Abraham Lincoln, Hall of Fame Wrestler, and Other American President Facts

22. The White House Flock

As a Washington Post article reported on May 12^th, 1918, just a few weeks after sheep were introduced to the White House: “President Wilson is having no end of trouble with the flock of sheep he purchased recently to graze on the White House lawn“. Cars and trucks had only recently started to appear in the District of Colombia in increasing numbers, and their sounds terrified the sheep. It was just the start of an ongoing sheep drama. President Wilson’s White House sheep could be said to have been scared, literally, shitless. As The Washington Post described their plight: “Two of the sheep developed serious illness yesterday and are under the care of specialists from the Department of Agriculture …

The animals had been getting along nicely, until yesterday. The fact that one of the sheep has the “dips” is said to be due to the fact that it became frightened by passing automobiles and similar noises to which it was not accustomed.” By 1920, the flock had grown to 48 sheep, and had destroyed the White House’s back lawn. So they were moved to the front lawn, and promptly began to wreck the rose gardens. The result was a frantic fencing operation to save the flower beds and more delicate trees from the flock’s depredations. By August of that year, Wilson had finally had enough, and brought the experiment to an end. As The Washington Post put it: “President Wilson has decided to retire from the sheep business“.

21. Honest Abe Was a Hall of Fame Wrestler

The Great Emancipator was also a great wrestler. With his craggy features, lanky frame, and stovepipe hat, Abraham Lincoln is perhaps America’s most recognizable historic president, well known for many things. He successfully navigated America through the Civil War, freed the slaves, and authored the Gettysburg Address, recited by schoolchildren to this day. Less known is that in his youth, Lincoln was a lean, mean, wrestling machine, who performed feats of strength that became part of local legend and frontier lore. Out on the frontier back in those days, wrestling was more along the lines of unarmed combat than sport, and Lincoln, 6 foot 4 and ripped, was a natural. His skills often came in handy. At age nineteen, for example, he saved his stepbrother’s river barge from river pirates by overpowering and throwing them overboard.

His most famous fight took place shortly after Lincoln, in his early twenties, moved to Salem, Illinois, and was challenged by a local bully named Jack Armstrong. The bout was inconclusive for some time. Then Armstrong resorted to dirty tricks. An enraged Lincoln grabbed him by the neck, and extending his arms, “shook him like a rag doll“, then tossed him to the ground. Standing over his rival, Lincoln then challenged Armstrong’s followers: “I’m the big buck of this lick. If any of you want to try it, come and whet your horns!” Armstrong admitted he’d been fairly beaten, and proclaimed Lincoln “the best feller that ever broke into this settlement“. The duo shook hands, and became friends. Lincoln reportedly wrestled more than 300 times in his youth, and lost only once. In 1992, he was inducted into the National Wrestling Hall of Fame.

20. The Mercurial Third President

Think of President Thomas Jefferson, and what usually comes to mind are his major accomplishments: The Declaration of Independence, the Louisiana Purchase, and the University of Virginia. When it comes to controversy, what usually comes to mind is the contrast between his soaring rhetoric about freedom, the fact that he was a major slaveholder, and that he had an enslaved concubine, Sally Hemings. Less known are his wacky beliefs, and other indicia that make Jefferson come across as a maniac. The man was a genius, but a wacky one. For example, he went from a huge dog lover at some point in his life, to a dog hater who had all his dogs – and all the dogs of his slaves – killed.

Jefferson used to be a close friend of John Adams, before he turned on and became his mortal enemy. He once got into the nineteenth century equivalent of a flame war with some Frenchmen who’d derided the size of American animals. To settle it, Jefferson shipped a putrid moose carcass across the Atlantic from America to Paris. Americans generally like dogs, and politicians who like dogs. Kissing babies aside, few things afford politicians a shorter cut to voters’ affection than to demonstrate affection towards dogs. Jefferson was a dog lover at some point. In 1789, at the end of his stint as America’s ambassador to France, Jefferson especially liked shepherd dogs, and went out of his way to get some. However, as seen below, his view of dogs underwent a radical reversal.

19. From Dog Lover to Dog Hater

As he wrote to a friend, Thomas Jefferson spent the eve of his departure from France: “[R]oving thro the neighborhood of this place to try to get a pair of shepherd’s dogs. We walked 10 miles, clambering the cliffs in quest of the shepherds, during the most furious tempest of wind and rain I was ever in“. He came across a human corpse in his journey, but no shepherd dogs. He lucked out the next day, however, and bought “a chienne bergere big with pup“. In Paris, Thomas Jefferson had been an avid dog lover. But his erstwhile love of dogs turned to outright hatred. He came to loathe them so much, that he called for the extermination of the entire species.

Jefferson was quite proud of his dogs when he got back home to Monticello, his plantation near Charlottesville, VA. He boasted of their herding skills, and before long, friends were writing him to ask for a pup from the next litter. However, Jefferson was one of those types who demanded strict and complete obedience. When one of his dogs proved obstinate, his views on dogs in general underwent a complete change. His reaction to one dog’s disobedience was to kill all his dogs. He also ordered his foreman to rid the plantation of dogs and kill all the slaves’ dogs as well. Eventually, he advocated for the complete eradication of all dogs everywhere. As he put it in a letter to a fellow dog hater in 1811: “I participate in all your hostility to dogs, and would readily join in any plan for exterminating the whole race“.

18. LBJ’s Quirky Side

Lyndon Baines Johnson, (1908 – 1973) would have gone down in history as one of the country’s greatest presidents, if not for the Vietnam War. LBJ had spent decades in Congress, both in the House and Senate, whose Majority Leader he became in the 1950s. When fate elevated him from vice president to president after John F. Kennedy was assassinated in 1963, LBJ entered the Oval Office with an unequaled mastery of the legislative process. He put that expertise to good use, and pushed through landmark legislative accomplishments such as the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Both Medicare and Medicaid also began during his administration. Had Vietnam not derailed his ambitious “Great Society” program, LBJ would probably rank alongside Franklin Delano Roosevelt as an exceptionally transformative president.

The disastrous war and the great legislative accomplishments loom large in the public’s perceptions of LBJ. They obscure the lesser known quirky – and sometimes seedy – side of the man. LBJ liked to depict himself as a simple a Good Ole Boy, and in many ways, he really was. A Good Ole Boy, that is: there was nothing simple about the smart-as-a-whip Lyndon Johnson. One way the Good Ole Boy side came out was in his humor. Not subtle salon or New Yorker type quips and bon mots, but down to earth – and quite often earthy – jokes and pranks. One of his favorites was to convince guests – whose numbers included important foreign dignitaries – that they were about to die. As seen below, LBJ pulled it off with his Amphicar – a West German vehicle that was the only civilian passenger amphibious automobile to ever be mass produced.

17. Hey, Hey, LBJ, How Many Pranks Have You Pulled Today?

About 4000 Amphicars were made, and President Johnson owned a baby blue one. He kept it in his Texas ranch, where he routinely hosted guests. While there, LBJ would often take his guests for a drive in his Amphicar – without telling them what it was. He would then convince them that they were about to drown. As LBJ drove guests around the Texas backcountry in his Amphicar, he would come close to a lake or pond, and suddenly pretend to have lost control of the vehicle. Then, to the terrified guests’ consternation, he would drive straight into a body of water. As the car splashed into a lake and the terrified passengers screamed, and perhaps soiled their pants as their lives flashed before their eyes, Johnson would double over with laughter.

As one of LBJ’s marks put it: “The President, with [his secretary] Vicky McCammon in the seat alongside him and me in the back, was now driving around in a small blue car with the top down. We reached a steep incline at the edge of the lake and the car started rolling rapidly toward the water. The President shouted, “The brakes don’t work! The brakes won’t hold! We’re going in! We’re going under!” The car splashed into the water. I started to get out. Just then the car leveled and I realized we were in a Amphicar. The President laughed. As we putted along the lake then (and throughout the evening), he teased me. “Vicky, did you see what Joe did? He didn’t give a damn about his President. He just wanted to save his own skin and get out of the car.” Then he would roar [with laughter]”.

16. Teddy Roosevelt’s Troubled and Tragic Youth

President Theodore “Teddy” Roosevelt (1858 – 1919) had been a sickly child, whose parents feared he would not survive to adulthood. The son of a Manhattan socialite and a businessman philanthropist father, young Teddy often suffered severe asthma attacks that doctors could do little about. As he described the bouts in later years, they felt as if somebody had sat on his chest and tried to smother him with pillows. A born fighter, TR did not despair, and discovered how to keep down the asthma and simultaneously keep up his spirits: vigorous exercise. When he was around eleven-years-old, Teddy traveled with his family to Europe, and as they hiked in the Alps, the sickly kid discovered that he could keep pace with his father. It felt pretty good, and from then on, TR adopted a regimen of strenuous exercise and outdoors activities.

He also took up boxing to learn how to fight, after he got bullied by older boys on a camping trip. TR went to Harvard, where he boxed and rowed. He was good enough at the former to make it to second place in a Harvard boxing tournament. After Harvard, TR spent a year at Columbia Law School, before he dropped out in 1881 to serve in the New York State Assembly. His political career showed early promise, and he made a name for himself, especially in his efforts against corporate corruption. Then came 1884, a horrible year for the future president. On Valentine’s Day, February 14^th, two days after she gave birth to their daughter Alice, his wife died. His mother died a few hours later. The only entry on his diary that day was an ‘X’, and the notation “The light has gone out of my life“.

15. TR Fell In Love With the West

A few months after his tragic bereavements, Teddy Roosevelt attended the GOP National Convention in Chicago, but his candidate lost. The personal and political setbacks in quick succession caused TR to feel burned out. So he decided to quit politics and move out West. He had visited the Dakota Territory in 1883 to hunt buffalo, and liked the western lifestyle. So he invested $14,000 – a significant amount in those days – to become a rancher. TR was more than just a rich guy from the East Coast who went out west to cosplay as a cowboy. In the summer of 1884, he established the Elkhorn Ranch on the banks of the Little Missouri River in the Badlands, about 35 miles north of what is now Medora, North Dakota. He enthusiastically embraced his new occupation as a rancher, and set out to learn the ropes – literally – of the profession.

TR learned to ride, rope cattle, and hunt, and wrote three books about his experience. Later that year, he went on a days-long horseback ride to clear his head and take in the scenery. He eventually came upon the Nolan Hotel in Mingusville, Montana. The place looked like a seedy dive, and TR hesitated to enter – especially after he heard two gunshots coming from the bar. However, nightfall was near, and it and it was cold outside, so he went in. He saw a “shabby individual in a broad hat with a cocked gun in each hand was walking up and down the floor talking with strident profanity. He had evidently been shooting at the clock, which had two or three holes in its face“. As seen below, things were about to get interesting.

14. Teddy Roosevelt’s Barroom Brawl

Soon as he saw TR, who wore glasses, the bar lout hailed him as “Four Eyes”, and announced that “Four Eyes is going to treat!” TR tried to play it off, but the loudmouth followed him around. As the future president described the encounter: “As soon as he saw me he hailed me as ‘Four Eyes,’ in reference to my spectacles, and said, ‘Four Eyes is going to treat.’ I joined in the laugh and got behind the stove and sat down, thinking to escape notice. He followed me, however, and though I tried to pass it off as a jest this merely made him more offensive, and he stood leaning over me, a gun in each hand, using very foul language… In response to his reiterated command that I should set up the drinks, I said, ‘Well, if I’ve got to, I’ve got to,’ and rose, looking past him.

As I rose, I struck quick and hard with my right just to one side of the point of his jaw, hitting with my left as I straightened out, and then again with my right. He fired the guns, but I do not know whether this was merely a convulsive action of his hands, or whether he was trying to shoot at me. When he went down he struck the corner of the bar with his head… if he had moved I was about to drop on my knees; but he was senseless. I took away his guns, and the other people in the room, who were now loud in their denunciation of him, hustled him out and put him in the shed“. The next day, the humiliated lout left town on a freight train.

13. Too Ugly to Be President?

Many consider Abraham Lincoln to be America’s greatest president, or at least in the top three. However, before he got the gig, Lincoln had to pass the job interview and audition: the 1860 presidential election. However, Lincoln’s campaign had a problem: the candidate’s looks. Photography had been invented by then, but had not yet widely spread in the media. So many Americans did not know what Lincoln looked like. In that vacuum, rumors – spread and amplified by his opponents – abounded that Lincoln was ugly as sin. One newspaper described him as: “coarse, vulgar, and uneducated“.

As the Houston Telegraph put it, Lincoln was: “the leanest, lankiest, most ungainly mass of legs, arms and hatchet face ever strung upon a single frame. He has most unwarrantably abused the privilege which all politicians have of being ugly“. A woman claimed Lincoln was “grotesque in appearance“. His opponents concocted a rallying cry that ended with: “We beg and pray you – Don’t, for God’s sake, show his picture“. It was petty, but unlike what we were told as kids, looks do matter. At least sometimes, and an election in which enough voters might be turned off by a candidate’s mug to impact the result is one of those times. So, as seen below, Lincoln turned to famous photographer Matthew Brady.

12. The Photo That Saved Lincoln’s Presidential Campaign

Matthew Brady had Lincoln pose for a photo, just before he gave an early 1860 speech at Cooper Union that secured him the Republican nomination. It became Honest Abe’s first widely disseminated image. Lincoln was rumored to be ugly, and gangly to the point of ungainliness. To address the ugly, Brady focused extra light on Lincoln’s face. It highlighted that while not exactly handsome, Lincoln was not nearly as grotesque as his opponents claimed. To make Lincoln’s neck look proportional, Brady touched up the photo to artificially enlarge the collar. He also had the future president curl up his fingers, so that their excessive length would not fuel the “gangly” narrative.

Nowadays, politicians routinely edit their photos. In 1860, what Brady did was revolutionary. The resultant photo was so positively received, that Lincoln remarked: “Brady and the Cooper Institute made me president“. It was not the only – and nowhere close to the most extreme – old timey photo editing of Lincoln’s image. After his assassination in 1865, the public was desperate for a then-popular “heroic pose” image of Lincoln. So portraitist Thomas Hicks went to extremes. He took a heroic pose image of extreme racist and slavery advocate John C. Calhoun, Lincoln’s total political opposite, and swapped in Lincoln’s head. Nobody noticed for a century.

11. George Washington’s Adventurous Life

George Washington had the most interesting pre Oval Office (which didn’t exist in his day) life of any American president. Before he was anybody, Washington played a key role in the disastrous Braddock Expedition – an obscure engagement in the middle of nowhere that nonetheless helped spark off the Seven Years’ War. The man was personally involved in world changing events from early on. When the American Revolution began, he led rebel armies almost from start to finish. He was not a brilliant battlefield commander. Nonetheless, he took disorganized militia mobs, forged them into a disciplined national army, and kept that army as a going concern for almost a decade, until victory was won.

Washington pulled that off despite intrigues, backstabbing, and straight up treason, both within his army and among his political masters. America probably would have lost its bid for independence without Washington. It is also probable that any random month from that period of his life as commander of the Continental Army had more interesting stuff than the entire pre-POTUS life of any other American president. Only other chief executives who had anything comparable by way of an exciting life before they were elected to lead the country were probably Andrew Jackson and US Grant, both of whom led armies in momentous battles and campaigns.

10. When a Young George Washington Started a World War

Some people seem destined for great things, and everybody predicts from early on that they’re going places. George Washington was one such. From early on, he stood out. Both literally, as he was quite big and tall by his era’s standards, and because he had a presence that commanded attention. Decades before he commanded the Patriot forces in the American Revolution, a young Washington made a name for himself, both in the Colonies and in Britain. His first brush with fame began in 1753, when Virginia’s governor sent Washington, then a twenty-one-year-old militia major, as a special envoy to demand that the French evacuate land claimed by Britain on the Ohio River. Washington was also ordered to negotiate peace with the Iroquois Confederacy, and to gather whatever intelligence he could about the French.

After a 900-mile and nearly three-months-long journey, Washington returned with the French commander’s refusal to depart. The governor had him write a report, titled The Journal of Major George Washington, which was then published to alert all to the dangers of French encroachment. The journal made Washington famous both in the Colonies, and among the political elites in Britain. Shortly thereafter, he returned to the Ohio River, this time as second in command of a Virginia regiment. Near today’s Pittsburgh, he led a force of militia and Native allies, that surprised, slaughtered, and scalped about fifty French soldiers. That sparked what eventually became the Seven Years War’ – arguably history’s first global conflict. It drew in all of Europe’s great powers, and was fought in Europe, the Americas, Africa, Asia, and the Pacific.

9. George Washington’s Scary Mother

George Washington reportedly cut down a cherry tree in his childhood, and was then unable to lie about it to his father. In reality, that never happened. It was invented out of whole cloth by Mason Locke Weems, one of Washington’s early biographers. However, the boy Washington’s relationship with his mother could yield some true, although less inspirational, tales. Mary Ball Washington was not monstrous. Indeed, she deserves credit for raising “The Father of His Country”. What made Mary Ball an iffy mother was a lifelong diet of passive-aggressiveness that she fed her son. As Washington put it, he grew up “ten times more afraid” of Mary than anybody else he knew.

Washington’s mother made things awkward for him his entire life. During the Revolutionary War, she asked Virginia’s House of Delegates for money. That prompted her embarrassed son – a conscientious straight rod appalled at the idea of nepotism – to rush off a letter, urging the Assembly not to give his mom any money. That attempt to cash in on her son’s position paled in comparison to the fact that, even as Washington was leading the Patriots in their fight for independence, Mary was a vocal supporter of King George III. She stayed passive-aggressive to the end. When George became president in 1789 and dropped by to visit his mom, she did not celebrate, but instead told him that she was dying.

8. President Johnson’s Johnson

Another lesser known fact about President Johnson was that he was obsessed with his penis. Not as in he could not keep it in his pants – he could not, in more ways than one, but that is not the point. LBJ was always eager to let everybody know that he had a huge penis. A competitive womanizer, whenever people mentioned John F. Kennedy’s many affairs, LBJ would bang the table and brag that he had more women by accident than JFK ever had on purpose. Today, the sheer number of sexual assault allegations LBJ’s conduct invited would probably force a presidential resignation – at least if he was a Democrat president, or a TV one.

From early on, Johnson was notorious for creepy mannerisms that skeeved out people, especially in Capitol bathrooms. If a colleague entered while he was at the urinal, LBJ would often swing around, with his penis still in his hand, and whirl it around as he hooted: “Woo-eee! Have you ever seen something as big as this?!” Johnson would then begin to discuss pending legislation, even as he continued to brandish and shake his Johnson. The man simply had no humility when it came to his penis, which he called “Jumbo”.

7. The Earthy LBJ

LBJ was earthy in a whole lot of different ways. In an alpha male ritual of primacy assertion, he obliged aides, both male and female, to take dictation as they stood in the door of his office bathroom while he urinated or defecated. Even on the floors of the House or Senate, Johnson would extravagantly rummage away at his crotch, and frequently reach through a pocket to better position “Jumbo” so its outline could show beneath his pants. He constantly tried to work penis size boasts into conversations, as a clip from the LBJ Tapes, which recorded a phone call with his tailor illustrates: “Another thing, the crotch, down where your nuts hang – it’s always a little too tight. So when you make them up, gimme an inch that I can let out there, because they cut me“.

President Johnson had a special nozzle installed in his White House bathroom, and had it positioned so it would shoot water directly at his penis while he showered. He refused to listen to arguments from the White House staff that the installation of the special nozzle would require a great deal of plumbing work, and insisted that it be done anyhow. As President of the United States, he of course had his way. As he told the staff: “If I can move 10,000 troops in a day, you can certainly fix the bathroom any way I want it“.

6. When Thomas Jefferson Stood Up for the Honor of American Animals

Thomas Jefferson was a prickly man. Few things brought out his prickly side when he served as US ambassador to France more than slights, real or imagined, directed towards America. Count Georges-Louis Leclerc Buffon, a prominent eighteenth century French naturalist and author of Historie Naturelle, a science encyclopedia, annoyed Jefferson. Buffon concocted the Theory of New World Degeneration, which held that North America was a marshy continent recently emerged from the sea. As the count claimed, excessive moisture made the continent’s plants and wildlife inferior to, smaller, and more delicate than those of Europe. Moreover, argued Buffon, if plants or animals were transported from Europe to America, the poor environment would cause them to degenerate smaller and less virile sizes.

It was a dumb take by a man who had never been to the New World. Scientifically speaking, it was silly gibberish. It should have elicited no more than a scornful chuckle and a shrug. However, that is not how Jefferson handled it. Buffon’s diss of North America’s mega fauna seriously ticked off Jefferson, and he decided to disprove the count’s theory. He went to great lengths to win the argument. Jefferson saw Buffon’s take as an insult to America and its potential greatness. So he set out to challenge the Frenchman with evidence of American bigness. For starters, he wrote friends back home, and asked them to measure the size of American animals. As seen below, he did not stop there.

5. Jefferson’s Ginormous Moose

Among the responses from Jefferson’s friends was one from James Madison, who sent precise measurements of a Virginian weasel, including the “distance between the anus and vulva“. Like a Founding Father version of Seinfeld’s George Costanza, Jefferson grew increasingly obsessed with the need to prove Buffon wrong. So he painstakingly compiled the measurements in a table. It included comparisons such as those between 12-pound American otters versus 8.9-pound European counterparts, and 410-pound American bears versus 153.7-pound European ones. Eager to confront the Frenchman, Jefferson accepted a dinner invitation at Buffon’s home, and headed there armed with his data for a showdown, ready for a confrontation. The Frenchman diplomatically put off his prickly guest, and delayed the debate for another time. However, halfway through the dinner, somebody mentioned the North American moose.

Buffon declared that an animal of such size could not possibly exist in the continent’s poor environment. A furious Jefferson sent a flurry of letters to America, and begged that somebody, anybody, shoot the biggest moose they could find, and ship it to him in Paris. Finally, New Hampshire’s governor sent out hunters in the dead of winter to bag the biggest moose they could find. They did, then dragged it back to civilization for two weeks through heavy snow. A taxidermist stuffed it, before it was shipped to France. However, the taxidermist was incompetent, and the moose arrived in Paris in 1787 as a putrid mess. A triumphant Jefferson immediately sent the fetid carcass to Buffon, with a letter that told him to picture it with more fur and antlers. Unfortunately, Jefferson never got a retraction from Buffon: the Count died before he could publicly disavow his claims.

4. Abraham Lincoln’s Marxist Leanings

Republicans have traditionally been pro-business, and the GOP has usually been a reliable ally of employers in disputes with labor unions and employees. Surprisingly, however, the party’s first president held views that could qualify him as a Marxist. In his first speech as an Illinois state legislator in 1837, Abraham Lincoln stated: “These capitalists generally act harmoniously and in concert, to fleece the people“. In his first Annual Message to Congress, on December 3^rd, 1861, Lincoln wrote: “Labor is prior to and independent of capital. Capital is only the fruit of labor, and could never have existed if labor had not first existed“.

Honest Abe continued: “Labor is the superior of capital, and deserves much the higher consideration. Capital has its rights, which are as worthy of protection as any other rights. Nor is it denied that there is, and probably always will be, a relation between labor and capital producing mutual benefits. The error is in assuming that the whole labor of community exists within that relation. A few men own capital, and that few avoid labor themselves, and with their capital hire or buy another few to labor for them“.

3. President Lincoln and Karl Marx

Abraham Lincoln’s Marxist views most likely came from the original fount of Marxism, Karl Marx himself. The author of The Communist Manifesto and Das Kapital had been a prolific contributor to the New York Daily Tribune, the most influential Republican newspaper of the 1850s, when the GOP was founded. In 1848, the Tribune’s publisher had invited Marx to become a correspondent, and over the following decade, Marx, sometimes with the help of Friedrich Engels, wrote over 500 articles for the Republican newspaper.

Unsurprisingly, considering how much Marx detested labor exploitation, he rooted for Lincoln, and cheered him on as he wrecked slavery, the era’s most exploitative labor system. In 1864, Marx wrote a letter on behalf of the International Working Men’s Association, to congratulate Lincoln on his reelection and wish him success in the US Civil War. Lincoln instructed the American ambassador in Britain, where Marx lived, to thank him, and let him know that the United States: “derive new encouragements to persevere from the testimony of the workingmen of Europe that the national attitude is favored with their enlightened approval and earnest sympathies“.

2. The First President’s Specter

Mount Vernon, George Washington’s home, has its store of spooky ghost stories. The best ones revolve around encounters with the ghost of America’s first president. One such is attributed to members of the Mount Vernon Ladies’ Association, America’s first national historic preservation organization, and the country’s first women’s patriotic society. The MVLAA raised money to purchase a dilapidated Mount Vernon in the nineteenth century, in order to restore and preserve it for posterity. In the early years, when members were in the area, they slept in the mansion, sometimes in the four-poster bed in which Washington died.

Many who did insisted that they felt the presence of George Washington’s ghost, which some described as “a strange and brooding spectre“.  One night, as two MVLAA members shared Washington’s bed, they saw a spook as their bedside candle went out with a noise. Alarmed, one told her friend: “You are on the side of the bed where Washington died!” Her friend replied: “No, I’m not. He died on your side!” That did it for their sleep. Both got up, dressed, and sat around wide awake until the sun came up, terrified by every squeak. As an 1890 newspaper article put it: “They all agree that Washington visits his chamber in the still watches of the night“.

1. Haunted Mount Vernon

One of Massachusetts’ more prominent figures in the first half of the nineteenth century was Josiah Quincy III (1772 – 1864). He served in the US House of Representatives from 1805 to 1813, as mayor of Boston from 1823 to 1828, and as President of Harvard University from 1829 to 1845. In 1806, he visited Mount Vernon, inherited by George Washington’s nephew Bushrod Washington. Quincy stayed overnight, and Bushrod hosted him in the first president’s bedroom – the one in which the great man had died. By then, rumors already abounded of spooky encounters with Washington’s ghost in that bedroom. Quincy, who like most Americans of his generations revered George Washington, was not afraid.

Indeed, he actually hoped “that he might be found worthy to behold the glorified spirit of him who was so revered by his countrymen“. As his son Josiah Quincy Jr. recounted decades later, his father was not disappointed. At some point that night, he reported that he did, indeed, meet the ghost of George Washington. Frustratingly, however, Quincy Jr. gave no details, other than inform readers that his father’s “assurance in this matter was perfect“. We are thus left to wonder what might have passed between the Massachusetts bigwig and the spooky ghost of America’s first president.

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Where Did We Find This Stuff? Some Sources and Further Reading

Atlantic, The, October 17^th, 2014 – White House Sheep, a History

Atlas Obscura – The Great Lengths Taken to Make Abraham Lincoln Look Good in Portraits

Auto Blog – LBJ’s Amphibious Car Caught Friends and Dignitaries by Surprise

Brodie, Fawn McKay – Thomas Jefferson: An Intimate History (1974)

Chernow, Ron – Washington: A Life (2010)

Daily Beast – Happy Mother’s Day! Meet the Worst Mothers in History

Dugatkin, Lee Alan – Mr. Jefferson and the Giant Moose: Natural History in Early America (2009)

Gawker – LBJ Was Obsessed With His Dick

History Collection – How George Washington Saved the American Revolution

Jacobin, August 28^th, 2012 – Lincoln and Marx

Listverse – 10 Stories That Show the Weird Side of Thomas Jefferson

Miller, Nathan – Theodore Roosevelt: A Life (1992)

Mount Vernon – Ghost Stories: Washington’s Ghost Haunts Mount Vernon

Mount Vernon Digital Collection – The Journal of Major George Washington

National Park Service – Lyndon B. Johnson Presidential Vehicles

National Wrestling Hall of Fame – Abraham Lincoln

NPR – Thomas Jefferson Needs a Dead Moose Right Now to Defend America

Sandburg, Carl – Abraham Lincoln: The Prairie Years (1929)

Sandburg, Carl – Abraham Lincoln: The War Years (1939)

Thayer, William Roscoe – Theodore Roosevelt: An Intimate Biography (1919)

ThoughtCo. – Was Abraham Lincoln Really a Wrestler?

University of Nebraska, Lincoln, Digital Commons – The Journal of Major George Washington (1754)

Woodrow Wilson Presidential Library & Museum – Wilson’s Sheep