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Introduction

Thomas Stackpole was a White House employee who once confided to the president’s close friend, Senator Orville H. Browning, many things about Mrs. Lincoln’s financial misdeeds that were, as Browning wrote in his diary, “painful to hear, and will result in the disgrace of the family at the White House, unless they are corrected.” Knowledgeable about Mary Lincoln’s ethical lapses, Stackpole presumably was trying to help her, but he was evidently not blind to the ways in which his being useful could be translated into presidential favor, and how this, in turn, could work to his financial benefit.

Abraham Lincoln and Mary Lincoln, autograph letters signed to John E. Wool
30 Sept. 1862
AMs 353/12

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