Strangest fact
In a dream Lincoln is said to have told days before his death, a soldier in the East Room says the President was killed by an assassin. Weeks later Lincoln lay in state in that room.
Why it is odd: The story fits his death almost too well, and it surfaced only in 1895, 30 years later, from one friend's memory.
Abraham Lincoln was shot at Ford's Theatre in Washington on the night of April 14, 1865, and died the next morning. Afterward his body lay in the East Room of the White House on a catafalque, which is a raised stand that holds a coffin at a funeral. Thirty years later, a book claimed that Lincoln had dreamed this exact scene shortly before he died.
The book was Recollections of Abraham Lincoln, 1847 to 1865, by Ward Hill Lamon, Lincoln's old friend from Illinois who later guarded him in Washington. Lamon died in 1893, and the book was edited by his daughter, Dorothy Lamon, and published in 1895. Lamon wrote that he told the story from notes which I made immediately after its recital,
and that only two or three people, including Mary Lincoln, were in the room.
In Lamon's version, Lincoln said that about ten days ago
he went to bed late after waiting for news from the army. In the dream he heard sobbing, walked through the White House and reached the East Room, where soldiers guarded a body whose face was covered. He asked one of them who was dead. The President,
the soldier answered, he was killed by an assassin!
Lamon adds that Lincoln later joked about it, saying that in the dream it was not him but some other fellow
who was killed.
A second dream is better recorded. Gideon Welles, Lincoln's Secretary of the Navy, kept a diary. In his entry about the cabinet meeting on April 14, 1865, the day Lincoln was shot, Welles wrote that Lincoln described a dream he had the night before, a dream he said he had before many big events of the war. Welles recorded that Lincoln seemed to be in some singular, indescribable vessel, and that he was moving with great rapidity towards an indefinite shore.
Lincoln guessed it meant news from General Sherman's army. He was shot that night.
Historians treat the two stories differently. The Welles account was written down at the time. The White House dream appears only in Lamon's book, three decades later, and no known letter or diary from 1865 mentions it. Historians Don and Virginia Fehrenbacher, who studied which reported Lincoln quotations can be trusted, pointed out a problem with the timing: Lincoln was away visiting the army from late March until April 9, so he was not in the White House waiting for dispatches about ten days
before he died.