Pittsburg ? As Abraham Lincoln was campaigning for the presidency in 1860, he received a letter from an 11-year-old girl urging him to grow a beard.

Grace Bedell of Chautauqua County, N.Y., told the candidate it would improve his looks and that women were more likely to encourage their husbands to vote for him.

“If you let your whiskers grow I will try and get the rest of them to vote for you you would look a great deal better for your face is so thin,” she wrote. “All the ladies like whiskers.”

Lincoln followed the advice of Bedell and the rest is history – including, it seemed, the contact between the president and the girl, nicknamed “Lincoln’s Little Correspondent.”

But a researcher has found a second letter Bedell wrote to Lincoln in 1864, asking for his help in finding a job before she moved to Kansas.

Karen Needles, an archivist researcher in Washington, D.C., said she found the letter this March in a box of Lincoln’s documents at the National Archives.

A copy of Bedell’s second letter will be unveiled publicly today at Pittsburg State University, where Needles went to school. She said she wanted to release the letter for the first time in Kansas, where Bedell eventually lived.

“Grace spent so much time in Kansas. It seemed like an appropriate spot,” said university spokeswoman Cassie Mathes.

In the letter, a now-married Grace Bedell Billings reminded Lincoln of who she was.

She went on to ask Lincoln for help in finding her an entry-level job with the Department of Treasury.