Four border states that would have added manpower and resources to the Confederacy declined to leave the Union despite the fact that they all leaned pro slavery –Delaware, Maryland, Kentucky and Missouri.

Delaware was first to reject the Confederacy.

Maryland would have been particularly helpful to the Confederates because it circled Washington on three sides, and Confederates could have could have pressed the Union capitol.

While many actors who played U.S. presidents have been nominated for awards, Daniel Day Lewis became the only actor to win a Best Actor Award for portraying a president when he snagged the Oscar for his 2013 portrayal of President Lincoln.

Mary Lincoln was far from the most popular first lady, but she inspired the most biographies. Her husband inspired more biographies than any other president, including George Washington.

Source: The First Ladies by F.S. Foster

John Hay, the Illinois boy who got to know Abraham Lincoln because a family member of his had an office next to Lincoln’s in Springfield, became rich and powerful in his own right.

Hay became one of Lincoln’s White House secretaries and his confidante.

After the assassination, Hay and fellow secretary John Nicolay co-wrote an exhaustive multi-volume biography of Lincoln.

Hay then served as Secretary of State to President Theodore Roosevelt.

Roosevelt was a visitor to Hay’s Romanesque Revival mansion facing the White House on Washington’s tony Lafayette Square.

Hay’s wife was a Cleveland heiress, and even his mistress had a pedigree. She was the wife of wealthy, well-connected Massachusetts Sen. Henry Cabot Lodge.

Source: Presidential Courage: Brave Leaders and How They Changed America 1789-1989 by Michael Beschloss

When President Harry Truman’s mom came to the White House to visit her president, she told her other son, “You tell Harry if he tries to put me in Lincoln’s bed, I’ll sleep on the floor.”

Turns out Truman’s mother and her border-state relatives remembered that Union soldiers burned her mother’s barn and took everything they could carry.

Source: Presidential Courage: Brave Leaders and How They Changed America 1789-1989 by Michael Beschloss

The 1864 presidential election pitted President Lincoln against a general he had removed from command.

The candidates couldn’t have been more different.

Gen. George B. McClellan was a Philadelphia patrician educated at West Point. Mr. Lincoln was a self-taught frontier lawyer. McClellan looked down on the president.

While McClellan was still working for Lincoln in Washington, Lincoln and Secretary of State William Seward came to call one evening while McClellan was attending a military wedding. McClellan not only didn’t hurry home when he was told the commander-in-chief was waiting, but, when he did return home, he walked directly upstairs to bed without greeting the president or Seward.

Lincoln backers feared McClelland, if elected, might shut down the war effort and allow secession to stand.

McClellan won only three states though – Delaware, Kentucky and New Jersey.

Poet Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote: “Seldom in history was so much staked on a popular vote — I suppose never in history.”

McClelland was elected governor of New Jersey in 1878.

Sources: History of the Civil War by James Ford Rhodes and Presidential Courage: Brave Leaders and How they Changed America, 1789-1989 by Michael Beschloss

Washington’s birthday was celebrated for many decades before it became an official national holiday on January 31, 1879. President Lincoln was one of those who believed it should be declared a national holiday.

Lincoln read Mason Locke Weem’s popular Life of George Washington early in his life. Weem’s fanciful presentation of the first president as a humble-born boy inspired Lincoln to believe a poor boy such as himself could become a great president.

Abraham Lincoln was a wealthy, well-connected attorney by the time he ran for president in 1859, but he ran as Honest Abe the Rail Splitter.

Source:  Presidential Courage: Brave Leaders and How They Changed America 1789-1989 by Michael Beschloss

President Lincoln was plagued by insomnia, sleep deprivation and nightmares with the war raging, the budget rising, battlefield losses soaring, patronage decisions pending and reelection worries.

When he couldn’t sleep, he would often walk to the bedrooms of his secretaries, who lived at the White House. John Hay and John Nicolay had rooms directly across the hallway from each other.

The president would wander down the hallway, and the three would laugh late into the night.

Source: Presidential Courage: Brave Leaders and How They Changed America 1789-1989 by Michael Beschloss

Andersonville, the rebel Civil War prison usually paired with the word “horror,” opened in central Georgia in late February, 1864.

It was an open stockade with high wooden walls and no shelter for the captives except tents, lean-tos and huts they built themselves out of salvaged wood.

A fence was erected a short distance from the high walls, It was dubbed “deadline” because guards had orders to shoot any prisoner who went past the fence line.

Thirteen thousand Union soldiers died at Andersonville in the 14 months it was open. The prison was built for 10,000, but housed 33,000.

Captives received meager or no rations. Some days, the ration was a tablespoon of grain or meat, often contaminated. Diarrhea, dysentery, pneumonia and scurvy were all rampant within the camp. The water supply was inadequate and conditions were unsanitary.

Andersonville commander Maj. Henry Wirz was tried and executed for murder after the war.

Immediately after his victories at Chattanooga, one of Ulysses S. Grant’s supporters introduced a bill in Congress to revive the rank of lieutenant general — the rank conferred on George Washington and pretty much retired after his death.

The bill was passed, the president signed it, and, immediately nominated Grant.

The Senate confirmed the nomination and Grant headed for Washington, where he met President Lincoln for the first time on March 8, 1863.

They recognized each other without being introduced, shook hands and conversed. Grant was then presented to Mrs. Lincoln. Then a cheer rose from the crowd and an embarrassed Grant was forced to sit on a sofa and shake hands with throngs of admirers for an hour.

At the ceremony the next day, after the president conferred the rank on him,  Grant said, “With the aid of the noble armies that have fought on so many fields for our common country, it will be my earnest endeavor not to disappoint your expectations. I feel the full weight of the responsibilities now devolving on me; and I know that if they are met, it will be due to those armies, and above all to the favor of that Providence which leads both nations and men.”

 Source: The Lincoln Reader, Rutgers University Press