The 11-Year-Old Who Gave Lincoln His Beard
On October 15, 1860, eleven-year-old Grace Bedell wrote Abraham Lincoln a letter that changed the face of his presidency — literally.
Abraham Lincoln's face is among the most recognizable in history: the tall hat, the sorrowful eyes, the beard — grown full, with the upper lip clean-shaven. It is hard to imagine him without it. But when he ran for president in 1860, Lincoln was clean-shaven, as he had been all his life. The beard was someone else's idea. She was eleven years old.
Her name was Grace Bedell, and she lived in Westfield, New York. Like many Americans that autumn, she had been following the presidential campaign, and she had formed a firm opinion about the Republican candidate's appearance. On October 15, 1860, she sat down and wrote him a letter.
Grace was blunt. Lincoln's face, she told him, was too thin. He would look a great deal better, she advised, if he would "let your whiskers grow." And she offered a political argument no campaign manager had thought of: "All the ladies like whiskers and they would tease their husbands to vote for you and then you would be President." She had four brothers, she added — some already for Lincoln, the rest gettable, if he complied.
Lincoln wrote back four days later, on October 19. He thanked his young correspondent graciously, and addressed her proposal with characteristic dry humor: "As to the whiskers, having never worn any, do you not think people would call it a piece of silly affectation if I were to begin it now?" It was a polite no — or so it seemed.
But the letter worked on him. By the time Lincoln left Springfield for Washington in February 1861, the whiskers were growing. And on his inaugural journey east, his train stopped in Westfield — and Lincoln asked after his young adviser. Grace was brought through the crowd to meet the president-elect, and she later recalled him showing her his new beard: proof, more or less, that he had taken an eleven-year-old's counsel.
The beard became inseparable from the man. Through the Civil War, through the Emancipation Proclamation and Gettysburg, the bearded Lincoln stared out from photographs and engravings — the face a grieving nation came to trust. Cartoonists, sculptors, and eventually the penny all preserved the whiskers Grace Bedell had suggested.
Grace grew up, married, and moved west to Kansas, where she lived most of her life. She never sought fame for the letter. But every image of Lincoln reminds us of a small, true thing: that history sometimes turns on the honest advice of a child — and that the most famous beard in American history began with a letter dated October 15, 1860.
No verifiable public-domain or Creative Commons image could be confirmed for this story, so it is published without a photo.
