President Lincoln loved opera, especially “Martha” by Friedrich von Flotow. The opera is known for a beautiful aria called “Ach so Fromm.”

One of Mr. Lincoln’s favorite tunes was “Annie Laurie,” an old Scottish love ballad.

And, of course, he loved “Dixie.”

While the Confederates appropriated it as their anthem, Dixie had been a popular song North and South before the Civil War.

After the war, the president jokingly claimed the song as federal property.

Source: NPR Morning Edition

More quotes from the 16th president:

“Better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to speak out and remove all doubt.”

“Nearly all men can stand adversity, but, if you want to test a man’s character, give him power.”

“Most folks are as happy as they make up their minds to be.”

“Give me six hours to chop down a tree and I will spend the first four sharpening the axe.”

“Don’t interfere with anything in the Constitution. That must be maintained, for it is the only safeguard of our liberties.”

William J. Ferguson, a young actor and call boy at Ford’s Theatre, had a beer with John Wilkes Booth at 3 p.m. the afternoon of the assassination.

“He was perfectly cool,” Ferguson recalled later.

Asked how Booth got to Lincoln, Ferguson said, “He went into the box. It was a sudden freak. I don’t believe anyone knew anything about it but himself.”

Ferguson, a teen, didn’t immediately tell anyone Booth was the assassin, although he recognized him  instantly.

“Why, he was my friend. I wasn’t going to tell on him. I was a boy. I had not reached the age of discretion. I had not any interest in Lincoln, but I think differently now,” Ferguson said later. “It was a great mistake. It was a great mistake.”

Source: Notes, N.Y. Historical Society

When Catherine Evans died in Chicago at age 81, she left a half-finished letter to a little admirer who had written to ask her about what happened in Ford’s Theatre many decades earlier.

Mrs. Evans was a stock player in “Our American Cousin,” and she was in the theater when John Wilkes Booth shot the president.

Rosalie Smith, superintendent of the nursing home where the actress lived, said Evans told her a dozen times that, if it weren’t for the fact that she had seen Lincoln killed, nobody would ever have known she was alive.

Source: The Baltimore Sun, June 16, 1926

When President Lincoln was shot, Newton Ferree was playing bagatelle, a table game where players try to guide balls through a series of pegs.

As Ferree walked out the door of Falstaff House after his game at about 10:30 p.m., he heard someone at Ford’s Theatre cry out. He went into Ford’s and found the entire audience on its feet and crying out that someone should be hanged.

Ferree ran forward and jumped up on the stage. There, he learned the president had been assassinated. He started to go towards the presidential box, but he saw five or six men carrying President Lincoln out.

Ferree picked up the collar that had been torn from the president’s neck after he was shot.

“When I heard of the president being assassinated, it almost set me wild,” Ferree wrote.

President Lincoln’s body was embalmed by Harry Cattell, who worked for Brown & Alexander, a Pennsylvania Avenue embalmer.

Cattell had embalmed 11-year-old Willie Lincoln three years earlier.

He embalmed Mr. Lincoln in the president’s bedroom at the Executive Mansion. Andrew Johnson, the new president, was present for the procedure.

Source: American’s Historical Newspapers: The Washington Post 

A photographer captured the scene on battlefield at Gettysburg 150 years ago today, as Confederate soldiers’ bodies were gathered for burial:

Source: Library of Congress

The losses were staggering following the three-day battle of Gettysburg, waged July 1-3, 1863. The following November, President Lincoln dedicated the Soldiers’ National Cemetery in Gettysburg.

He paid tribute to those who died there in his Gettysburg Address. Its ten sentences comprised one of the most-quoted presidential addresses in American history:

Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.

Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battlefield of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.

But, in a larger sense, we can not dedicate, we can not consecrate, we can not hallow this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us—that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion—that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain—that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom—and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.

On this evening 150 years ago, the town of Gettysburg, Pa. (population 2,400) was left with nearly 8,000 bodies and 3,000 horse carcasses rotting in the summer sun — so many that townspeople gagged at the stench.

After three days of fighting, the Union had won the bloodiest battle of the Civil War, but they lost 2,155 soldiers and more than 14,000 others were wounded. More than 5,000 were captured or went missing.

Confederate casualties were far greater. Nearly a third of Gen. Robert E. Lee’s general officers were killed, wounded or captured.

Despite three days of heavy fighting, only one civilian was killed. Jenny Wade was struck down by a stray bullet as she worked inside her house.

The Battle of Gettysburg was a decisive victory for the Union. It stopped the Confederate invasion of the North and forced Lee’s army to withdraw to Virginia.

When asked if her husband had a hobby, Mary Todd Lincoln replied, “Cats.”

President Lincoln loved cats, and he would spend hours playing with them.

Even with the war raging in March 1865, when the president found three kittens abandoned at a wartime telegraph hut, he picked them up, placed them in his lap and saw to it that they found a loving home.

Source: National Park Service