12 Odd, Random Facts About Abraham Lincoln

While extensively researching the politics of antebellum America for my award-winning screenplay, NORTH STAR: THE LIFE OF FREDERICK DOUGLASS, I learned many things about Abraham Lincoln that were never taught in school. These are some of the most interesting.

1. Abraham Lincoln is enshrined in the National Wrestling Hall of Fame. In Illinois during the early half of the 19^th century, wrestling was a popular pasttime. The bouts were often brutal, and many a man lost a testicle, or two, in these battles. Abe was defeated just once in 300 matches as a wrestler and did not engage in trying to mutilate his opponents. He won because he was freakishly tall for the day and had tremendous upper body strength from railsplitting. He wasn’t afraid to talk trash, and once, after dispatching an opponent, bragged, “I’m the big buck of this lick. If any of you want to try it, come on and whet your horns.” Nobody took him up on the offer.
2. Abe retired from politics before running for president.
3. Lincoln is the only president to have obtained a patent. Confounded by a steamboat running aground, and having to unload its entire cargo, he invented a device that allowed boats to traverse shallow waters, and was granted patent #6469 in 1849.
4. After his election to the office of President of the United States, he hired a personal secretary, John Nicolay. Nicolay was disturbed by the number of letters threatening violence and death. Lincoln needed to sneak into Washington in disguise the night before his inauguration because of a death threat in Baltimore. The plot to kill the president-elect was uncovered by Lincoln’s friend, Allan Pinkerton.
5. Lincoln was elected in 1860 with just 39 percent of the vote. Finishing second was Southern Democrat John C. Breckinridge, followed by Northern Democrat Stephen Douglas and the Constitutional Union candidate, John Bell.
6. Godfrey Hyams was offered $60,000 by the Confederate Secret Service to deliver an overcoat to Lincoln as a gift that was infected with yellow fever. Dr. Luke Blackburn was the originator of the plot. Hyams refused.
7. Lincoln often spent time away from the White House, just outside Washington at the Old Soldiers Home, considered a summer vacation spot for presidents at that time. As president Lincoln rode on horseback, alone, to the Old Soldiers Home in August 1864, a musket fired in the immediate vicinity.
   Lincoln’s account of the incident: “I was jogging along at a slow gait, immersed in deep thought, when suddenly I was aroused–I may say the arousement lifted me out of my saddle as well as out of my wits–by the report of a rifle. [He heard a bullet whistle past his ear.] Old Abe, with one reckless bound, unceremoniously separated me from my eight-dollar plug-hat, with which I parted company without any assent, expressed or implied, upon my part. At a break-neck speed we soon arrived in a haven of safety. I can truthfully say that one of the Abes was frightened on this occasion, but modesty forbids my mentioning which of us is entitled to that distinguished honor.”
   Union soldier, Private John Nichols, was sent to retrieve President Lincoln’s trademark stovepipe hat, only to find that a musket ball had created a hole in the top, knocking it off Lincoln’s head.
8. Lincoln established the Thanksgiving holiday, passing legislation Oct. 3, 1863 that the last Thursday of November would be set aside as a day of thanks. He also issued a presidential pardon to “Tom” Turkey, a ritual that has been carried on by every president since.
9. When asked if her husband had a hobby, Mary Todd Lincoln replied, “Cats.” Lincoln was a cat-lover. He also brought his dog, Fido, to the White House, and two goats, Nanny and Nanko.
   Lincoln was an avowed Animal Rights advocate, who sometimes spoke and wrote against cruelty to animals, contending that “an ant’s life was as sweet to it as ours to us.”
10. Lincoln was almost universally hated as a president until Union generals Sherman and Grant turned the tide of the war against the confederacy. It was only after his death that Abraham Lincoln became revered as a wise, just leader.
11. Though no actual proof verifies this fact, it is believed Lincoln’s last meal consisted of mock turtle soup, roast Virginia fowl with chestnut stuffing, baked yams and cauliflower with cheese sauce.
12. Grave robbers tried to steal the body of Abraham Lincoln in 1876. Chicago gang members planned to ransom Lincoln’s remains for $200,000 and the release of a convicted counterfeiter from prison.

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Douglass’ 4th of July Address

An invitation to speak brings certain responsibilities, certain expectations. For sure, a festive anniversary lends itself to upbeat sentiments celebratory of the date and event.
That’s one way you can go.
One of history’s great orators chose a different tact. Frederick Douglass returned to the United States in 1847 from exile after two Irishmen secured his freedom for a sum approximating $741. Nearly five years later, he was invited to speak about what freedom meant to him at an Independence Day celebration at Corinthian Hall in Rochester, N.Y.  By my best estimates, Corinthian Hall stood Just off State Street, behind what is now the Reynold’s Arcade Building, precisely where the parking lot for the Rochester Plaza Hotel borders the Genesee River. Historically, the demolition of Corinthian Hall in 1928 is one of the city’s great travesties.

Invited by the Rochester Ladies’ Anti-Slavery Society, Douglass spoke, but instead of providing gracious reflection on how wonderful it was being free, he raged against the folly and hypocrisy of Freedom in America.
“Do you mean, citizens, to mock me by asking me to speak today?” he asked, preceded by the most famous line from this speech, “This Fourth of July is yours, not mine.”
It was 1852. More than three million African-Americans were engaged in forced servitude, in shackles and chains, beaten and whipped as slaves. For blacks who were free, few opportunities existed. Douglass, perhaps, was an exception. Yet, he spoke indignantly on behalf of his race, scorching ears with his fiery rhetoric that would last beyond his own flesh.

“What, to the American slave, is your Fourth of July? I answer, a day that reveals to him more than all other days of the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim. To him, your celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty an unholy license; your national greatness, swelling vanity; your sounds of rejoicing are empty and heartless; your denunciation of tyrants, brass-fronted impudence; your shouts of liberty and equality, hollow mockery; your prayers and hymns, your sermons and thanksgivings, with all your religious parade and solemnity, are to him mere bombast, fraud, deception, impiety, and hypocrisy’s thin veil to cover up crimes which would disgrace a nation of savages. There is not a nation of the earth guilty of practices more shocking and bloody than are the people of these United States at this very hour.”

Happy Fourth of July, right?

On this day, perhaps more than any other, Frederick Douglass stood as a mirror in which a still-fledgling nation could see itself, with all its blemishes and imperfections, and grow. And I ask this, 151 years after Douglass – Are we free yet? Are we free from prejudices and biases. Are we free to trust that our leaders are acting in accordance with the visions of our forefathers. Are we free in the knowledge that our sacred rights as citizens, our privacy and our privileges as Americans are being protected?
As Douglass pointed out that one July afternoon, we still have a ways to go as a nation. This ability to challenge the status quo is why the time is right for a motion picture to be made about his life, and his courage.

Here is the entire speech:

Frederick Douglass’ 4th of July Speech:

“What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?”

July 5, 1852
Rochester, New York *

Fellow Citizens:

Pardon me, and allow me to ask, why am I called to speak here today? What have I or those I represent to do with your national independence? Are the great principles of political freedom and natural justice, embodied in that Declaration of Independence, extended to us? And am I, therefore, called upon to bring our humble offering to the national altar, and to confess the benefits, and express devout gratitude for the blessings resulting from your independence to us?

Would to God, both for your sakes and ours, that an affirmative answer could be truthfully returned to these questions. Then would my task be light, and my burden easy and delightful. For who is there so cold that a nation’s sympathy could not warm him? Who so obdurate and dead to claims of gratitude, that would not thankfully acknowledge such priceless benefits? Who so stolid and selfish that would not give his voice to swell the hallelujahs of a nation’s jubilee, when the chains of servitude had been torn from his limbs? I am not that man. In a case like that, the dumb might eloquently speak, and the “lame man leap like as an hart.”

But such is not the state of the case. I say it with a sad sense of disparity between us. I am not included within the pale of this glorious anniversary. Your high independence only reveals the immeasurable distance between us. The blessings in which you this day rejoice are not enjoyed in common. The rich inheritance of justice, liberty, prosperity, and independence bequeathed by your fathers is shared by you, not by me. The sunlight that brought life and healing to you has brought stripes and death to me. This Fourth of July is yours, not mine. You may rejoice, I must mourn. To drag a man in fetters into the grand illuminated temple of liberty, and call upon him to join you in joyous anthems, were inhuman mockery and sacrilegious irony. Do you mean, citizens, to mock me, by asking me to speak today? If so, there is a parallel to your conduct. And let me warn you, that it is dangerous to copy the example of a nation whose crimes, towering up to heaven, were thrown down by the breath of the Almighty, burying that nation in irrecoverable ruin. I can today take up the lament of a peeled and woe-smitten people.

By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down. Yes! We wept when we remembered Zion. We hanged our harps upon the willows in the midst thereof. For there they that carried us away captive, required of us a song and they who wasted us, required of us mirth, saying, Sing us one of songs of Zion. How can we sing the Lord’s song in a strange land?: “If I forget thee, O Jerusalem, let my right hand forget her cunning. If I do not remember thee, let my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth.”

Fellow citizens, above your national, tumultuous joy, I hear the mournful wail of millions, whose chains, heavy and grievous yesterday, are today rendered more intolerable by the jubilant shouts that reach them. If I do forget, if I do not remember those bleeding children of sorrow this day, “may my right hand forget her cunning, and may my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth!” To forget them, to pass lightly over their wrongs, and to chime in with the popular theme, would be treason most scandalous and shocking, and would make me a reproach before God and the world.

My subject, then, fellow citizens, is “American Slavery.” I shall see this day and its popular characteristics from the slave’s point of view. Standing here, identified with the American bondman, making his wrongs mine, I do not hesitate to declare, with all my soul, that the character and conduct of this nation never looked blacker to me than on this Fourth of July. Whether we turn to the declarations of the past, or to the professions of the present, the conduct of the nation seems equally hideous and revolting. America is false to the past, false to the present, and solemnly binds herself to be false to the future. Standing with God and the crushed and bleeding slave on this occasion, I will, in the name of humanity, which is outraged, in the name of liberty, which is fettered, in the name of the Constitution and the Bible, which are disregarded and trampled upon, dare to call in question and to denounce, with all the emphasis I can command, everything that serves to perpetuate slavery-the great sin and shame of America “I will not equivocate; I will not excuse”; I will use the severest language I can command, and yet not one word shall escape me that any man, whose judgment is not blinded by prejudice, or who is not at heart a slave-holder, shall not confess to be right and just.

But I fancy I hear some of my audience say it is just in this circumstance that you and your brother Abolitionists fail to make a favorable impression on the public mind. Would you argue more and denounce less, would you persuade more and rebuke less, your cause would be much more likely to succeed. But, I submit, where all is plain there is nothing to be argued. What point in the anti-slavery creed would you have me argue? On what branch of the subject do the people of this country need light? Must I undertake to prove that the slave is a man? That point is conceded already. Nobody doubts it. The slave-holders themselves acknowledge it in the enactment of laws for their government. They acknowledge it when they punish disobedience on the part of the slave. There are seventy-two crimes in the State of Virginia, which, if committed by a black man (no matter how ignorant he be), subject him to the punishment of death; while only two of these same crimes will subject a white man to like punishment. What is this but the acknowledgment that the slave is a moral, intellectual, and responsible being?

The manhood of the slave is conceded. It is admitted in the fact that Southern statute-books are covered with enactments, forbidding, under severe fines and penalties, the teaching of the slave to read and write. When you can point to any such laws in reference to the beasts of the field, then I may consent to argue the manhood of the slave. When the dogs in your streets, when the fowls of the air, when the cattle on your hills, when the fish of the sea, and the reptiles that crawl, shall be unable to distinguish the slave from a brute, then I will argue with you that the slave is a man!

For the present it is enough to affirm the equal manhood of the Negro race. Is it not astonishing that, while we are plowing, planting, and reaping, using all kinds of mechanical tools, erecting houses, constructing bridges, building ships, working in metals of brass, iron, copper, silver, and gold; that while we are reading, writing, and ciphering, acting as clerks, merchants, and secretaries, having among us lawyers, doctors, ministers, poets, authors, editors, orators, and teachers; that while we are engaged in all the enterprises common to other men-digging gold in California, capturing the whale in the Pacific, feeding sheep and cattle on the hillside, living, moving, acting, thinking, planning, living in families as husbands, wives, and children, and above all, confessing and worshiping the Christian God, and looking hopefully for life and immortality beyond the grave-we are called upon to prove that we are men?

Would you have me argue that man is entitled to liberty? That he is the rightful owner of his own body? You have already declared it. Must I argue the wrongfulness of slavery? Is that a question for republicans? Is it to be settled by the rules of logic and argumentation, as a matter beset with great difficulty, involving a doubtful application of the principle of justice, hard to understand? How should I look today in the presence of Americans, dividing and subdividing a discourse, to show that men have a natural right to freedom, speaking of it relatively and positively, negatively and affirmatively? To do so would be to make myself ridiculous, and to offer and insult to your understanding. There is not a man beneath the canopy of heaven who does not know that slavery is wrong for him.

What! Am I to argue that it is wrong to make men brutes, to rob them of their liberty, to work them without wages, to keep them ignorant of their relations to their fellow men, to beat them with sticks, to flay their flesh with the last, to load their limbs with irons, to hunt them with dogs, to sell them at auction, to sunder their families, to knock out their teeth, to burn their flesh, to starve them into obedience and submission to their masters? Must I argue that a system thus marked with blood and stained with pollution is wrong? No; I will not. I have better employment for my time and strength than such arguments would imply.

What, then, remains to be argued? Is it that slavery is not divine; that God did not establish it; that our doctors of divinity are mistaken? There is blasphemy in the thought. That which is inhuman cannot be divine. Who can reason on such a proposition? They that can, may; I cannot. The time for such argument is past.

At a time like this, scorching irony, not convincing argument, is needed. Oh! had I the ability, and could I reach the nation’s ear, I would today pour out a fiery stream of biting ridicule, blasting reproach, withering sarcasm, and stern rebuke. For it is not light that is needed, but fire; it is not the gentle shower, but thunder. We need the storm, the whirlwind, and the earthquake. The feeling of the nation must be quickened; the conscience of the nation must be roused; the propriety of the nation must be startled; the hypocrisy of the nation must be exposed; and its crimes against God and man must be denounced.

What to the American slave is your Fourth of July I answer, a day that reveals to him more than all other days of the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim. To him your celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty an unholy license; your national greatness, swelling vanity; your sounds of rejoicing are empty and heartless; your denunciation of tyrants, brass-fronted impudence; your shouts of liberty and equality, hollow mockery; your prayers and hymns, your sermons and thanksgivings, with all your religious parade and solemnity, are to him mere bombast, fraud, deception, impiety, and hypocrisy’s thin veil to cover up crimes which would disgrace a nation of savages. There is not a nation of the earth guilty of practices more shocking and bloody than are the people of these United States at this very hour.

Go where you may, search where you will, roam through all the monarchies and despotisms of the Old World, travel through South America, search out every abuse and when you have found the last, lay your facts by the side of the every-day practices of this nation, and you will say with me that, for revolting barbarity and shameless hypocrisy, America reigns without a rival.