Willie Lincoln dies at 5 P.M. President sends carriage for Senator and Mrs. Orville H. Browning (Ill.). They spend night at White House. Browning, Diary; National Republican (Washington, DC), 21 February 1862, 2:1.

President stops in secretary's office and says: "Well, Nicolay, my boy is gone—he is actually gone," and bursting into tears turns and goes into his own office. Notebook, February 1862, John G. Nicolay Papers, Library of Congress, Washington, DC.

Mrs. Lincoln is inconsolable. Elizabeth Keckley, Behind the Scenes: Thirty Years a Slave, and Four Years in the White House (1868: reprint, Buffalo, NY: Stansil and Lee, 1931), 101.