Everybody knows Abraham Lincoln.
His face is on both the penny and the five dollar bill, not to mention Mount Rushmore.
He freed the slaves, wore a tall hat, and was assassinated.
But it turns out there's a lot more to the 16th president than the results of a quick
Google search might show.
Here's a look at the untold truth of Abraham Lincoln.
Militiaman
Long before he was commander-in-chief, Lincoln got first-hand military experience in 1832
during the short lived Black Hawk War.
One of 1,500 men summoned by the Illinois militia to fight the Native American chief
Black Hawk, the 23-year-old Lincoln never saw combat, but was considered a good soldier,
and was elected captain of his company.
That decision ended up saving a man's life.
When a Native American man entered camp looking for food, Lincoln's men wanted to shoot him
as a spy.
But Lincoln wouldn't allow it, vowing to fight any man who tried.
Nobody was willing to test Lincoln's renowned strength, and the man was spared.
Bartender
Lincoln held quite a few jobs over the course of his life.
He was a lawyer, a boatman, a surveyor, a post office clerk, and—long before moving
into the Oval Office—Lincoln ran his very own bar.
Yep, in 1833, he and his militia buddy William F. Berry opened what was then called a grocery,
which was a store that also had a tavern license, so people could buy and drink alcohol on the
premises.
Unfortunately, Berry ended up drinking most of the profits and skipped town, leaving Lincoln
to pay off their debts alone.
Cannibal?!
In 1846, a group of 87 people left Illinois for a trip to California.
Stranded for the winter in the snowy Sierra Nevada mountains, the Donner Party turned
to cannibalism to survive, with only 45 of the original travelers making it out alive.
Strangely enough, it turns out Lincoln actually knew members of the party, and even considered
joining them.
However, his wife Mary Todd was pregnant at the time, while Lincoln himself was just getting
into politics.
So they decided to stay behind, though Mrs. Lincoln was among those present to send them
off when the Donner Party left Springfield, Illinois on their ill-fated journey.
Crazy!
Inventor
If you want to stump your pals in a trivia contest, ask them who the only president to
ever hold a patent was.
Yep, it's Lincoln, who among his other pursuits was also an inventor.
After a series of boat trips that wound up with his boat getting stuck on sandbars, Lincoln
designed a system of inflatable chambers that you could use to buoy your boat enough to
easily lift it off of sandbars if you got stuck.
Lincoln got someone to build a working model and took out a patent in May, 1849, but luckily
for the nation his invention failed to catch on, and instead of becoming a world-famous
inventor, he wound up putting his creative brain to work in the White House.
Lawyer
Before jumping into the national spotlight, Lincoln was probably best known for defending
William "Duff" Armstrong in an 1858 murder trial.
Armstrong was accused of killing James "Pres" Metzker, and things weren't looking good for
Duff, because a witness named Charles Allen swore he'd seen Armstrong and an associate
beat Metzker to death.
Lincoln pointed out, however, that Allen's eyewitness testimony had a fatal flaw.
The murder had taken place at 11 p.m., but Allen said the moon was big and bright enough
for him to have seen every detail of the murder even from his vantage point 150 feet away.
Lincoln shot this down by providing the court with several copies of a farmer's almanac
showing that at 11 o'clock on the night in question, the moon was only in its first quarter,
and would have been on the horizon, not overhead.
So there was no way Allen could have seen what he claimed.
The jury agreed, and Armstrong walked away a free man thanks to Lincoln's ingenuity.
Fugitive
When Lincoln was elected President, he made a highly publicized journey from Springfield,
Illinois to the nation's capitol in Washington, D.C. for the inauguration.
Along the way, though, detective Allan Pinkerton, who was in charge of Lincoln's security detail,
uncovered a plot to assassinate Lincoln during a stopover in Baltimore to catch a connecting
train.
Pinkerton quickly devised a tricky scheme to sneak Lincoln through Baltimore.
First, he secretly changed the itinerary so Lincoln arrived at 3:30 in the morning instead
of midday.
He also disguised Lincoln as a random invalid, planting female agent Kate Warne in disguise
as Lincoln's "sister" to keep watch over him while they rode undercover in plain sight.
And when the train finally did arrive in the dead of night, rather than risk Lincoln getting
off, Pinkerton hooked the train car to a team of horses and actually drove the whole thing
through town, then hooked it up to the new train and sent the President on his way.
When the ruse was exposed, Lincoln was widely mocked in the media.
But hey, the assassination attempt was foiled, so whatever works.
Target
Everyone knows that Lincoln was eventually assassinated by John Wilkes Booth in April,
1865.
But Lincoln actually wasn't the only target.
In fact, Booth and his co-conspirators had planned to take out Vice president Andrew Johnson,
Secretary of State William Seward, and General Ulysses S. Grant.
The man sent to kill Johnson changed his mind and spent the night drinking, while the assassin
who went after Grant was foiled by a locked door.
Seward, on the other hand, only survived the attempt by sheer luck.
After former Confederate soldier Lewis Powell burst into Seward's home, wounding seven people
with his sword, he stabbed Seward several times.
However, the Secretary of State had recently injured his neck in a coach accident and was
wearing a metal brace, which deflected the knife.
Booth ended up being shot to death, while four of his co-conspirators, including Powell,
were hanged for treason.
Symbol
After his tragic and untimely death, Lincoln set off on one of the weirdest train rides
in US history.
In order to give the American people a chance to grieve their dead leader, Lincoln's corpse
was sent on a 1,600 mile train journey from Washington, D.C. to Springfield, Illinois.
Along the way, the train stopped several times for funeral processions, and Lincoln's corpse
was set up for public display so mourners could gaze on his decaying body.
Perhaps the weirdest part, though?
Lincoln's body was accompanied on the trip by the body of his 11-year old son Willie,
who had passed three years earlier from typhoid fever.
Prize
After Lincoln's ghoulish goodbye tour, the president was laid to rest at the Oak Ridge
Cemetery in Springfield, Illinois, inside a mausoleum guarded by a simple padlock.
In 1876, a Chicago gangster named Big Jim Kennally came up with a truly crazy idea:
he would kidnap the President's corpse and hold it for ransom.
He hoped to get a cool $200,000, plus the release of his pal Benjamin Boyd from prison.
Kennally sent a couple of his goons to steal the body, but they made the mistake of bringing
a buddy of theirs who also happened to be a Secret Service informer.
He tipped off the feds, and after the corpse-napping attempt was foiled, the whole gang was rounded
up and arrested.
In order to protect the President's body from further shenanigans, he was re-buried in a
secret location.
In 1901, though, they finally laid him to rest back inside the tomb that bears his name
alongside his wife and three of his sons.
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