When President Abraham Lincoln was assassinated, his wallet had no US currency. However, it contained a $5 Confederate banknote. He probably would not have been killed that night if he had not been assigned the Washington Metropolitan Police’s worst officer as a bodyguard. A bad cop in more ways than one, he abandoned his post at Ford’s Theater to go drink at a nearby bar. Following are thirty things about those and other lesser-known American presidential facts.
30. The Most Burdened President in American History
No American president before or since has ever faced challenges as varied and as difficult as did Abraham Lincoln. Chief among them was the Civil War, which killed about 700,000 to 900,000 people. Prorated to the current US population, that would be the equivalent of about nine to ten million dead Americans today. He had to handle that bloodbath without the vast support staff and civil bureaucracy available to modern presidents to ease and streamline their workload. He had to handle ineptness and incompetence by sundry generals, who dealt the Union cause setback back after setback and piled up defeat after defeat.
In addition to armed rebellion in the South, he had to contend with treason in the North. There were vicious attacks directed at him from both right and left, from the opposition Democrats and from within the ranks of his own Republican party, and accusations of incompetence and tyranny. There was disloyalty within his own cabinet, plots and schemes and terrorism, plus a serious threat of foreign war against Britain and France. In the middle of all that, a beloved son caught a fever and died, at the tender age of eleven years old. To top it all off, he had to cope with a crazy wife at home – a spouse who literally suffered bouts of insanity.
