Callie Hawkins had been working at President Lincoln’s Cottage museum for 10 years when she became pregnant. She and her husband were thrilled, and she joked with her co-workers about the baby’s “perfect” due date — Feb. 12 — Abraham Lincoln’s birthday.
When the day arrived, Hawkins went into labor right on schedule. But when she and her husband got to the hospital, the medical team couldn’t find the baby’s heartbeat. Their son Coley James Hobbie was stillborn the next day.
Three years later, Hawkins sits on a picnic bench near the cottage where Lincoln and his wife spent more than a quarter of his presidency, pressing with her thumb a pendant around her neck that says “Mama.”
“After my son died, I got really afraid that people would maybe judge me or think about me in the way that history has remembered Mary Lincoln,” she said. Which is to say, she was afraid they would think she was “crazy.” In her lifetime, the former first lady lost her husband to an assassin’s bullet and three of her four children to disease. Her lengthy, public mourning defied conventions of the day and led to criticism and questions about her sanity.
With that in mind, Hawkins, now the interim executive director and director of programming at the cottage, helped to create a unique exhibit called “Reflections on Grief and Child Loss” at President Lincoln’s Cottage. In it, accounts of the Lincolns’ grief are presented alongside the stories of modern-day bereaved parents and their kids, showing their similarities across time.
Abraham and Mary Lincoln (she did not go by Mary Todd Lincoln in her lifetime) had four sons; only one survived past age 18. Son Eddy died of an unknown illness at 3 in 1850; Willie died of typhoid at 11 in 1862, while the couple occupied the White House; and Tad died of a lung disease at 18 in 1871.
Back then, Hawkins said, “society allowed certain types of grief. You could wear black, you could have a mourning band on your stationery, and things like that.” But Mary Lincoln didn’t stick to what was socially acceptable. When Eddy died, she tore out her hair; when Willie died she was so overcome she couldn’t leave her bed for weeks and missed his funeral. She would cry loudly and wore black mourning clothes much longer than was socially acceptable.