Lincoln Dreamed His Own Assassination

Days before he was killed, Abraham Lincoln reportedly described a dream to his bodyguard.

In the dream, he was walking through the White House. The building was quiet but not empty — he could hear people weeping somewhere. He kept moving through the rooms until he came to the East Room.

There was a corpse laid out there, guarded by soldiers, with mourners around it.

Lincoln asked one of the soldiers who had died.

“The President,” the soldier told him. “He was killed by an assassin.”

He was shot at Ford’s Theatre on April 14, 1865.

Now, a word about this story, because it deserves one. It comes to us secondhand, and dreams of this kind have a way of getting sharper and more specific every time they’re retold. That’s how history works when it passes through people who loved the man and were shattered by his death.

But there’s a reason it doesn’t need to be supernatural to be true, and it’s the part I find more interesting than the ghost story.

Lincoln knew. He was 6 foot 4 in a country where half the population wanted him dead. He’d been receiving threats since before he took office. He’d traveled to his own inauguration under guard against a plot. He was the most recognizable man in America during the deadliest four years in its history, and he had spoken openly about the risk.

A man carrying that for four years is going to dream about it. The dream isn’t a prophecy. It’s what happens to a mind that has been doing that arithmetic every day since 1861.

That, to me, is the darker version. He didn’t foresee it. He’d simply been expecting it for years.

This is one of 101 questions answered in The Civil War Little Black Book: Secrets, History, and Trivia of America’s Defining Conflict.

Get your copy here: https://amzn.to/4wEsnGZ

I’ve also written a novel about Sherman’s March to the Sea, Howl! WT Sherman’s Monster Hunters: https://amzn.to/40WYgfJ

And a trilogy going from West Point in the 1840s through the Mexican War and into the Civil War in the vein of HBO’s Rome miniseries; Duty, Honor, Country: https://amzn.to/3RgWbXa