Death of Mr. Harlan’s Child

We deeply sympathize with Senator Harlan in the affliction he as sustained in the loss of a beautiful little daughter. It was our melancholy allotment to sustain the same bereavement a twelvemonth since, and our heart is yet softened beneath the terrible affliction, and alive to the kindred sorrows of others. A correspondent of the Hawkeye thus alludes to the death of the little daughter of Mr. Harlan: –

“The family of one of our Senators – Mr. Harlan – are at present in deep affliction. A beautiful promising daughter of some six years old has been suddenly stricken down by a mysterious disease. In the very height of health and bloom of beauty, when no concern, no thought of danger was entertained, the Destroyer claimed her for his own. So sudden, so strange was her sickness and her death, that even in the last moments of dissolution her parents could not realize that she was in danger, and only after the pulse had ceased to beat and the bosom to heave, did the painful truth come home to them. The funeral occurs today. The body, still fresh and beautiful as in life, has been embalmed and will be ultimately laid in the soil of Iowa.

– Published in The Davenport Daily Gazette, Davenport, Iowa, Friday Morning, February 14, 1862, p. 2