Disunion follows the Civil War as it unfolded.

An old adage states, “You can pick your friends, but not your relatives.” The truth of this maxim was brought home to Abraham and Mary Lincoln when Mary’s half sister, Emilie Todd Helm, visited the White House in late 1863.

Emilie was widowed on Sept. 20, 1863, when her husband, a Confederate brigadier general named Benjamin Hardin Helm, was killed in the Battle of Chickamauga. At the beginning of the war, Lincoln had offered Helm, whom he viewed more as a brother than an in-law, an officer’s rank in the Union Army, but the Kentuckian Helm opted to raise a regiment for the Confederacy instead.

Nonetheless, his death affected the Lincolns very deeply. Seeking to comfort Helm’s 26-year-old widow, Lincoln invited Emilie and her three children to visit. He did so without fanfare, since she had been, after all, the wife of a rebel general. On Dec. 13, 1863, one of Lincoln’s secretaries, John Hay, recorded in his diary that Mrs. Helm had “just arrived from Secessia.”

The reunion was a sad but loving one. As Emilie recalled to her daughter Katherine many years later, “Mr. Lincoln and my sister met me with the warmest affection, we were all too grief-stricken at first for speech. I have lost my husband, they have lost their fine little son Willie, and Mary and I have lost three brothers in the Confederate service.” The following day, Lincoln granted Emilie a letter of amnesty that he wrote out himself – although she never signed the requisite Oath of Allegiance – making her among the first to receive a pardon under his recently issued Proclamation of Amnesty and Reconstruction.

The contrast between the half sisters could not have been more marked. Emilie, whom Lincoln always called Little Sister, was 18 years Mary’s junior. Where Mary was middle-aged and physically unappealing, Emilie was young, sophisticated and highly attractive – a true Southern belle. Yet, despite the differences, the two became immediately close through a shared burden of grief and loss. As Emilie later remembered it, “We could only embrace each other in silence and tears. Sister and I dined intimately, alone. Our tears gathered silently and fell unheeded as with choking voices we tried to talk of immaterial things.”

It haunted the president that Emilie might blame him for her husband’s death. “Mr. Lincoln,” she recalled,

in the intimate talks we had was very much affected over the misfortunes of our family; and of my husband he said, ‘You know, Little Sister, I tried to have Ben come with me. I hope you do not feel any bitterness or that I am in any way to blame for all this sorrow.’ I answered it was ‘the fortune of war’ and that while my husband loved him and had been deeply grateful to him for his generous offer to make him an officer in the Federal Army, he had to follow his conscience and that for weal or woe he felt he must side with his own people. Mr. Lincoln put his arms around me and we both wept.

Despite the president’s efforts to keep Emilie’s six-day visit quiet, the presence of a Confederate widow living in the White House did not go unnoticed, and prompted angry reactions from a number of Northern luminaries, as well as harsh criticism from the press. At one point Emilie, still dressed in mourning crepe, found herself in conversation with two visitors to the White House, Senator Ira Harris of New York and Gen. Daniel Sickles. Harris was deliberately rude to the widow, apprising her of a recent Union victory: “We have whipped the rebels at Chattanooga, and I hear the scoundrels ran liked scared rabbits!” Never one to let an insult pass unanswered, Emilie responded, “It was the example, Senator Harris, that you set them at Bull Run and Manassas.”

Conscious of the precarious position in which her visit had placed the Lincolns, Emilie reacted emotionally to the encounter. “I forgot that I was a guest of the President and Mrs. Lincoln at the White House,” she said. “I was cold and trembling. I stumbled out of the room somehow, for I was blinded by tears and my heart was beating to suffocation. Before I reached the privacy of my room where unobserved I could give way to my grief, Sister Mary overtook me and put her arms around me. … Her own tears were falling but she said no word of the occurrence and I understood that she was powerless to protect a guest at the White House from cruel rudeness.”

Immediately following the exchange, General Sickles, who enjoyed a close personal relationship with the Lincolns despite being a scoundrel of the first order, sought out the president, and boldly insisted that Lincoln “not have that Rebel in your house.” Lincoln icily informed the general that he and his wife would choose their own guests, without benefit of help from others.

Ultimately, there was more to the Lincolns’ motives in having Emilie close to them than simple kindness. Each hoped that Emilie’s visit would help the other. While Mary was concerned over the president’s bouts of melancholy, he was worried about her mental stability. Lincoln confided in Emilie, “You and Mary love each other – it is good for her to have you with her – I feel worried about Mary, her nerves have gone to pieces; she cannot hide from me that the strain she had been under has been too much for her mental as well as her physical health.” At one point, a distraught Mary Lincoln, whose Kentucky roots had inspired suspicion and calumny from a number of the administration’s critics, implored her half sister, “Kiss me, Emilie, and tell me that you love me. I seem to be the scape-goat for both North and South.”

Circumstances dictated that there would inevitably be tension during the visit. It occurred one day between the Lincolns’ young son Tad and Emilie’s 6-year-old daughter, Katherine, during play. Tad held up a picture of his father, stating, “This is the president.” Katie informed him in no uncertain terms that Jefferson Davis was, in fact, the president. Lincoln, overhearing the heated exchange that followed, took a child on each knee. “Well, Tad, you know who is your President, and I am your little cousin’s Uncle Lincoln.”

After returning home to Kentucky on Dec. 20, Emilie began seeking special favors from Lincoln, which put an increasing strain on their relationship. She first wrote Lincoln asking permission to send clothing to the Rebel prisoners of war at Camp Douglas, near Chicago. Lincoln’s response is not recorded. However, the following August, he sent a telegram to Maj. Gen. Stephen Burbridge, in response to “hear[ing] a rumor to-day” that Burbridge had sought to arrest Emilie, but that she had evaded arrest by showing her presidential pass.

Lincoln wrote, “I do not intend to protect her against the consequences of disloyal words or acts, spoken or done by her since her return to Kentucky, and if the paper given her by me can be construed to give her protection for such words or acts, it is hereby revoked pro tanto. Deal with her for current conduct, just as you would any other.” Neither the nature of the rumor that prompted such a harsh response from Lincoln, nor whether it had any foundation in truth, is known. Emilie later responded in print, “This despatch is a surprise to me, since I was never arrested and never had any trouble with the United States authorities.” Lincoln’s telegram did, however, serve to widen the rift between him and his sister-in-law.

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The irrepressible Emilie returned to Washington in the fall of 1864, seeking the president’s authorization to sell a stock of cotton she owned. Lincoln, who was being roundly criticized for issuing passes to cotton speculators of questionable loyalty, refused. When she got home, Little Sister wrote the president yet again, reminding Lincoln that her brother Levi had requested a loan from him in vain, and had consequently died of “utter want and desolation … another sad victim to the powers of more favored relations.” She added, “I have been a quiet citizen and request only the right which humanity and justice always gives to widows and orphans. I also would remind you that your Minnie bullets [sic] have made us what we are.”

Pleading her own poverty, she begged Lincoln to allow her another pass to travel south to sell her cotton. No response to this scathing and impertinent letter – if indeed Lincoln deigned to respond – has ever been found. However, in January 1865, Emilie wrote to Postmaster Montgomery Blair, seeking protection for her cotton in the event that it should fall into federal hands. She added, “I was in Washington in October and Mr. Lincoln then promised to give me his assistance at some future time.” It is not recorded what measures, if any, Lincoln took to aid his disaffected sister-in-law during the three months of life left to him.

Perhaps, had the Lincolns anticipated the friction that would derive from Emilie’s visit, or her persistent imposition on Lincoln’s compassion afterward, they might have chosen to mourn privately. Perhaps they had not anticipated the scope of the antipathy her visit would engender. Family ties aside, she was a devout enemy of the same Union that Lincoln was attempting to preserve, engaged in conducting a war that had claimed the lives of her husband and three brothers. Although Emilie later developed a close relationship with Robert Todd Lincoln, the initial intimacy she had experienced with Abraham and Mary faded rapidly under the harsh realities of civil conflict.

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Ron Soodalter is the author of “Hanging Captain Gordon: The Life and Trial of an American Slave Trader” and a co-author of “The Slave Next Door: Human Trafficking and Slavery in America Today.” He is a frequent contributor to America’s Civil War magazine, and has written several features for Civil War Times and Military History.