnie bullets have made us what we are and I feel I have that additional claim upon you.” She knew that would upset him, but concluded, “I beg you will make some excuse for a woman almost crazed with misfortune.”
The optics of Lincoln providing a special permit to his sister-in-law—the widow of a Confederate officer who remained loyal to him and his cause—would not be received positively. They all knew this. Even if Emilie had not been arrested as rumored two months prior, she had already gained a reputation. Lincoln would not provide her the pass, at least not directly, though there is some speculation that he might have allowed another woman to pass through in her place. Either way, Emilie and Lincoln never saw each other again. She felt pain, and so did he, a pain reflected in his second inaugural address. “Let us strive on to finish the work we are in,” he famously said, “to bind up the nation’s wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan.” Notably, he did not specify Union widow.
All too soon, it was Mary’s turn to face widowhood.
On April 15, 1865, Abraham Lincoln’s death sent Mary into a mental spiral that ended only with her own death seventeen years later. In the hours following the murder, Mary filled the White House with what Elizabeth Keckly remembered as “the wails of a broken heart, the unearthly shrieks, the terrible convulsions.” Mary stayed in bed, refused visitors, and seemed “more dead than alive—broken by the horrors of that dreadful night as well as worn down by bodily sickness.” The loss of her husband was one from which Mary would never fully recover. In the months and years to come, Mary’s overwhelming grief, shopping sprees, and demands for attention made life challenging for those who loved her most. Emilie would never be as close with Mary as she once was. “In her later years I saw little of her,” Emilie admitted, calling Mary “highly sensitive” while acknowledging that the many tragedies of Mary’s life were “more than any one could bear up under, and her last years were very sad.” Their older sister Elizabeth explained that Mary “had much to bear though she don’t bear it well; She has acted foolishly—unwisely and made the world hate her.” And hate her many did, without sympathy for her loss or her immense grief. Mary seemed unable to bear her suffering as a widow should.
By contrast, Emilie played the part of widow well. She may have lost her husband, but she eventually prospered as the widow of Benjamin Hardin Helm. She joined bustling crowds in 1883 for a gubernatorial inauguration, continuously crisscrossed Kentucky visiting friends and family, joined the Filson Club in Louisville, and served as a postmistress in Elizabethtown for twelve years, appointed with the aid of her nephew, Secretary of War Robert T. Lincoln.
The veterans of her late husband’s Orphan Brigade practically worshipped Emilie. When the Elizabethtown Volunteers changed its name to the Helm Guards, they did so not in honor of her husband, but “in honor of Mrs. E. T. Helm, the widow of the late General Hardin Helm.” She attended nearly every reunion of her late husband’s regiment, and at the 1920 reunion outside of Paris, Kentucky, her portrait “appeared on the badges of red, white and blue, worn by the veterans of the Brigade,” and “beautiful tributes were paid to her.” She never remarried, and in many ways, her devotion to Helm reminded all those who met her that a Confederate soldier was irreplaceable.
Emilie also became obsessed with compiling a genealogy of the Todd family, and she penned hundreds of letters to strangers and relatives across the nation to gather information. “You must not be discouraged in your undertaking,” wrote one relative, “it is not characteristic of the Todds, to give up any thing fairly began.” As Emilie became increasingly consumed with her project, her older sister Elizabeth teased her in a letter of April 30, 1880, “Do not exhaust yourself in your research, it will be impossible to trace beyond Adam and Eve.” Emilie continued her work for decades. Perhaps, in documenting the more honorable deeds of her ancestors, Emilie hoped to repair the present reputation of the Todd family. After all, of the fourteen Todd siblings, Emilie lived longest. She survived her three younger siblings by over forty years, a lonely fact not lost on the public. “Mrs. Helm is the only member of her family living to-day,” wrote the Adair County News when announcing Emilie’s visit to the county in February 1905.
Emilie became a living relic of the Todds, not only representing them but shaping how they would be remembered. Better yet, Emilie’s notorious siblings could not undermine her efforts from their graves. She used the social capital she gained as a devoted widow in her attempts to salvage the image of Mary, who had passed away in 1882. In 1898, the Saint Paul Globe reported that Emilie denied that there had ever been two marriage ceremonies arranged for Mary and Abraham and rejected “the existence of that in harmony to which so many allusions have been made.” The paper concluded, “It would be better for the world to accept these statements, bury rank gossip in the dark pit in which it belongs and henceforth regard Mrs. Lincoln only as the honorable and honored helpmeet of the greatest American of the century.” Of course, as Emilie knew, Abraham and Mary had multiple engagements and marital discord, but this was not the image that she wanted remembered. And as the last one of the Todd siblings alive, she could have the final word.
In 1909, “while ten thousand people stood in reverence with bared heads . . . a veiling of the stars and stripes fell gracefully away” to reveal a statue of Abraham Lincoln at his birthplace in Hodgenville, Kentucky. Papers reported “the canopy that hid the statue from view was drawn away by the hand of Mrs. Ben Hardin Helm, a sister to the wife of Lincoln, and cheer after cheer went up.” Even with the disagreements over politics and the loss of a war, Emilie found it within herself to honor Abraham Lincoln, pulling a string to drop the drape “showing the martyred president sitting in a chair” before a crowd of ten thousand Americans. Instead of rehashing the political divisions of the Todd and Lincoln families, reporters emphasized their familial ties. It was as Emilie had written, “we should revive no memories that may embitter the future.” To the nation, the reunification of Emilie and Abraham represented the reunification of white America. If a Confederate woman could honor the brother-in-law responsible for the death of her husband and two brothers, at least as she saw it, could not the nation also become one again?
Emilie also formed a close relationship with Robert Todd Lincoln, Mary and Abraham’s eldest (and only surviving) son. Though Emilie was his aunt, in many ways, she is better understood as a sort of sibling, as they were just seven years apart in age. Both Robert and Emilie loved Mary, although both gained the reputation of being her enemy at various points in their lives. Both spent decades battling rumors—true and untrue—about their family. Robert assisted Emilie’s daughter, Katherine Helm, in her publication of The True Story of Mary, Wife of Lincoln (1928). The result is a biography that is part record, containing selections of Emilie’s letters and diary, but also part myth. When it was time to gift a portrait of his mother to the White House Collection, Robert and his wife selected a portrait painted by Emilie’s daughter in 1925.
Through Emilie, we see how the emotional, human experience of losing a husband could be channeled and reinvested. In her mourning, she earned social capital, which she spent wisely. Certainly, death was nothing new for either the Lincolns or the Todds. When Abraham walked into the White House as president, he had the emotional baggage of a dead mother, father, sister, sweetheart, and son, who had passed just after his fourth birthday. The coming years would bring the death of another son, then a beloved brother-in-law, atop the killings of dozens of friends, and thousands of Americans. Life was sad, tragic, and broken. The family was broken. And yet, when disaster of the worst sort hit, Emilie and Mary mourned together. It was messy, it wasn’t always conciliatory, but in the end, decades of healing later, Emilie stood before a cheering crowd with the statue of her brother-in-law, a man tangentially responsible for her own widowhood. Family endured.
Emilie did not pass away until February 20, 1930, sixty-six years after her husband. Though she had devoted a lifetime to the work of mourning, she did not want anyone to mourn her. “We ought not to grieve over anyone who has to live until they are feeble and unable to enjoy life,” wrote Emilie years before, adding, “I hope every one will feel this if I live to be old.”
Angela Esco Elder is associate professor of history at Converse University. Her publications include Love and Duty: Confederate Widows and the Emotional Politics of Loss (2022) and a co-edited collection, Practical Strangers: The Courtship Correspondence of Nathaniel Dawson and Elodie Todd, Sister of Mary Todd Lincoln (2017).