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He was 6’4″ and had a size 14 foot.
His favorite color was blue.
He loved oysters, biscuits and apple pie, coffee his favorite beverage.
Some say he was homely yet attracted women, I’m betting because of his legendary sense of humor.
He married Mary Todd from Lexington, Kentucky who gave him 4 sons, we now think was bipolar because of her mood swings and colossal compulsion to spend money, causing Lincoln chronic embarrassment.
I have nothing against her being an Olympian shopper, but her jealousy was another matter, accusing everyone short of Old Bob, Abe’s horse, having the hots for her husband.
It actually saved U.S. Grant’s life since, he was on John Wilkes Booth’s hit list. Because Mary had insulted his wife Julia the day before during a carriage ride the four of them had taken, she refused the invitation to go to Fords.
The play, My American Cousin was a comedy staring Laura Keene, the Julie Andrews of her day, where it’s believed Wilkes shot Abe during a laugh.
Let’s hope since, he never regained consciousness dying the following day on April 15, 1865 at the age of 56.
Abe lost his Mom, Nancy Hanks Lincoln, when he was 9 as well as his first love, Ann Rutledge who died of Typhoid, at 22; loss cementing the melancholia he’d suffer from the rest of his life.
Of course sadness sires sensitivity making Abe one of the most poignant presidential writers we’ve ever had.
His only possible rival was Teddy Roosevelt, who kept a portrait of him in the room at Sagamore Hill where he wrote.
Abe seemed to have a way of turning simple words into sheer poetry.
He wrote the Gettysburg Address on a napkin while riding the train to deliver it;
The Emancipation Proclamation in his study, now the White House’s Lincoln Bedroom.
But for me, his most eloquent piece was the last paragraph of his First Inaugural Address given on March 1, 1861, a month before the outbreak of the Civil War.
…I am loath to close. We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained, it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battle-field, and patriot grave, to every living heart and hearthstone, all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.
To quote the writer Kurt Vonnegut in his book, Man Without A Country who too loved Lincoln
…Holy Shit! And I thought I was a writer!
SB