President Abraham Lincoln announces a grant of amnesty for Emilie Todd Helm, his wife Mary Lincoln’s half sister, widow of a Confederate general.
The pardon was one of the first given under Lincoln’s Proclamation of Amnesty and Reconstruction, announced the week before as part of the president’s plan for the reintegration of the South into the Union. Amnesty was available to be granted to former Confederates, except the highest officials of the Confederacy if they took an oath to the United States. Lincoln's sister-in-law received the pardon, but never took the required oath.
