9 – Abraham Lincoln Dreamed About His Assassination
On April 14, 1865, Abraham Lincoln, the 16th President of the U.S., was murdered by John Wilkes Booth. The assassination was purportedly part of Booth’s plan to revive the Confederacy and he planned to kill three of the nation’s most important officials. Booth did not act alone, however; he has at least three conspirators and they planned to turn the night into a bloodbath. While Booth was successful, his co-conspirators were not. David Herold and Lewis Powell did not kill William H. Seward, the Secretary of State, and George Atzerodt did not kill Andrew Johnson, the Vice President.
According to Lincoln’s friend, and occasional bodyguard, Ward Hill Lamon, Lincoln predicted his assassination. Lamon claimed that Lincoln shared details of a dream he had just a few days before his death. In it, the president walked into the White House’s East Room where he found a body protected by soldiers and surrounded by a mourning crowd. Lincoln asked one of the soldiers who had died. “The president” was the reply. “He was killed by an assassin.” There are doubts over the veracity of Lamon’s tale and also a suggestion that Lincoln said the corpse wasn’t him.
It seems increasingly likely that Lamon made the entire thing up. He didn’t publish his account for 20 years and it was a reconstruction based on notes he had made at the time. It is also odd that neither he nor Lincoln’s widow, mentioned the dream after the president’s death. However, there is evidence to suggest that the former president was extremely interested in deciphering the meanings of dreams and what they said about the future. In 1863, Lincoln wrote to his wife and said that she should put their son’s pistol away because he “had an ugly dream about him.”
According to members of his cabinet, Lincoln spoke about a dream he had the night before the assassination. In it, he dreamed about sailing rapidly over a body of water but he didn’t know where it was. Lincoln revealed that he had the same dream multiple times before; always before important events during the Civil War. In the end, he was unable to harness the predictive power of dreams and was slain on the night of April 14. Booth became the most wanted man in America and was killed 12 days later.
