The most recognizable face in American history exists because a child wrote a letter.

In October 1860, 11-year-old Grace Bedell of Westfield, New York, wrote to Abraham Lincoln with some campaign advice. He should grow whiskers, she told him. His face was too thin. And she made a political argument for it: “All the ladies like whiskers and they would tease their husbands to vote for you.”

Consider what she was actually saying. Women could not vote in 1860. Grace Bedell, at eleven, had worked out that they could still influence an election through the men in their households — and she put that in a letter to a presidential candidate.

Lincoln grew the beard.

Every image you have of Abraham Lincoln — the photographs, the penny, the five-dollar bill, the memorial in Washington — is a face shaped by a fifth-grader’s marketing note.

And he didn’t forget her. On his way to Washington for the inauguration, Lincoln had his train stop at Westfield. He asked for Grace Bedell by name, met her in front of a crowd, and showed her the whiskers she’d asked for.

He never shaved it off. He wore that beard through the entire war, and he was wearing it at Ford’s Theatre.

There’s a lesson in here about the enormous consequences of small acts, but I think the better lesson is about Lincoln himself. He was in the middle of a presidential campaign in a country coming apart at the seams, and he read a letter from an eleven-year-old girl, took the advice, and then made a point of stopping his train to thank her.

That’s not a small man’s instinct.

This is one of 101 questions answered in The Civil War Little Black Book: Secrets, History, and Trivia of America’s Defining Conflict.

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