The ballot is stronger than the bullet — Abraham Lincoln

Boomerang adults living with their parents in this economy can take inspiration from President Lincoln. It took him 29 years to get to the White House.

While he left his home and his demanding father in 1831, as soon as he was legally able to do it, he wasn’t immediately on a standard career path to president.

He ran for the state legislature and won his home district overwhelmingly, but lost the election.

He was elected captain of a company of soldiers from his hometown who volunteered to fight in the Black Hawk Indian War.

Then he became to town postmaster.

Then he opened a store, but it went bankrupt, plunging him into debt.

In 1834, he made a successful run for the state legislature, and his political career was launched. He was 25.

He earned a law license in 1836 and was re-elected to the legislature.

He was elected a U.S. congressman, but served only one term.

He launched failed attempts to become a U.S. senator in 1855 and 1858.

He snatched the Republican Party’s nomination for president in 1860, and the rest is history.

Young Abraham Lincoln excelled at “fives,” a precursor of handball.

With his exceptionally long arms and legs, he could reach and return the ball from any angle. One friend said he would play as if his life depended on it until he was nearly exhausted, then take a seat on the bench designated for tired players.

Mr. Lincoln was playing the game as he awaited the results of nominating convention in Chicago in May 1860.

Source: The Lincoln Institute

The food at Lincoln’s second inaugural was served at a late hour — late enough that revelers were very hungry.

When the hungry crowd saw oysters, roast beef, veal, turkey, venison, smoked ham, lobster salad, cakes and tarts for the taking, they charged the food table.

In less than an hour, the floor was sticky and stained with slopped stews and fallen jellies after men hoisted full trays above revelers’ heads to carry them back to their friends.

Source: The Smithsonianmag.com

Maunsell Field, assistant secretary of the treasury, told a Philadelphia Inquirer reporter that he was sitting in the reading room at the Willard Hotel when a person ran in and announced in a loud tone of voice that the president had just been shot at Ford’s Theatre.

Field rushed to Tenth Street, but found it already crowded with masses of people. He said the individuals he talked to erroneously reported the president had been shot in the breast and the wound might not prove fatal.

It was not until he entered Petersen’s Boardinghouse that he learned the president was shot in the head and a death watch was on.

President Lincoln had a couple takes on enemies and frenemies:

“A friend is one who has the same enemies as you have.”

— A. Lincoln

“Am I not destroying my enemies when I make friends of them?”

— A. Lincoln

Abraham Lincoln was without a mother for less than a year.

After his birth mother Nancy Hanks Lincoln died from drinking poisoned milk in 1818, his father Thomas LIncoln married Sarah Bush Johnston Lincoln in 1819.

Although his father preferred he work, Abraham’s loving stepmother encouraged him to read and write.

She also prodded her new husband to install a wooden floor in the dirt-floored cabin where they lived and to provide utensils so the children could learn to eat properly.

Elizabeth Keckley, Mary Lincoln’s dressmaker, was reimbursed the present-day equivalent of $5,142.86 for attending Mrs. Lincoln in the six weeks after the president died.

Bills submitted by Mrs. Keckley and paid by the Commissioner of Public Buildings included $210 for six weeks work as attendant and nurse to Mrs. Lincoln, calculated at $35 a week; $100 for travel and incidental expenses when the women travelled to Chicago and back, and $50 for Mrs. Keckley’s mourning apparel.

President Lincoln gave as good a definition of liberty as anyone when he addressed a Sanitary Fair in Baltimore in 1864:

“The shepherd drives the wolf from the sheep’s throat, for which the sheep thanks the shepherd as a liberator, while the wolf denounces him for the same act as the destroyer of liberty…Plainly the sheep and the wolf are not agreed upon a definition of the word liberty; and precisely the same difference prevails today among us human creatures, even in the North, and all professing to love liberty. Hence we behold the processes by which thousands are daily passing from under the yoke of bondage, hailed by some as the advance of liberty, and bewailed by others as the destruction of all liberty.”

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

The photographer who took the alarming photos of the Lincoln conspirators hanging from the gallows knew they were to be hanged before the conspirators did.

A military commission issued a pass to Alexander Gardner before the pubic or the condemed had been informed of the imminent hangings.

Gardner and another photographer arrived at the prison yard at 11 a.m. on July 7 and set up their cameras in two windows facing the scaffold.  The condemed were led to the scaffold around 1:15 p.m.

Source: The Lincoln Assassination Encyclopedia by Edward Steers Jr.