Lincoln Log

In the fall of 1818, thirty-four-year-old Nancy Hanks Lincoln accidentally drank some toxic cow milk (toxic milk was a danger in the time before pasteurization). She fell seriously ill. Lying on her death bed, she called her children, Sarah, eleven, and Abraham, nine, to her bedside and told them to be good and kind to their father, to each other, and to the world. The children’s father, Thomas, a skilled carpenter, made a casket of green pine planks. Abe helped by carving the pegs that held the casket together. The family buried Nancy atop a nearby ridge, without ceremony. Months later, when a traveling clergyman came through that wilderness stretch of southwestern Indiana, near Evansville, he said a funeral prayer over the unmarked grave.

At age twenty-two, Lincoln settled in the tiny village of New Salem, Illinois, and tried to figure out what to do with his life. When Black Hawk, a leader of the allied Sauk and Fox tribes, led a small band of Native American families eastward from Iowa into Illinois with the intent to grow corn there, Lincoln’s decision was made. Illinois governor John Reynolds called the migration an invasion and called out the militia, which in turn called for new recruits. Lincoln signed up. In the thoroughly democratic and unruly militia, the likeable Lincoln found himself elected captain of his company. When he first called out the order “Attention!” he was met with a good-natured chorus of “Go to hell!” He never saw battle during his three months of service in the Black Hawk War, but he later recalled “a good many bloody struggles with the mosquitoes.”

Lincoln was “close friends” with a couple of young lasses of the Illinois persuasion prior to his marriage to Mary Todd. Lincoln’s first serious girlfriend caught typhoid and died at age twenty-two, sending Lincoln into a deep depression. The next candidate, Mary Owens, turned the future prez down flat.

With the Civil War in full swing in July 1864, Confederate general Jubal A. Early attacked the Union capital in an attempt to distract Grant, who had Robert E. Lee pinned down in Virginia. The Union forces met Early a short distance from the White House. Lincoln rode out to observe and quickly came under fire. A young officer called out “damned fool!” and told Lincoln to take cover. Some speculate that the young officer in question was Oliver Wendell Homes, Jr., a future supreme court justice, who had such damned fool ideas as sterilizing the mentally ill. As for the failed attack on D.C., Early later said, “We didn’t take Washington, but we scared Abe Lincoln like hell.”

It seems Lincoln was a bit of a psychic, although he didn’t know it himself. According to the account of his friend and bodyguard, Ward Hill Lamon, Lincoln dreamed of hearing someone crying and of himself wandering from empty room to empty room in search of the mourner. In the White House’s East Room, he found a covered corpse lying on an ornate funeral platform. Lincoln asked, “Who is dead in the White House?” and someone replied that the corpse was Lincoln’s. On the night of April 14, 1865, Lincoln was shot and killed and sent to lie in state on an ornate funeral platform in the White House’s East Room.