Abraham Lincoln Trivia

Welcome to the Lincoln Site Tours Trivia Challenge. Read below to see what you do or do not know about our 16th President of the United States.
 

• Lincoln was seeing the play "Our American Cousin" when he was shot.
• Lincoln was the first president to have a beard while in office.
• Lincoln, Nebraska was named after Abraham Lincoln.
• Abe Lincoln's mother, Nancy Hanks Lincoln, died from milk sickness. The disease resulted when cows ate the white snakeroot plant and the poison from the plant contaminated the milk. People who drank this milk or ate its products were likely to die.
• A plot was developed to steal Lincoln's body, so a secret society to guard his tomb was formed.
• During the Civil War, telegraph wires were strung to follow the action on the battlefield. But there was no telegraph office in the White House, so Lincoln went across the street to the War Department to get the news.
• Lincoln was the tallest president. He was 6 feet and four inches tall.
• Lincoln once had a dream right before the fall of Richmond that he would die. He dreamt that he was in the White House, he heard crying and when he found the room it was coming from he asked who had died. The man said the President. He looked in the coffin and saw his own face. A week later Lincoln died.
• Lincoln was shot on Good Friday.
• Robert Todd Lincoln arrived too late to stop three separate presidential assassinations. He met his father, President Abraham Lincoln, at the theatre after John Wilkes Booth had fired the shot. He went to a Washington train station to meet President Garfield, arriving only minutes after he was shot. And, he traveled to Buffalo, New York to meet President McKinley, but got there after the fatal shot had already been fired.
• Lincoln had a cat named "Bob," a turkey named "Jack," and a dog named "Jib."
• He was the first president to be photographed at his inauguration. John Wilkes Booth (his assassin) can be seen standing close to Lincoln in the picture.
• Lincoln was the only president to receive a patent, for a device for lifting boats over shoals.
• Mary Todd Lincoln's brother, half-brothers, and brothers-in-law fought in the Confederate Army.
• Abraham Lincoln was shot while watching a performance of Our American Cousin at Ford's Theatre in Washington, D.C. The same play was also running at the Maverick Theatre in Chicago on May 18, 1860, the day Lincoln was nominated for president in that city.
• Lincoln's favorite sport was wrestling.
• Lincoln worked as a deck hand on a Mississippi River flatboat.
• Lincoln had a substitute fight for him during the Civil War. Not a paid substitute as some might think. When J. Summerfield Staples, the son of an army chaplain, heard that Lincoln felt that the president should be fighting in the war (but couldn't because of all his duties), Staples volunteered to fight as a substitute. Both he and his father survived through the war, and returned home to Stroudsburg, Pennsylvania. If one traveled to the cemetery there, they would find a headstone that reads:
• Lincoln had a wart on his right cheek, a scar on his thumb from an ax accident, and a scar over his right eye from a fight with a gang of thieves.
• Abraham Lincoln grew his beard out of the suggestion of an 11 year old girl.
• John Wilkes Booth's brother once saved Abraham Lincoln's son's life.
• Abe Lincoln is the U.S. president most frequently portrayed in films.
• The contents of his pockets on the night of his assassination weren't revealed until February 12, 1976. They contained two pairs of spectacles, a chamois lens cleaner, an ivory and silver pocketknife, a large white Irish linen handkerchief, slightly used, with "A. Lincoln" embroidered in red, a gold quartz watch fob without a watch, a new silk-lined, leather wallet containing a pencil, a Confederate five-dollar bill, and news clippings of unrest in the Confederate army, emancipation in Missouri, the Union party platform of 1864, and an article on the presidency by John Bright.
• He was named after his grandfather.
• Lincoln and his wife held séances in the White House. They had great interest in psychic phenomena.
• Lincoln loved the works of William Shakespeare.
• Abraham Lincoln was the first president to be born outside of the original thirteen colonies. He was born in Kentucky.

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