Addams adored her father, John H. Addams, when she was a child, as she made clear in the stories of her memoir, "Twenty Years at Hull House" (1910). He was a founding member of the Illinois Republican Party, served as an Illinois State Senator (1855–70), and supported his friend Abraham Lincoln in his candidacies, for senator (1854) and the presidency (1860). He kept a letter from Lincoln in his desk, and Addams loved to look at it as a child. Her father was an agricultural businessman with large timber, cattle, and agricultural holdings; flour and timber mills; and a woolen factory. He was the president of The Second National Bank of Freeport. He remarried in 1868 when Addams was eight years old. His second wife was Anna Hosteler Haldeman, the widow of a miller in Freeport.