by Rowena Mills
I am in favor of animals rights as well as human rights. That is the way of a whole human being.” — Abraham Lincoln, February 12, 1809–April 15, 1865
Abraham Lincoln’s birthday on February
12 and Presidents’ Day on February 20
are good times to remember his animals.
When Lincoln moved into the White House in
March 1861 for his first term as sixteenth president of the United States, his wife, Mary Todd
Lincoln, sons Willie and Thomas (Tad), and various animals moved also. (The eldest son, Robert,
was attending Harvard, and the second son, Eddy,
had died as a young child.) Lincoln was the first
president known to have had family kitties in
the White House. His kittens Tabby and Dixie
— gifts from Secretary of State William Seward —
were the original First Felines.
Lincoln loved cats and could play with them or
talk to them for hours. He brought home strays.
When someone asked his wife if he had a hobby,
she said, “Cats.” Lincoln fed Tabby from the table
during a formal dinner, embarrassing his wife.
He said, “If the gold fork was good enough for former President
James Buchanan, I think it is good enough for Tabby.” Frustrated,
Lincoln reportedly once said, “Dixie is smarter than my whole
cabinet! And furthermore she doesn’t talk back.”
On a visit to Union General Ulysses Grant in Virginia, Lincoln
noticed three kittens in the telegraph hut. He put them on his lap
and asked about their mother, who was dead. He recommended
that the kittens be fed and a good home found for them.
Lincoln’s compassion extended to other animals.
When he was elected president in 1860, fireworks
and cannons announcing victory in Springfield,
Illinois, where Lincoln lived, terrified the family
dog, Fido. The Lincolns thought the train trip to
Washington, D. C., and noisy celebrations would
be traumatic for Fido. They left him with friends
with strict instructions that he should be treated
with compassion.
The Lincolns also had rabbits, a horse named
Old Bob, and goats Nanny and Nanko. Hitched
to carts or kitchen chairs, the goats pulled Tad and
Willie around the White House.
When Lincoln proclaimed the last Thursday of
November 1863 as “a day of Thanksgiving and
Praise,” someone sent a live turkey to the White
House for Thanksgiving dinner. Lincoln took time
out from a Cabinet meeting to reprieve the turkey.
The White House cats consoled Lincoln, who
was depressed by the death and suffering on both
sides of the war. The sorrow was even more profound after 11-year-old Willie died on February 20,
1862, probably of typhoid fever.
A month after Lincoln’s second term began, the
war ended with the Confederate surrender on
April 9, 1865. On April 11, Lincoln gave a speech
promoting voting rights for blacks. On April 14, the Lincolns
attended a play at Ford’s Theatre. John Wilkes Booth, a well-known
actor and a Confederate spy, shot Lincoln in the head. He died the
next morning. Old Bob was the riderless horse in Lincoln’s funeral
procession.
Whatever happened to Tabby and Dixie and the other animals,
their bond with Lincoln did not end with his death.
