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. Early life Eddie 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 her father 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." Mary's stepmother, who did not like cats, ordered the cat thrown out, "Ed screaming & protesting loudly against the proceeding, she never appeared to mind his screams, which were long & loud, I assure you." Abraham Lincoln also referenced him in an 1848 letter to his wife, also during the aforementioned time period. He mimicks the way two-year-old Eddie would say his father had gone to the Capitol: "Dear Eddy thinks father is 'gone tapila.'" He also writes about searching for plaid stockings that would "fit Eddy's dear little feet," but says ultimately that he had been unsuccessful, and finally closes his letter with, "What did he and Eddy think of the little letters father sent them? Dont [sic] let the blessed fellows forget father…." Death Eddie died a month before his fourth birthday. Census records list "chronic consumption" (tuberculosis) as the cause. An alternate theory is that he died of medullary thyroid cancer given that: (a) "consumption" was a term then applied to many wasting diseases, (b) cancer is a progressing disease, (c) Abraham and two of Eddie's brothers had several features compatible with the genetic cancer syndrome multiple endocrine neoplasia type 2b (MEN2B), and (d) his thick, asymmetric lower lip is a sign of MEN2B.