In a telegraph hut at City Point, Virginia, while Ulysses S. Grant’s army began the final advance of the Civil War, Abraham Lincoln heard three kittens mewing.[1]
Abraham Lincoln really was known as a cat lover, and in March 1865, weeks before his assassination, witnesses remembered him pausing at Grant’s headquarters to comfort three motherless kittens and ask that they be fed milk and treated kindly.
Grant’s headquarters at City Point was part of the siege of Petersburg, and Lincoln had come there with his family near the end of the war, about three weeks before he was killed.[1][2] The president was in the telegraph hut on the day Grant’s army started its last advance when he came upon three tiny kittens, apparently lost, wandering around and crying.[1]
Lincoln picked one up. “Where is your mother?” he asked.[1] Someone nearby told him the mother was dead.[1] Lincoln kept petting the kitten and answered with the kind of sentence that could only have come from a man surrounded by casualty lists: “Then she can’t grieve as many a poor mother is grieving for a son lost in battle.”[1]
Admiral David Porter later remembered another version of the same scene. He wrote that he was struck by the sight of Lincoln “tenderly caressing three stray kittens,” a moment Porter thought showed “the kindness of the man’s disposition” and the “childlike simplicity” mixed with his grandeur.[2] Porter recalled Lincoln stroking the cats and saying, “Kitties, thank God you are cats, and can’t understand this terrible strife that is going on.”[2]
The President Who Talked To Cats
The kittens at City Point were not the only cats to interrupt Lincoln’s day. Treasury official Mansell B. Field later wrote that Lincoln possessed “extraordinary kindness of heart” when his feelings could be reached, and that helplessness and suffering moved him when they came directly before his senses.[2] Field added a domestic detail that sounds almost comic until it becomes revealing: Lincoln was fond of animals, “especially cats,” and Field had seen him fondle one for an hour.[2]
In the White House, Lincoln had cats named Tabby and Dixie, reportedly given to him by Secretary of State William Seward.[2] He doted on them enough that one story has him feeding Tabby from the table during a formal dinner. When Mary Lincoln objected that it was shameful in front of guests, Lincoln is said to have replied that if the gold fork was good enough for former President James Buchanan, it was good enough for Tabby.[2]
His friend Caleb Carman recalled that Lincoln would pick up one of the cats and “talk to it for half an hour at a time.”[2] The famous cabinet line belongs to the same cluster of Lincoln cat stories: “Dixie is smarter than my whole cabinet! And furthermore she doesn’t talk back!”[2] Mary Lincoln, according to the Presidential Pet Museum account, even referred to cats as her husband’s “hobby.”[2]
Milk Before The Next Dispatch
Before Lincoln left a meeting in the officers’ tent that day at City Point, Porter recalled, the president turned to a colonel with one last instruction: “I hope you will see that these poor little motherless waifs are given plenty of milk and treated kindly.”[2]
The order sits strangely beside the larger orders of March 1865. The Confederacy was collapsing. Armies were moving. Mothers were grieving sons. Lincoln, exhausted and close to the end of his own life, heard a tiny cry in a telegraph hut and made room for it. In the middle of the final advance, three stray kittens had a president worrying over their milk.
