From Lincoln’s letter to Fanny McCullough, written at the Executive Mansion in Washington on 23 December 1862, after her father Lt. Col. William McCullough was killed in Mississippi. The autograph letter signed survives, and the sentence appears in it word for word.
“In this sad world of ours, sorrow comes to all; and, to the young, it comes with bitterest agony, because it takes them unawares” Abraham Lincoln, letter to Fanny McCullough, 23 December 1862
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Provenance
The source
Work
Letter to Fanny McCullough
Written
Executive Mansion, Washington — 23 December 1862
Manuscript
Autograph letter signed (“A. Lincoln”), 1 page, quarto — Shapell Manuscript Foundation
Standard text
Roy P. Basler, ed., The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln
Dear Fanny
It is with deep grief that I learn of the death of your kind and brave Father; and, especially, that it is affecting your young heart beyond what is common in such cases. In this sad world of ours, sorrow comes to all; and, to the young, it comes with bitterest agony, because it takes them unawares. The older have learned to ever expect it. I am anxious to afford some alleviation of your present distress. Perfect relief is not possible, except with time. You can not now realize that you will ever feel better. Is not this so? And yet it is a mistake. You are sure to be happy again.
the opening of a one-page letter
Text as printed by Abraham Lincoln Online from Basler’s Collected Works; the emphasis is ours.
Older printings differ. Project Gutenberg’s text of the Lapsley collected edition ↗ reads “In this sad world of ours sorrow comes to all, and to the young it comes with bittered agony because it takes them unawares” — a reminder that the punctuated version everyone quotes is the manuscript one.
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Fact-check
What goes wrong with it
For once the famous name is the right one — this really is Lincoln, in his own hand. What gets mangled is the wording and the setting.
Project Gutenberg’s text of the Lapsley collected edition ↗ prints “In this sad world of ours sorrow comes to all, and to the young it comes with bittered agony because it takes them unawares” — commas dropped, “bitterest” become “bittered” — and opens the letter with “deep regret” where the manuscript text reads “deep grief.”
✓The sentence is Lincoln’s own, written 23 December 1862; the signed manuscript survives, and the standard text reads “…with bitterest agony, because it takes them unawares.” Read the whole letter ↗
His daughter Fanny took it badly enough to frighten people — she shut herself in her room and would neither eat nor sleep. David Davis, a friend to both families, asked Lincoln to write ↗, and he did, in the same grim December the Union army was wrecked at Fredericksburg. What he produced is one page, no rhetoric, no scripture — just a man telling a grieving young woman that she will be happy again, and that she should believe him because he knows.
The older have learned to ever expect it.
How the wording drifted
The version everyone quotes is the manuscript version, which is unusual for a famous line. Basler’s Collected Works text — the one Abraham Lincoln Online prints ↗ — keeps Lincoln’s heavy, breath-marking commas and semicolon exactly as the popular quotation has them.
Earlier collected editions were tidier and less accurate. Project Gutenberg’s text of the Lapsley edition ↗ opens the letter with “deep regret” instead of “deep grief,” strips the punctuation out of the famous sentence, and garbles “bitterest” into “bittered.” If you have ever seen a comma-free version of this line, that family of printings is a plausible ancestor.
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Filed under
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Abraham Lincoln led the United States through the Civil War and is remembered as much for his prose as his politics — the Gettysburg Address, the second inaugural, and a run of short private letters that do more emotional work in a paragraph than most writers manage in a chapter. He wrote this one by hand as a private condolence, not for publication. His own son Willie had died earlier that same year, which is part of why the letter lands: “I have had experience enough to know what I say.”
For writers & researchers
Cite this
Cite this
Abraham Lincoln to Fanny McCullough, Executive Mansion, Washington, 23 December 1862. Autograph letter signed, Shapell Manuscript Foundation; text as printed in Roy P. Basler, ed., The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln.
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Quotle.info. “Who really said ‘In this sad world of ours, sorrow comes to all; and, to the young, it comes with bitterest agony, because it takes them unawares’?” Last verified 4 Aug 2026. https://quotle.info/who-said/in-this-sad-world-of-ours-sorrow-comes-to-all-and-to-the/