10 Things You Didn't Know About........

                              In honor of Presidents Day, here are little-known tidbits about our 16th president.

                              Abraham Lincoln

1. He is only president to hold a patent.  Even as he worked as a "prairie lawyer" in 1848, Lincoln spent evenings on an idea for a river steamboat with accordion-like balloons mounted on the sides that could be inflated to lift the boat clear if it encountered a sandbar.  The idea (U.S. Patent No. 6469) didn't take off the way Lincoln had hoped, but his drawings and hand-carved wooden model are on display at the Smithsonian Institution.
2. Lincoln was a slow starter in politics.  He lost his first race for the Illinois General Assembly in 1832, then went on to lose one race for the U.S. Congress, two races for the U.S. Senate, and one campaign for a vice presidential nomination.  But by 1858 he was one of the key figures in the newly formed Republican Party, and in 1860 he fought his way to the Republican presidential nomination.
3. Lincoln lost a case before the U.S. Supreme Court.  On March 7, 1849, the prairie lawyer went before the high court in a dispute over some land that had been sold, without the true owner's knowledge, by a man who died after the transaction.  The court ruled that Lincoln's client was still liable for damages in the complicated affair.
4. Lincoln kept a messy desk.  The clutter in his workspace was a constant source of irritation to his law partner, William Herndon, who claimed Lincoln kept some documents in an envelope marked "When you can't find it anywhere else, look into this."
5. Lincoln's 1860 election victory is the poorest showing of any successful presidential candidate.  As the first Republican Party candidate, he won only 39.8 percent of the popular vote, in large part because the election was a four-way race with Democrat Stephen A. Douglas, John C. Breckinridge of the Southern Democrats, and John Bell of the new Constitutional Union Party.
6. Lincoln's boldness nearly got him killed during the Civil War.  During the Battle of Fort Stevens in 1864, the 6-foot, 4-inch president stood in an exposed position to watch as Confederate forces attempted to reach Washington, D.C.  As rebel fire cut through the air, future Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, at that time a Union captain, shouted:  "Get down, you damn fool, before you get shot!"
7. At the height of the Civil War, Lincoln was challenged for the presidency by one of his own generals.  In the first years of the war, General George B. McClellan was so cautious and slow-moving in his use of the troops that newspapers started calling him "the Virginia Creeper."  His indecisiveness led to failures on the battlefield, and gave Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee several chances to escape destruction by superior Union forces.  Lincoln grew so exasperated that he demoted McClellan and finally dismissed him for insubordination.  McClellan was taken up by the anti-war "Copperhead" wing of the Democratic Party, and he ran against Lincoln in the 1864 presidential campaign.  Although McClellan failed to unseat Lincoln, he went on to serve as governor of New Jersey from 1878 to 1881. 
8. Lincoln was not the only target for assassins on April 14, 1865.  On the night that John Wilkes Booth shot Lincoln in the presidential box at Ford's Theather, co-conspirator Lewis Powell broke into the bedroom of William Seward, the secretary of state, and stabbed him several times, but Seward survived.  Lincoln's vice president, Andrew Johnson, was also targeted at the Kirkwood Hotel, but the would-be assailant, George Atzerodt, lost his nerve at the last minute.
9. The Gettysburg Address was not delivered at the Gettysburg cemetery.  With 51,000 casualties, the Battle of Gettysburg of July 1863 was the bloodiest battle ever fought in the Western Hemisphere.  Most of the bodies had been buried in shallow graves on the farmlands where they had fallen.  When Lincoln arrived to consecrate the new cemetery in November 1863, there had been so many recent reburials that a speaking platform was built in the adjacent Evergreen Cemetery.
10. The Gettysburg Address lasted barely three minutes.  At 272 words, the most famous speech in American history was over before some spectators had taken their seats.