Quote Originally Posted by Redleg
Lincoln would have had her arrested and sent to the south.
You didn't research that, did you? Nor did I, but I Googled around and found a little biographical gem, a tear-jerker of the kind that usually bears only a tenuous relationship to reality.

Shortly after the battle of Gettysburg, Edward, the elderly White House usher, showed a careworn, tearful woman into Lincoln’s office. Her husband and both of her sons were in the Army, she explained, and she was finding it hard to survive. Could she have one of her sons back?
The way she told her story moved him. He stood by the fire, his head low, keeping a grip on his emotions. ‘I have two [sons] and you have none,” he murmured. He stepped over to his desk and composed an order that would secure her youngest son’s discharge.
A few days later, Edward came to tell him, “That woman, Mr. President, is here again and still crying.”
“Let her in.”
The grief-stricken mother confronted him. She had found her son’s regiment, she told Lincoln, only to be informed that he had just died of wounds suffered in the battle of Gettysburg. Could she not have her surviving son.
Again he said softly, “I have two and you have none.” He sat down to write out another order. She stood beside him, and as he wrote, she stroked his wild mane, shooting in all directions and showing gray tints, as a mother might stroke a child’s. He stood up and thrust the order into her hands. He did not trust himself to say more than “There!” Then he hurried out of the room before he gave way to tears.

Geoffrey Perret, Lincoln’s War (Random House, 2004), pp. 346-347; from Michael Burlingame, ed., An Oral History of Abraham Lincoln (Carbondale IL, 1996), pp. 81-82
Well, there we have it -- good ol' Abe comforting a war widow and granting her family no less than two discharges. Even if we take this story with a lump of salt -- and we have to -- you will agree that it is a far cry from the callous treatment you suggested.