Edward Baker Lincoln

Edward Baker Lincoln (March 10, 1846 – February 1, 1850) was the second son of Abraham Lincoln and Mary Todd Lincoln. He was named after Lincoln's close friend, Edward Dickinson Baker. Both Abraham and Mary spelled his name "Eddy"; however, the National Park Service uses "Eddie" as a nickname and the nickname also appears spelled this way on his crypt at the Lincoln tomb.

Life Edward Baker Lincoln was born on March 10, 1846, at the Lincoln Home in Springfield, Illinois. Little is known about his life, but a surviving story says that one day during a visit to his grandfather Robert Todd's home in Lexington, Kentucky, Eddie's older brother, Robert, found a kitten and brought it to the house. Mary Lincoln wrote to her husband about the incident: "[As] soon as Eddy, spied [the kitten], his tenderness, broke forth, he made them bring it water, fed it with bread himself, with his own dear hands, he was a delighted little creature over it."

Death Eddie died at the age of 3 years and 11 months on February 1, 1850. Census records list "chronic consumption" (tuberculosis) as the cause. An alternate theory suggests that Eddie died of a different type of wasting disease, medullary thyroid cancer, part of the MEN2B genetic cancer syndrome that he possibly inherited from his father. However, this familial MEN2B theory is principally challenged by the fact that Eddie's father, Abraham Lincoln, was 56 when he was murdered. The untreated disease usually causes death around 21 years of age. Most researchers and historians subscribe to the idea that Eddie's death was caused by tuberculosis and not the MEN2B theory.

Abraham Lincoln referenced Eddie's death in a letter to his stepbrother John D. Johnston, noting that Eddie was "sick fifty-two days," and "We miss him very much."

Eddie's funeral was held at the Lincoln home by the pastor of the First Presbyterian Church, Both parents were devastated. A week after his death, an unsigned poem entitled "Little Eddie" was printed in the Illinois Daily Journal.

Authorship of the poem was long a mystery with some supposing that Abraham and Mary wrote it. In 2012, the Abraham Lincoln Association published an article in their journal that concludes neither of them did, and that it was instead an early draft by a young poet from St. Louis.