Mary Lincoln consulted with multiple mediums while she resided at the White House, often in attempts to make contact with her deceased son Willie.

She was not alone. Belief in spiritualism soared as war fatalities and victims of childhood disease did.

A Washington medium named Colchester threatened Mary Lincoln that, if she did not get him a War Department pass to New York City, he might have some unpleasant things to say to her.

Noah Brooks, a reporter who was friendly with the president, attended one of Colchester’s seances and tried to expose him as a swindler. Brooks jumped up in the dark and tried to grasp a hand beating a bell against a drum, but the drum hit him on the head, leaving a bloody gash.

Soon after that, Brooks arranged a meeting with Colchester at the White House, confronted him with his bloody scar and warned him to give Mrs. Lincoln no further trouble or he’d wind up in prison.

Source: Reveille in Washington by Margaret Leech

Abraham Lincoln went to school for the first time in 1815, when he was six years old. It was dubbed a “blab school” because all the students said their lessons aloud.

Source: Abraham Lincoln: The Writer, edited by Harold Holzer

In 1849, after the voters turned him out of Congress after just one term, Abraham Lincoln tries unsuccessfully to get President Zachary Taylor to appoint him to an important government job.

He keeps campaigning against slavery and against the Dred Scott decision.

By 1859, he begins to think about running for the presidency himself.

The first Union soldier killed in the Civil War did not fall in battle.

Ephraim Elmer Ellsworth of Illinois was shot by an angry hotel keeper in Alexandria, Va., on May 24, 1861, after Ellsworth tore down a Confederate flag that was flying over the hotel. He was 24.

Lincoln mourned Ellsworth, a young firend from Illinois, at a White House funeral.

The president wrote a letter to Ellsworth’s parents explaining that the two had been acquainted for two years. He told them how he had observed their son’s fine intellect, his good heart, his indomitable energy, his natural military talent and his power to command men. He also mentioned that he had never heard him utter a profane or intemperate word.

He signed it: “May God give you that consolation which is beyond all earthly power. Sincerely your friend in a common affliction — A. Lincoln

Source: Abraham Lincoln: The Writer, edited by Harold Holzer

President Lincoln beat the odds when he was elected to a second term in 1864. The last president to win a second term was Andrew Jackson in 1832.

Jackson beat Henry Clay of Kentucky, a close friend of Mary Todd Lincoln’s father.

In 1857, Mary and Abraham Lincoln made their only trip outside the U.S. together — to Niagara Falls in Canada.

On the last day of his life, they talked about traveling more, perhaps to California or Jerusalem.

Abraham Lincoln wrote two poems in the pages of an old arithmetic book when he was around 16 years old:

Abraham Lincoln

his hand and his pen

he will be good but

god knows When

and

Abraham Lincoln is my name

And with my pen I wrote the same

I wrote in both hast and speed

and left it here for fools to read

Source: Abraham LIncoln: The Writer, edited by Harold Holzer

Dr. T. S. Verdi, Secretary William Seward’s doctor, described what he saw when he arrived at Seward’s mansion after the attempted assassination:

“I had left Mr. Seward about nine o’clock in the evening, very comfortable, in his room, and when I saw him next he was in bed, covered with blood, with blood all around him, blood under his bed, and blood on the handles of the door.”

Source: Recollection of Men and Things at Washington, During the Third of a Century by L.A. Gobright

On this day in 1863, President and Mrs. Lincoln occupied the same Ford’s Theatre box where the assassination would occur less than two years later.

Mary B. Clay, the daughter of U.S. minister to Russia Cassius Clay, was one of the friends who accompanied the Lincolns.

She later wrote: “I do not recall the play, but Wilkes Booth played the part of the villain. The box was right on the stage, with a railing around it. Mr. Lincoln sat next to the rail…Twice Booth, in uttering disagreeable threats in the play, came very near and put his finger close to Mr. Lincoln’s face. When he came a third time I was impressed by it, and said, ‘Mr. Lincoln, he looks as if he meant that for you.’ ‘Well,’ he said, ‘he does look pretty sharp at me, doesn’t he?’

Source: “Mary, Wife of Lincoln,” by Mary Lincoln’s niece Katherine Helm, Harper and Bros, N.Y., 1928

John Miles was working in Ford Theatre’s flies, about 20 to 30 feet above the backstage, when he heard a pistol go off. In about a minute or two, he heard the sound of a horse’s hooves fleeing the alley outside.

Miles came down the stairs and saw the door John Wilkes Booth passed through open.

Source: “We Saw Lincoln Shot” by Timothy S. Good