12th February: Abraham Lincoln

Today was Abraham Lincoln's birthday - some little known facts:

1. He's a member of the Wrestling Hall of Fame. As a young man, Abraham Lincoln was an accomplished wrestler. He lost one out of 300 matches and according to one biography, after one victory he challenged the audience: “I’m the big buck of this lick. If any of you want to try it, come on and whet your horns.” (or in modern parlance, "Come and have a go if you think you're hard enough".) Nobody felt up to it.
2. We all know he wanted to free the slaves, but perhaps lesser known is the fact that he supported votes for women, as early as 1836. He was the first major political figure to do so.
3. His mother died when he was nine, from drinking poisoned Milk.
4. He and his wife, Mary, had four sons, but there are no descendants alive today. Only one son survived to adulthood and his last descendant died in 1985.
5. After losing their sons, Abraham and Mary used to hold seances in the White House to try and contact them.
6. He had a patent. Always fascinated by gadgets, he'd personally test the guns his army was to use. In 1849, he invented a device for freeing steamboats when they ran aground. The patent number was 6,469.
7. Lincoln signed the Secret Service into existence hours before he was shot. However, their mission at the time was to fight counterfeiting rather than protecting the President.
8. Lincoln regularly read the Bible and called himself a Christian, but never formally joined a church.
9. Lincoln was the first president to be photographed at his inauguration. Standing close to Lincoln in the photo is his future assassin, John Wilkes Booth.
10. He had premonitions of his death. One was a dream in which he heard weeping in the White House. When he asked who had died, he was told, "The President" and when he looked in the coffin, he saw his own face. On another occasion he looked in the mirror and saw a double reflection. One of the images was pale and blurry. Lincoln took that to mean that he would survive one term in office, but not a second.