When Mary Lincoln was a little girl, she idolized her father’s close friend Henry Clay, a three-time candidate for president.

Clay promised her that she could come to the Executive Mansion if he were elected.

He never was, and he died before Mary could invite him to be her guest.

She never forgot the goal, though. When the Lincoln’s moved into the Executive Mansion, Mary stood in the doorway of the opulent Blue Room and exclaimed, “It’s mine, my very own! At last, it’s mine!”

Sources: Journal of the Abraham Lincoln Association, History Cooperative.org

Not all members of the cast of Our American Cousin were onstage or backstage when John Wilkes Booth shot President Lincoln, hopped the ballustrade of the presidential box and raised his bloody dagger in front of an astonished audience.

Some cast members were relaxing in the theater’s green room — now the site of the National Park Service’s office suite.

They couldn’t see any of the action, but W.J. Ferguson, the theater’s call boy, said actors who saw nothing until the event was practically over came forward with striking testimonies of what they said they had “seen.”

Samuel Seymour wasn’t concerned about President Lincoln on the night of April 14, 1865. Sitting in the audience at Ford’s Theatre, he didn’t even realize the president had been shot.

It was John Wilkes Booth who elicited the sympathies of the 5-year-old Baltimore boy,  attending the play with his godmother. He wondered if the actor was hurt when he suddenly dropped from the presidential box.

Seymour, at age 96, appeared on TV’s “I’ve Got A Secret” show in 1956. His secret: “I Saw John Wilkes Booth Shoot Abraham Lincoln.”

Seymour, like most people in the theater, didn’t actually see the shooting.

Like most other theatergoers that night, he did see Booth alight on stage, wobble and right himself.

Hear him tell it on You Tube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-jgGX1v4YFo

Congressman Abraham Lincoln donated  $10 to Irish famine relief in 1847 — the equivalent of several hundred dollars today.

Christine Kinealy, a professor at Drew University in New Jersey, discovered Lincoln’s name on a list of contributors.

The Great Hunger, which killed almost 1 million Irish, was the first national disaster to attract international fundraising efforts, Prof. Kinealy writes.

Although the British wouldn’t move to allieviate the suffering of the Irish people they taxed, thousands of others around the world did — including the future president, an Ottoman sultan, and an  impoverished Choctaw Indian tribe.

Shortly after he arrived in Washington, D.C., Congressman Lincoln attended a  meeting where letters from Irish women were read  aloud. They described coffinless starvation victims surrounded by family members who were screaming, not because of their sorrow but because of the agony of their extreme hunger. Their stories moved Mr. Lincoln to help.

Other donors included Pope Pius IX, Tsar Alexander II and American President James Polk, who gave $50.

Prof. Kinealy’s book “Charity and the Great Hunger in Ireland: The Kindness of Strangers” will be published by Network Educational Press in August, 2013.

President Lincoln had no Irish ancestors, but Mary Todd Lincoln’s paternal great-grandparents emigrated from County Longford in 1737.

Sources: Drew Magazine. IrishCentral.com, IrishAmerica.com

As a young lawyer, Abraham Lincoln made $1,500 to $2,000 a year for about a dozen years.

In the 1850s, his income rose to about $3,000 a year, and he had more than $9,000 invested in interest-bearing notes and mortgages.

He sued at least six times to collect his legal fees.

His net estate at death was $111,000.

By 1869, President Lincoln’s face graced a U.S. $100 note. The Lincoln penny debuted in 1909, with strong reaction from surviving Confederate veterans. Versions of the Lincoln $5 bill appeared beginning in 1914.

Sources: “The Personal Finances of Abraham Lincoln” by Harry E.Pratt, The Abraham Lincoln Assoc. , Springfield, Ill.  1943

The Chicago Tribune’s  April 15, 1865 edition topped its lead Lincoln assassination story with eight headlines, stacked atop one another:

Terrible News

President Lincoln Assassinated at Ford’s Theater

A Rebel Desperado Shoots Him Through the Head and Escapes

Secretary Seward and Major Fred Seward Stabbed by Another Desperado

Their Wounds Pronounced Not Fatal

Full Details of the Terrible Affair

Undoubted Plan to Murder Secretary Seward

Very Latest … The President is Dying

When investigators arrived at the National Hotel at 2 a.m. on Saturday, April 15, and asked to search Room 228, the night desk clerk was taken aback.

Walter Burton couldn’t figure out why in the world they’d want to search John Booth’s room. When they told him Booth shot the president, Burton laughed in their faces.

So did the other regulars gathered around.

“We all laughed at the absurdity of such a thing,” Burton told a reporter.

Booth was a genial fellow who lived at the hotel whenever he was in town. He and Burton  often sat behind the front desk talking late into the night, smoking 12-cent cigars and drinking while they waited for the newspaperman who stayed at the hotel  to wander in with the latest news.

There’s no report of whether Burton stopped laughing when officers found these items inside Booth’s room: handcuffs, a gag, a military dress coat and a pack of letters, including one from a woman who begged Booth to quit his perilous plan.

Sources: Washington, D.C. and Louisville, Ky. newspapers

The Surratt Society’s annual conference is scheduled March 14-16 in Clinton, Md., site of the Surratt House.

“Lincoln’s Assassination: Collateral Damage” will feature KIm Matthew Bauer, Jason Emerson, Thomas Bogar,  Jim Garrett, Richard Smyth, John Elliott, Caleb Stephens and Barry Cauchon.

Attendees may also take two optional tours — one to Mosby’s country in Virginia and one to Washington, D.C. to view the restored conspiracy trial room at Ft. McNair, the restored Clara Barton office and a Civil War exhibit at the National Portrait Gallery

For more information, call 301 868 1121.