LincolnFreak: Weird Lincoln Facts

Now scrolling: The Gettysburg Address

Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal. Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battle-field of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this. But, in a larger sense, we can not dedicate -- we can not consecrate -- we can not hallow -- this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us -- that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion -- that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain -- that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom -- and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.

Saturday, August 25, 2007

Weird Lincoln Facts: Lincoln and Booth Can Be Seen in Photo of Second Inaugural

There are many little known facts about Lincoln. He was the first president to be born outside the original thirteen colonies. His favorites sport was wrestling. The scar over his right eye was the result of a fight with a gang of thieves. But some facts are downright bizarre. For instance, did you know...

Lincoln once had a dream right before the fall of Richmond that he would die. He dreamt that he was in the White House, he heard crying and when he found the room it was coming from he asked who had died. The man said the President. He looked in the coffin and saw his own face. A week later Lincoln was shot at Ford's Theatre.

Abraham Lincoln was shot while watching a performance of Our American Cousin at Ford's Theatre in Washington, D.C. The same play was also running at the Maverick Theatre in Chicago on May 18, 1860, the day Lincoln was nominated for president in that city.

He was the first president to be photographed at his inauguration. John Wilkes Booth (his assassin) can be seen standing close to Lincoln in the above picture of the Second Inaugural. Booth can be seen in the crowd at the top and accomplices David Herold, Lewis Powell, George Atzerodt, John Surratt and Edmund Spangler in the bottom crowd. Frederick Douglass commented on that day, "I was present at the inauguration of Mr. Lincoln, the 4th of March, 1865. I felt then that there was murder in the air, and I kept close to his carriage on the way to the Capitol, for I felt that I might see him fall that day. It was a vague presentiment."

Robert Todd Lincoln arrived too late to stop three separate presidential assassinations. He met his father, President Abraham Lincoln, at the theatre after John Wilkes Booth had fired the shot. He went to a Washington train station to meet President Garfield, arriving only minutes after he was shot. And, he traveled to Buffalo, New York to meet President McKinley, but got there after the fatal shot had already been fired.

Where did I get all this stuff? Check out "Lincoln Site Tours: Trivia" at http://www.lincolnsitetours.com/trivia.html.