"I wish I had a little girl like you, Julie," Mary Todd Lincoln often
told Julie Taft, and for the first year of the Lincoln presidency,
sixteen year old Julie had the run of the White House, befriending the
First Lady, playing with the Lincoln boys, and sharing priceless moments
with Lincoln himself, which she noted down in her diary. An intimate
portrait of the Lincoln family, as only a child could see them, through
the first, fateful, tragic year of the civil war.