Abraham Lincoln and Mary Lincoln to Edward R. Thayer, [5 February 1857]1
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[Envelope]
1Abraham Lincoln wrote this undated invitation. The date of composition is conjectured
from the proposed day of Thursday, February 5, for the event in the invitation, and
from Orville H. Browning’s diary entry of February 5, 1857, stating that he was a guest at a “large & pleasant
party” at the Lincolns’ home in Springfield that evening.
The Lincoln Log: A Daily Chronology of the Life of Abraham Lincoln, 5 February 1857, http://www.thelincolnlog.org/Results.aspx?type=CalendarDay&day=1857-02-05; Theodore Calvin Pease and James G. Randall, eds., The Diary of Orville Hickman Browning: Volume I, 1850-1864, vol. 20 of Collections of the Illinois State Historical Library (Springfield: Illinois State Historical Library, 1925), 274.
2No response to this invitation by Edward R. Thayer has been located. For an additional
invitation to this party in Abraham Lincoln’s hand, see Abraham Lincoln and Mary Lincoln to Adolph F. C. Mueller.
Mary Lincoln described this party as a “very large” and “very handsome entertainment”.
She reported that three hundred of the five hundred invited guests attended, with
rain and a conflicting wedding party in Jacksonville preventing some guests from attending.
Katherine Helm, The True Story of Mary, Wife of Lincoln (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1928), 120-21.
Copy of Handwritten Note, 2 page(s), Abraham Lincoln Association Files, Lincoln Collection, Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum (Springfield, IL).