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Today's post brings you a wonderful story about Abraham Lincoln and three little kittens, courtesy of Kelly Cat at It's All Good. It's from the Abraham Lincoln Research Site*, and it proceeds as follows:

An excellent example of President Abraham Lincoln's tenderness occurred
near the end of the Civil War. Abraham and his family had been invited to
visit General Ulysses S. Grant's headquarters at City Point, Virginia. The
trip took place in late March of 1865 about three weeks before the
assassination. During his visit to City Point, the president happened to
be in the telegraph hut on the day that Grant's army began the final advance of
the Civil War. In the hut the president came upon three tiny
kittens. They appeared to be lost and were wandering around and
meowing.
Abraham picked up one of the kittens and asked, "Where is your mother?" A
person standing nearby said, "The mother is dead." The president continued
to pet the little kitten and said, "Then she can't grieve as many a poor mother
is grieving for a son lost in battle." Abraham picked up the other two kittens
and now had all three in his lap. He stroked their fur and quietly told them,
"Kitties, thank God you are cats, and can't understand this terrible strife that
is going on." The Chief Executive continued, "Poor little creatures, don't
cry; you'll be taken good care of." He looked toward Colonel Bowers of Grant's
staff and said, "Colonel, I hope you will see that these poor little
motherless waifs are given plenty of milk and treated kindly." Bowers
promised that he would tell the cook to take good care of them. Colonel Horace
Porter watched the president and recalled, "He would wipe their eyes tenderly
with his handkerchief, stroke their smooth coats, and listen to them purring
their gratitude to him." Quite a sight it was, thought Porter, "at an army
headquarters, upon the eve of a great military crisis in the nation's history,
to see the hand which had affixed the signature to the Emancipation Proclamation
and had signed the commissions....from the general-in-chief to the lowest
lieutenant, tenderly caressing three stray kittens."

I love it! Thanks, Kelly Cat!

*referencing Carl Sandburg's Abraham Lincoln: The War Years, Volume IV, p. 146