Kennedy and Lincoln - Medical & Ballistic Comparissons

[RJNorton]

Hi Toia. He may have lost some weight and looked tired and much older, but if this story be true, he was still very strong.

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"Historians figure Abraham Lincoln was showing off on April 8, 1865, when, at the end of a long day, he spotted an ax at a Union Army field hospital in Virginia. He'd spent hours shaking hands with thousands of wounded soldiers. A doctor told him his arm was surely tired.

Holding his arm straight out, Lincoln picked up the ax by the butt, with the handle parallel to the ground, and held the 7-pound tool motionless. He was 56 years old and one week away from assassination.

Strong men who looked on, men accustomed to manual labor, could not hold the same ax in that position for a moment," wrote Francis Fisher Browne, a Union soldier who authored a biography called "The Every-Day Life of Abraham Lincoln."

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Although the veracity of this story has been questioned by some, the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum has issued the following statement:

"The state of Illinois, it turns out, has owned the ax since 1955, when it was donated to the Lincoln Home, then the state's responsibility. It was accompanied by an affidavit from the director of the field hospital, plus a second statement signed in 1914, verifying the tool's authenticity."