1864-04-14

“Send Him To Her, By All Means”

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Apr. 14. To Edwin M. Stanton, on letter of “Miss C. N.” asking discharge of “would be husband,”

“Hon. Sec. of War Send him to her, by all means,”

purported copy, InFtwL–Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln. Volume 8.


    On April 5, 1864, Lincoln received a letter from a broken-hearted girl in Washington County, Pennsylvania. “After long hesitation through dread and fear,” she began, “I have at last concluded to inform you of my troubles.” The man to whom she had been engaged for some years had joined the army, had later been permitted to go home to vote, and they had, as she put it, “very foolishly indulged too freely in matrimonial affairs.” And now “the results of our indulgences are going to bring upon us both an unlawful family providing you do not take mercy upon us and grant him a leave of absence in order to ratify past events. … I hope and pray to God that you will not cast me aside in scorn and dismay.” Reading the letter, Lincoln was deeply touched. He stared out the window with unseeing eyes in which there were doubtlessly tears. . . . Picking up his pen, Lincoln wrote the following words to Stanton across the bottom of the girl’s letter: “Send him to her by all means.” 

By Dale Carnegie,“Lincoln, the Unknown”,p. 190,Carnegie-185-178-32

Lincoln’s Handwriting