In the winter of 1862, President Abraham Lincoln sat beside the bed of a dying patient and asked the nurse to tell him her story again. Not the boy’s story—her own. He had just lost his eleven-year-old son, Willie, to typhoid fever, while his youngest son, Tad, lay sick in another room. His wife, Mary Todd Lincoln, had stopped getting out of bed and refused to attend the funeral.
The nurse was Rebecca Pomroy, a widow from Boston who had already buried her husband and two children before the war began. She had spent nearly twenty years caring for a husband whose lungs were failing and children who did not survive. By the time she reached the White House, she had buried her spouse, two of her children, and her mother, leaving her with only one son. In the summer of 1861, she responded to a newspaper advertisement seeking women willing to nurse wounded soldiers.
By September, she was in Washington. She was not looking for the White House. The White House came looking for her. The story of how Rebecca Pomroy came to sit with the Lincoln family, and what she gave them during those months of grief, remained hidden for over a century.
In 2007, a collector of Civil War memorabilia was sorting through a series of old letters at an exhibition in Nashville when he found one written on paper bearing the presidential seal. The collection—51 pieces in total, including photographs, letters, a ring, a cup, and a small cross made of braided human hair—arrived at the Library of Congress in 2022. That cross is no longer than a thumb. It is not made of wood, silver, or bone.
It is made of tightly braided human hair, capped with metal ends. Beside it lie a pair of earrings, a metal ring engraved with a heart, and a handful of flowers, now flattened and colorless, picked from the White House garden more than 160 years ago. These items belonged to Rebecca Pomroy. And for most of a century, almost no one knew she existed.
Born in Boston in 1832, Pomroy received no formal education. She learned to sew, to stitch shirts and collars, piecework paid by the unit, carried home in a basket and returned when finished. She learned early that hands can be forced to work when nothing else in a person works. In that room with Lincoln, only one of them knew how to survive such pain.
It was not him. She had already lived through the loss of her husband and two children before the war began. She had sat beside their beds, watched them die, and somehow continued. Lincoln, according to her account, asked her to explain how a person goes on living.
Night after night, he sat beside her, listening. The president, who carried the weight of a nation at war, was learning about grief from a woman who had lost everything. When the Lincolns prepared to leave the White House after the war, they asked Pomroy what they could do for her. She made one request: that they help her find her son, who had gone to sea and never returned.
As for what she refused, and why her grave remained unmarked for more than a century, those details are preserved in the collection now held at the Library of Congress. The story of the woman who sat with a grieving president, and what she did with her own grief, was finally being told.