Abraham Lincoln, 13 October 1862

LINCOLN, Abraham (1809-1865). Autograph letter signed ("A. Lincoln"), as President, to Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton, Washington, 13 October 1862.

One page, 200 x 125mm, bifolium, Executive Mansion stationery with blank integral leaf containing later clerical docket on verso (a little wear at folds, small tape repair to verso).

Lincoln praises a "devoted union man" hurt by the ravages of war. "I have ample evidence," he writes Stanton, "that the bearer of this, Mr. Benjamin F. Winchester, is a most worthy gentleman, and devoted Union man. His means of subsistence is totally broken up by the taking of the Female Seminary at Frederick Md. for a government hospital. I shall be really obliged if you can find a place of Additional Pay-Master, Quarter-Master, or Commissary for him." He got it. War Department records show that Winchester ended the war as a Captain and Commissary of Subsistence.

The Female Seminary was one of 19 private buildings converted to house the massive number of Union and Confederate soldiers wounded in neighboring battles, especially Antietam three weeks before. Lincoln visited the wounded in Frederick on 4 October, after his conferences with McClellan. Hailed by an enthusiastic crowd outside, Lincoln declined, as usual, to speak but a few words of thanks: "I might perhaps talk nonsense to you for half an hour and it wouldn't hurt anybody," he joked. But he gave "thanks to our good soldiers for the services they have rendered, the energy they have shown, the hardships they have endured, and the blood they have shed for this Union of ours" (quoted in Williams and McKinsey, History of Frederick County, Md., p. 381).