October 15, 1863
President Lincoln sends a pass for Mary Lincoln’s step-mother to go to Alabama to bring the recently widowed Emilie Helm back home to Kentucky: “Allow Mrs. Robert S. Todd, widow, to go south and bring her daughter, Mrs Genl B. Hardin Helm, with her children, North in Kentucky.” President and Mrs. Lincoln were very fond of Emile and her husband, General Benjamin Hardin Helm who had been killed at the Battle of Chickamauga.
President Lincoln is also concerned about his own reelection a year hence. As he works in the telegraph office of the War Department, he calculates the likely state-by-state presidential results and predicts the race will be close.
President Lincoln writes Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton: “This lady, Abigail C. Berea, had a husband and three sons in the war, and has been a nurse herself, without pay, during nearly the whole war. Her husband was killed at Gettysburg, and one of her sons also has died in the service. One other son she is willing to leave in the service where he still is, but the youngest, James H. Benjamin, private in Co. K. 104 N.Y. vols. and who is in poor health, she asks to have discharged. Let it be done.”
Abraham Lincoln and the Civil War 
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