SPECIAL EDITION – President Lincoln

SPECIAL EDITION – Our 16^th President

No visit to Gettysburg during the Civil War would be complete without learning a few things about our illustrious 16^th President, Abraham Lincoln.

We’ve learned a few things the past two days, and this post will not even come close to learning all there is to know about this incredible man.  But it’s my humble tribute to a man no one would bother to give the time of day to today, and he certainly would never win an election – just based on his looks alone – let alone his Godly principles and comments, ideas and lack of formal education.

And yet, he’s become one of our most beloved Presidents of all time.

Instead of spending a lot of time reading “articles”, I’ve decided it’s easier and less time-consuming to just present a list of facts that I’ve gathered from several sites.  Facts that I personally neither confirm nor deny.  I don’t have the time to check them all out.  Read as many as you’d like, and keep in mind that it’s entirely possible there may be a couple of repeats.  😊

From constitutioncenter.org

Top 10 Abraham Lincoln facts

1. He was the only president to have a patent: Lincoln invented a device to free steamboats that ran aground.

2. He practiced law without a degree. Lincoln had about 18 months of formal schooling.

3. He wanted women to have the vote in 1836.

4. He was a big animal lover, and he wouldn’t hunt or fish. If he were alive today, Lincoln might be running an animal shelter.

5. He really was a wrestler. Lincoln was documented as taking part in wrestling bouts.

6. He lost in his first bid for a presidential ticket. The unknown Lincoln was also an unsuccessful vice-presidential candidate in 1856 at the Republican convention.

7. He never belonged to an organized church. Lincoln read the Bible daily and believed the scriptures, but he never joined an organized church.

8. He didn’t drink, smoke, or chew. Lincoln was a simple man of tastes.

9. He didn’t have a middle name. Lincoln went through his life with two names.

10. He hated being called Abe. Apparently, he preferred being called by his last name.

40 more Lincoln facts 

11. Lincoln established Thanksgiving as a national holiday.

12. He was the first president born outside of the 13 original states.

13. Lincoln loved to eat oysters.

14. Lincoln’s cat ate at the White House dinner table.

15. His dog was named Fido.

16. His cat was named Tabby.

17. His favorite food was fruit.

18. He was also a big fan of chicken casserole.

19. Lincoln was the first president to use the telegraph.

20. He used the telegraph like email to communicate with generals.

21. Lincoln’s mother was killed by poisoned milk.

22. Lincoln’s life was saved twice when he was young.

23. Grave robbers were foiled in 1876 when they tried to steal Lincoln’s body.

24. He was the first president with a beard.

25. Lincoln argued a case before the Supreme Court in 1849 and lost.

26. Lincoln failed in his first business.

27. Lincoln’s shoe size was between 12 and 14.

28. His coffin has been opened five times.

29. Lincoln was estranged from his father and didn’t attend his funeral.

30. Lincoln didn’t play musical instruments.

31. Lincoln served one term in the U.S. House of Representatives.

32. He ran for the U.S. Senate twice and lost.

33. Lincoln won the popular vote in Senate campaign against Douglas but lost the election.

34. Lincoln was shot on Good Friday.

35. Lincoln was photographed with John Wilkes Booth nearby, at his second inauguration.

36. There are no direct living descendants of Abraham Lincoln.

37. Booth’s brother saved the life of Lincoln’s son on a New Jersey train platform.

38. Lincoln was part of séances after his son died in the White House.

39. Lincoln’s animals also died in a White House stable fire.

40. Someone shot at Lincoln in 1864 and put a hole in his stovepipe hat.

41. Lincoln was the first president to be assassinated.

42. He was a judge on the circuit court in Illinois.

43. Lincoln defended the son of his most famous wrestling opponent from murder charges.

44. Lincoln battled depression for much of his life.

45. Lincoln was seemingly obsessed with cats.

46. He was set to take part in a duel, but it was cancelled at the last second.

47. Lincoln kept his important documents inside his hat.

48. Lincoln’s dog Fido was killed by a drunken assailant a year after Lincoln died.

49. Lincoln’s suit was made by Brooks Brothers.

50. Lincoln’s guest at Ford’s Theater was Ulysses S. Grant, who cancelled at the last second.

From Ducksters.com:

Abraham Lincoln came from humble beginnings. He was born in a single-room log cabin in Hardin County, Kentucky. His parents were Thomas and Nancy Hanks Lincoln. His father lost everything when Abraham was young and they had to move to Perry County, Indiana where they struggled to get by. When he was just nine years old, his mother died and his sister Sarah took care of him until his father remarried.

Abraham had very little formal education, but had a strong interest in books and learning. Most of what he learned was self-educated and from books he borrowed. His family later moved to Illinois where Lincoln would set out on his own.

As a young man, Lincoln worked a variety of jobs including shopkeeper, surveyor, and postmaster. For a time, he even split firewood with an axe for a living. He soon moved into politics and won a seat in the Illinois Legislature when he was 25.

Lincoln served on the Illinois State Legislature for several terms. During that time he studied the law and began to work as a lawyer. He ran for the U.S. Congress in 1845. He won the election and served as a congressman for one term. After serving as congressman he continued to work as a lawyer. Later, Lincoln ran for the U.S. Senate, he did not win but he did gain national recognition for his arguments against slavery during the debates.

In 1860, Lincoln ran for President of the United States. He was a member of the fairly new Republican party which strongly opposed allowing any of the southern states to secede (leave the country). The republicans were also against slavery. They said they would allow for slavery to continue in the southern states, but that it would not be allowed to spread to new U.S. states or territories.

Lincoln won the 1860 election and was inaugurated as president in March of 1861. The southern states did not want Lincoln to be president. They did not agree with his policies. Before he was even officially in office, they began to secede. The first state to leave was South Carolina, but soon six more states followed and together they formed a new country called the Confederacy. This all happened after Lincoln won the election, but before he took the oath of office.

The Civil War

The Civil War began on April 12, 1861 at Fort Sumter in South Carolina just a month after Lincoln took office. Lincoln was determined to maintain the “Union” of the states. He called for an army from the northern states to defeat the south. What followed was a bloody war that lasted four years and cost the lives of over 600,000 Americans. Lincoln faced all sorts of opposition during the war, but managed to hold the country together.

The Emancipation Proclamation

On January 1, 1863 Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation. This was an order that freed the slaves in the Confederate States. Although not all the slaves were immediately set free, it paved the way for the 13th Amendment which would free all slaves in the United States a few years later.

The Civil War finally ended on April 9, 1865 when General Robert E. Lee surrendered at the Appomattox Court House in Virginia. Lincoln wanted the country to heal, forgive, and rebuild. He wanted to be generous to the southern states in helping them during the reconstruction. Unfortunately, he would not live to see the country rebuild.

How did he die?

President Abraham Lincoln was shot by John Wilkes Booth while attending a play at the Ford Theatre in Washington D.C. He died the next day on April 15, 1865.

Fun Facts about Abraham Lincoln

• Honest Abe was the tallest president at 6 feet 4 inches tall.
• He set up a national banking system while he was president. He also established the Department of Agriculture.
• He was known as a gifted storyteller and liked to tell jokes.
• On the day he was shot, Lincoln told his bodyguard that he had dreamt he would be assassinated.
• He was the first president who had a full beard.
• He often stored things like letters and documents in his tall stove-piped hat.

And don’t forget . . . . according to the movies, in his spare time during the Civil War, he was also a Vampire Hunter!  😊

From history.com

1. Lincoln is enshrined in the Wrestling Hall of Fame.
The Great Emancipator wasn’t quite WWE material, but thanks to his long limbs he was an accomplished wrestler as a young man. Defeated only once in approximately 300 matches, Lincoln reportedly talked a little smack in the ring. According to Carl Sandburg’s biography of Lincoln, Honest Abe once challenged an entire crowd of onlookers after dispatching an opponent: “I’m the big buck of this lick. If any of you want to try it, come on and whet your horns.” There were no takers. Lincoln’s grappling exploits earned him an “Outstanding American” honor in the National Wrestling Hall of Fame.

2. Lincoln created the Secret Service hours before his assassination.
On April 14, 1865, Lincoln signed legislation creating the U.S. Secret Service. That evening, he was shot at Ford’s Theatre. Even if the Secret Service had been established earlier, it wouldn’t have saved Lincoln: The original mission of the law enforcement agency was to combat widespread currency counterfeiting. It was not until 1901, after the killing of two other presidents, that the Secret Service was formally assigned to protect the commander-in-chief.

3. Grave robbers attempted to steal Lincoln’s corpse.
Secret Service did come to Lincoln’s protection, but only in death. In 1876 a gang of Chicago counterfeiters attempted to snatch Lincoln’s body from his tomb, which was protected by just a single padlock, in Oak Ridge Cemetery in Springfield, Illinois. Their scheme was to hold the corpse for a ransom of $200,000 and obtain the release of the gang’s best counterfeiter from prison. Secret Service agents, however, infiltrated the gang and were lying in wait to disrupt the operation. Lincoln’s body was quickly moved to an unmarked grave and eventually encased in a steel cage and entombed under 10 feet of concrete.

4. John Wilkes Booth’s brother saved the life of Lincoln’s son.
A few months before John Wilkes Booth assassinated Lincoln, the president’s oldest son, Robert Todd Lincoln, stood on a train platform in Jersey City, New Jersey. A throng of passengers began to press the young man backwards, and he fell into the open space between the platform and a moving train. Suddenly, a hand reached out and pulled the president’s son to safety by the coat collar. Robert Todd Lincoln immediately recognized his rescuer: famous actor Edwin Booth, brother of John Wilkes. (In another eerie coincidence, on the day of Edwin Booth’s funeral—June 9, 1893—Ford’s Theatre collapsed, killing 22 people.)

5. Lincoln is the only president to have obtained a patent.
Benjamin Franklin isn’t the only American political leader who demonstrated an inventive mind. After being aboard a steamboat that ran aground on low shoals and had to unload its cargo, Lincoln, who loved tinkering with machines, designed a method for keeping vessels afloat when traversing shallow waters through the use of empty metal air chambers attached to their sides. For his design, Lincoln obtained Patent No. 6,469 in 1849.

6. Lincoln personally test-fired rifles outside the White House.
Lincoln was a hands-on commander-in-chief who, given his passion for gadgetry, was keenly interested in the artillery used by his Union troops during the Civil War. Lincoln attended artillery and cannon tests and met at the White House with inventors demonstrating military prototypes. Although there was a standing order against firing weapons in the District of Columbia, Lincoln even test-fired muskets and repeating rifles on the grassy expanses around the White House, now known as the Ellipse and the National Mall.

7. Lincoln came under enemy fire on a Civil War battlefield.
When Confederate troops attacked Washington, D.C., in July 1864, Lincoln visited the front lines at Fort Stevens on two days of the battle, which the Union ultimately won. At one point the gunfire came dangerously close to the president. Legend has it that Colonel Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., a future Supreme Court justice, barked, “Get down, you fool!” Lincoln ducked down from the fort’s parapet and left the battlefield unharmed.

8. Lincoln didn’t move to Illinois until he was 21.
Illinois may be known as the Land of Lincoln, but it was in Indiana that the 16th president spent his formative years. Lincoln was born in a Kentucky log cabin in 1809, and in 1816 his father, Thomas, moved the family across the Ohio River to a 160-acre plot in southern Indiana. Lincoln did not migrate to Illinois until 1830.

9. Poisoned milk killed Lincoln’s mother.
When Abraham was 9 years old in 1818, his mother, Nancy, died of a mysterious “milk sickness” that swept across southern Indiana. It was later learned that the strange disease was due to drinking tainted milk from a cow that had ingested poisonous white snakeroot.

10. Lincoln never slept in the Lincoln Bedroom.
When he occupied the White House, the 16th president used the current Lincoln Bedroom as his personal office. It was there that he met with Cabinet members and signed documents, including the Emancipation Proclamation.

From battlefields.org:

Fact #1: The young Abraham Lincoln described himself as “a piece of floating driftwood.”

The second child of Thomas and Nancy Lincoln was born on February 12, 1809 in a one-room log cabin.  In Abraham’s youth the family moved frequently, trying to stay one step ahead of financial trouble and illness, before eventually settling down in Coles County, Illinois.  Along the way, Lincoln became known for his physical strength as well as his formidable self-education.  At the age of 21, he left home and canoed to New Salem, Illinois, where he signed on to a local riverboat firm.  After a short stint on the western rivers, a shorter stint as manager of a general store, and service as a militia captain during the Black Hawk Wars, he made his first run for a seat on the Illinois General Assembly, which he lost.  In 1834, he won his second General Assembly election and served four terms as a member of the Whig Party while taking up the practice of law in Springfield.  In 1842, after a two-year engagement marked by one cancelled wedding, Lincoln married a 23-year old woman named Mary Todd. 

Fact #2: Abraham Lincoln argued a case in front of the United States Supreme Court—and lost. 

After serving a term in the U.S. House of Representatives in 1846, Lincoln returned to his self-proclaimed profession of “prairie lawyer” in Illinois.  He took cases dealing with everything from homicide to navigation rights to slave laws.  An arcane statute dispute brought him to the high chamber on March 7, 1849.   He argued on behalf of Thomas Lewis, a public administrator who had taken over the affairs of a man named Broadwell, who had sold 100 acres of land that he did not own and then died.  The true grit of the case was the question of whether or not the plaintiff, William Lewis (no relation), could still sue for damages regarding the poisoned contract or if the statute of limitations had already passed.  Lincoln claimed that William’s action came too late, and that Thomas could no longer be held liable.  After two days of hearings and five days of deliberations, the justices decided against Lincoln.  Despite this defeat, the prairie lawyer was becoming one of the most respected and feared litigants in Illinois.  

Fact #3: Abraham Lincoln is the only president in American history to hold a patent.

William Herndon spent part of 1848 watching bemusedly as his law partner, Abraham Lincoln, sat at his office desk intently whittling a strange-looking wooden ship.  Looking up from time to time, Lincoln would excitedly explain how his invention would bring about a revolution in the burgeoning steamboat industry.  Lincoln’s design, which became U.S. Patent No. 6469, details the invention of an inflatable bellows system meant to improve the navigation of boats in shallow waters.  In effect, four balloons would be collapsed, accordion-like, and attached to both sides of a riverboat on either end.  If the boat found its way obstructed by a sandbar, the balloons would be filled with air in order to raise the hull higher than the bar, allowing passage without having to unload the cargo and carry the boat manually.  This issue was particularly important to the inventor, who had spent part of his youth on the treacherous Sangamon River and had twice run aground on high shoals.  Lincoln’s patent was never implemented and was in fact lost for many years after a fire in the patent office.  Throughout his life Lincoln expressed a strong philosophical love for the patent system.  Lincoln’s model and his drawings are now on display in the Smithsonian. 

Fact #4: Lincoln lost five separate elections before being elected president.

For Lincoln, electoral successes had to be taken hand-in-hand with failures.  Since losing his first race for the Illinois General Assembly in 1832 he had gone on to lose a race for the U.S. Congress, two races for the U.S. Senate, and one campaign for a vice-presidential nomination.  His ambition was unchecked, however, and by 1858 he was a national player in the new Republican Party and perhaps its most prominent intellectual voice.  He won the 1860 Republican presidential nomination after a tough battle at the national convention, defeating notable opponents William H. Seward, Edward Bates, and Salmon P. Chase, before wading into the four-way general election against Democrat Stephen Douglas, Southern Democrat John Breckinridge, and Constitutional Unionist John Bell.  Lincoln and Douglas, rivals from the Lincoln-Douglas senatorial debates of 1858, squared off in the north while Breckinridge and Bell divided the southern states between them.  In the end the demographic dominance of the Republican Party gave Lincoln a victory, even though he lost every single southern state by a large margin.  By the time he was inaugurated on March 4, 1861, seven southern states had seceded. 

Fact #5: Lincoln risked his life while fulfilling his duties as commander-in-chief of the American military.

At the Battle of Fort Stevens in 1864 Lincoln actually came under Confederate fire, making him the second and last sitting president to be in such a position, the first being James Madison at the Battle of Bladensburg in 1814. At 6’4” Lincoln stood a foot taller than Madison, greatly increasing his peril. This episode was not an exception to Lincoln’s involved role in the war. As commander-in-chief, Lincoln exercised the highest authority over the American military. Applying his old talent for self-education, Lincoln began to voraciously study the principles that composed contemporary military thought.  He made the decision to resupply Fort Sumter,which prompted the Confederate barrage igniting the Civil War, and continued to take an active hand in formulating the grand strategy of the war. Lincoln appointed every top general in the Union army, including Ulysses S. Grant.  Aides would often find him in the telegraph office poring over dispatches from the field—some days he would visit the office four or more times.  In addition to making frequent appearances in camps and at parades, Lincoln even personally tested such new pieces of military technology as the “coffee-mill” machine gun and the Spencer repeating rifle. 

Fact #6: Lincoln violated some civil liberties to further the war effort.

In the early days of the war, a significant portion of Marylanders attempted to thwart the North’s military mobilization.  Groups of citizens disrupted rail lines, rioted, and grumbled about leaving the Union.  In response, Lincoln suspended the writ of habeas corpus in the state on April 27, 1861, allowing his agents to imprison anyone, including the Mayor of Baltimore, for any length of time without trial or probable cause.  The courts ruled that the president had overstepped his constitutional bounds, but Lincoln ignored them.  This limitation on civil liberties gradually spread across the Union until some 13,000 citizens were jailed.  In 1863, Congress passed a bill permitting the executive suspension of the writ.  Many newspapers were also shut down, taken over, or intimidated throughout the conflict.  However, Lincoln’s presidency was not entirely defined by running the Civil War.  He appointed abolitionists to the Supreme Court, instituted the nation’s first income tax, implemented two international tariffs, and created the Department of Agriculture.  He also proclaimed a national day of Thanksgiving, which had previously been only irregularly declared, as an institutional tradition for the first time on the final Thursday of November, 1863.

Fact #7: Lincoln proclaimed all persons held as slaves in states of the rebellion “forever free.”

The Emancipation Proclamation, issued on New Year’s Day, 1863, freed all of the slaves in the rebellious states.  Legally, the Proclamation was classified as a military order and thus the responsibility for its enforcement rested with Lincoln, the commander-in-chief.  While saving the Union was the official war aim when the war began, the fate of the “peculiar institution” had never been far from Lincoln’s mind.  In the months before issuing the proclamation, he had paired personal moral progression with a series of canny political maneuvers to lay the foundation for the earth-shattering announcement.  His cause was strengthened by the growing strength of the Union military, as notably demonstrated at the Battle of Antietam.  The Emancipation Proclamation was not met with universal support, however.  Many American citizens were still undecided on the issue of slavery and the political class of Britain, which was considering an intervention, worried that the order was overly limited and that Lincoln would bring about a bloody slave uprising.  Despite the inevitable turmoil it engendered, the Emancipation Proclamation was the first giant step towards fulfilling America’s long-neglected promise of liberty for all.

Fact #8: Lincoln campaigned against his former general.

For the entirety of the Civil War there remained a considerable faction of Northerners, primarily in the Democratic Party, who wanted to stop the fighting and negotiate a two-state peace.  These citizens were labeled “Copperheads.”  Their attitude nearly won out during the darkest days of the conflict, promising an end to the bloodshed with a compromise.  The Democrats nominated George B. McClellan, the disgraced general, as their candidate to run against Lincoln in the election of 1864.  Given the casualties and length of the war, Lincoln felt a great anxiety, which he states in a note from August, 1863.  However, with a series of victories by the Union armies, most notably at Atlanta, Mobile, and Cedar Creek, the country’s morale was raised and citizens were reassured of the Union’s success.  Lincoln won the election with 55% of the popular vote and 91% of the Electoral College. 

Fact #9: Lincoln desired a forgiving Reconstruction.

After a long war there were many who felt that Southerners should be severely punished for their insurrection.  Some wanted to hold rebels criminally accountable, exact huge financial penalties, and relegate the Southern states to second-class status.  Lincoln, on the other hand, advocated amnesty and a swift return to an equal union.  The effects of Lincoln’s plan will only ever be speculative.  His assassination ensured that the ultimately injurious process of Reconstruction would leave deep fissures in American society.

Fact #10: Lincoln was not the only member of his administration to be attacked on the night of April 14, 1865.

On April 14, 1865, John Wilkes Booth crept into the presidential box at Ford’s Theater, shot Lincoln in the head, and then leapt from the balcony and into one of the most dramatic manhunts in American history.  But Booth was just one of the prowlers in Washington on that bloody night.  In Lafayette Park, Lewis Powell forced his way into Secretary of State William Seward’s bedroom and stabbed him repeatedly with a knife.  At the Kirkwood Hotel, George Atzerodt was overpowered by fear before he could make his planned attack on Vice President Andrew Johnson.  The men sought to reinvigorate the Southern cause but within two months they would all be dead, shot or hanged, along with co-conspirators Mary Surratt and David Herold.  Seward survived Powell’s assault, but Lincoln died the next day.  At his deathbed, Secretary of War Edwin Stanton offered an epitaph: “Now he belongs to the ages.” 

There are hundreds of quotes attributed to Abraham Lincoln available on the internet and in books.  Here are a very few:

1. “Folks are usually about as happy as they make their minds up to be.”
2. “Whatever you are, be a good one.”
3. “Do I not destroy my enemies when I make them my friends?”
4. “America will never be destroyed from the outside. If we falter and lose our freedoms, it will be because we destroyed ourselves.”
5. “My Best Friend is a person who will give me a book I have not read.”
6. “Nearly all men can stand adversity, but if you want to test a man’s character, give him power.”
7. “I’m a success today because I had a friend who believed in me and I didn’t have the heart to let him down.”
8. “My concern is not whether God is on our side; my greatest concern is to be on God’s side, for God is always right.”
9. “Books serve to show a man that those original thoughts of his aren’t very new after all.”
10. “When I do good, I feel good. When I do bad, I feel bad. That’s my religion.”
11. “Those who deny freedom to others, deserve it not for themselves”
12. “Whenever I hear anyone arguing for slavery, I feel a strong impulse to see it tried on him personally.”
13. “I am a slow walker, but I never walk back.”
14. “There are no bad pictures; that’s just how your face looks sometimes.”
15. “Those who look for the bad in people will surely find it.”
16. “I can see how it might be possible for a man to look down upon the earth and be an atheist, but I cannot conceive how a man could look up into the heavens and say there is no God.”
17. “I don’t like that man. I must get to know him better.”
18. “When you reach the end of your rope, tie a knot and hang on.”
19. “Be sure you put your feet in the right place, then stand firm.”
20. “I am not bound to win, but I am bound to be true. I am not bound to succeed, but I am bound to live up to what light I have.”
21. “If I were two-faced, would I be wearing this one?”
22. “You can fool some of the people all of the time, and all of the people some of the time, but you can not fool all of the people all of the time.”
23. “I would rather be a little nobody, then to be a evil somebody.”
24. “All that I am or ever hope to be, I owe to my angel mother.”
25. “Character is like a tree and reputation its shadow. The shadow is what we think it is and the tree is the real thing.”
26. “I have been driven many times upon my knees by the overwhelming conviction that I had nowhere else to go. My own wisdom and that of all about me seemed insufficient for that day.”
27. “Always bear in mind that your own resolution to succeed is more important than any one thing.”
28. “No man is poor who has a Godly mother.”
29. “The best way to predict your future is to create it.”
30. “I laugh because I must not cry, that is all, that is all.”
31. “No man has a good enough memory to be a successful liar.”
32. “Human action can be modified to some extent, but human nature cannot be changed.”