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Abe Lincoln Quick Facts
Posted By: Abe Lincoln 19 January 2012 226 views No Comment
Lincoln’s stovepipe top hat served as more than fashionable headwear. He used it to store and carry notes, letters, even bills. Why do they call it a stovepipe hat? Well, the rise is so tall and straight with no flair that it resembles a length of pipe. They’re hard to come by nowadays, the traditional top hat being much more current, but still pretty “retro”. Best you go to a custom haberdashery to get one made just for you.
Lincoln was 6’4”, making him our country’s tallest president. That of course raises the question, who was our shortest president? That would be our 4th president, James Madison, who stood a stately 5’4”, making him an entire foot shorter than Honest Abe – even without his hat!
Lincoln really liked machines and gadgets. He liked to take them apart to see how they worked and try to put them together again. He even tried his hand at inventing, and in 1849 had a patent issued for “A Device for Buoying Vessels Over Shoals”. The machine never made it, but the patent was a new thing for a president, and no president has held a patent since.
In the weeks before his death, Lincoln was extremely melancholy. He had seen portents of his own death, and had been dreaming of death as well. On one occasion looked in the mirror and saw a double reflection, one image much paler and blurrier than the other. He told his wife that he thought it meant that he had survived his first term, but wouldn’t survive his second. The week prior to his death, Lincoln had a dream of hearing crying in a distant room of the White House. He sought out the room and found that it had a coffin in it. He asked the weeping person who had died and the person responded that it was the President. In his dream, Lincoln looked into the coffin and saw himself. Read more in The Psychic Life of Abraham Lincoln
Not only did he get premonitions, he also believed in the occult. Well, if he didn’t believe then he was at least willing to go along with it. Because he and Mary had lost little Edward and Willie at such young ages, they actually held seances in the White House trying to contact their dearly departed. Mrs. Lincoln also attended seances at the homes of famous mediums of the day. Whether or not they made contact is unknown.
Not only was Lincoln spiritual and intelligent, he was also a heck of a speech writer. He wrote his own speeches, and it is said that his famous Gettysburg Address wasn’t even the best one! Rumor has it that the speech Lincoln made to the Illinois Republican Convention on May 29, 1856 was his best, but it was either so enthralling that nobody remembered to take notes, or it was so controversial that nobody was allowed to print them. Either way, no record of it exists.
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