President Lincoln Spends Christmas Day with Wounded Soldiers

December 25, 1862

President and Mrs. Lincoln “visit many hospitals in afternoon,” according to a local newspaper.   Mrs. Lincoln had been preparing to help serve Christmas dinner at the hospitals for several days.   There were more than 20 hospitals in Washington.   Indeed, novelist Harriet Beecher Stowe wrote that the city “was one great hospital of wounded soldiers; the churches, the public buildings all filled with the maimed, the sick and suffering…”

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