Rebel in the White House
Emilie Todd Helm: Rebel in the White House 1836 - 1930
As the half-sister of Mary Todd Lincoln and the wife of Confederate General Benjamin Hardin Helm,, Emilie Todd Helm had a fron row view of history during the Civil War era.
The daughter of prominent Lexingtonian Robert Todd, Emilie was 18 years younger than her sister Mary. She first met her sister's husband, Abraham Lincoln, in 1847. The Lincolns had stopped in Lexington on the way to Washington, where he would take his seat in the U.S. House of Representatives (he served one term).
Like Mary, Emilie got an excellent education which included hearing many political discurses by Henry Clay and other friends of the Todd family. In 1856, she married Benjamin Hardin Helm, a West Point graduate who had left the military to become a lawyer in Elizabethtown. He was in practice with his father, two -- time Kentucky governor John Helm.
The Helms and the Lincolns soon became close. Despite their different political views --- Helm was a Southern Democrat, Lincoln a Republican --- the new brothers - in - law became fast friends. This gave Emile an intimate view of the Lincoln marriage and the strains the presidency and the Civil War place on it.
When he was elected president in 1860, Lincoln won very few votes in his home state --- and none from his Kentucky in--- laws. But in April 1861, with war imminent, he called Benjamin Helm to the White House and offered him the position of pay - master of the Union Army with the rank of major. Helm rejected the offer, instead accepting appointment as a Confederate colonel in September 1861.
As the war progressed, Emilie Helm followed her husband south. In chattanooga, she organized better care for wondedu soldiers. Benjamin rose to the rank of Brigadier General in command of the First Kentucky Brigade (the famed Orphan Brigade). Emilie was in Alabama in September 1863 when she got word that her husband had been killed at the battle of Chickamauga. Lincoln arranged safe passage for Emilie to the White House. She and Mary, who was mourning the death of her son Willie, comforted each other. But the presence of a southern loyalist in the White House aroused protests. Lincoln defended his right to have anyone he chose as his guest, but Helm soon departed for Kentucky.
She found the city of Lexington, under federal martial law very hostile to those who would not take an oath of loyalty to the Union. Helm retreated to Madison, Ind., where she played the organ at Christ Church to earn money. With Children to support, she begged the president to let her retrieve and sell 500 bales of cotton she had stored in the South. Lincoln at first refused, saying he could not do for a Southern sympathizer what he had refused to do for others who were loyal to the Union. Helm pressed her case and Lincoln eventually retented, but this "cotton campaign" so offended Mary that she never spoke to her sister again.
After she retured to Kentucky, her husband's family persuaded Helm to settle in Elizabethtown, his hometown. In the 1880s and '90s, she became a working woman, appointed postmistress of Elizabethtown by three different presidents. At Confederate reunions, Helm was hailed as the mother of the Orphan Brigade.
In 1884, amidst much ceremony, Benjamin Helm's remains were moved from Georgia to the family cemetery in Elizabethtown.
In 1912, Benjamin Helm Jr., fulfilling a pledge to bring his mother home to Lexington, bought a farm on land that had once been owned by Levi Todd, Emilie Todd Helm's great gandfather. There she lived out her very long and eventful life.
Rebel in the White House, presenter, Betsy Smith
WHERE: ARTISTS COLLABRATIVE THEATRE (ACT Theatre)
207 North Pattyless Drive
Elkhorn City, Kentuck
606 754- 4228
SPONSORS ARE; Kentucky Humanities Council, Inc. Elkhorn City Area Heritage Council, Inc. and
Artists Collabrative Theatre (ACT Theatre)
TIME : 6:00 P.M.
WHEN May 26, 2011
