Interesting "little" Lincoln stories

[David Lockmiller]

I believe that all of us here on the Lincoln Discussion Symposium have had severe difficulity at times in determining whether a particular Lincoln story was true or false. During the Civil War, General John A. Logan came up with a simple solution to this problem.

I had some doubts for a time about the authenticity of the stories attributed to Lincoln, until an experience of my own with him. I was sent from the West by Grant with some dispatches to the President in person. It was late Saturday night when I got into Washington. The next morning I went to the White House, and there was nobody about. I made a noise at the door until someone came and said that Mr. Lincoln couldn’t be seen on Sunday; it was against the rules.

“Go upstairs,” I said, “and tell the President that Logan is here with some important dispatches from Grant.”

Pretty soon the messenger came back and told me to walk up. When I got into the room, Mr. Lincoln was sitting in a chair with one foot on a table and his head thrown back. A barber was just getting through shaving him. He told me to take a seat and he would be ready to talk to me in a few minutes. The barber finished the shaving and went to work on the hair. Mr. Lincoln saw me glance at his foot. It was much swollen. Both of his feet, in fact, were in bad condition. I said nothing, but he commenced talking about them.

“They remind me,” said he, “of a man in Sangamon County who made a pretty bad horse trade. The animal was in awful condition, but the farmer got him home. About two weeks afterward one of his neighbors met him and asked him how his new horse was coming on. ‘Oh, first rate,’ said the farmer, ‘he’s putting on flesh very fast. He’s fat now up to his knees.’ That’s my fix.”

Since then I have accepted as authentic all Lincoln stories. – General John A. Logan

(“Life and Services of Gen. John A. Logan: As Soldier and Statesman,” by George Francis Dawson, pp. 449-50.) [I got the story from “Lincoln Talks, a Biography in Anecdote, by Emanuel Hertz, p. 648. But Hertz does not reference his source.]