The herald-advance. (Milbank, S.D.) 1890-1922, 1912-02-09
The
Lincoln in
Legend

N%MNH names, humorous, patnetlc,
~% tragic, epic. Supernatural
likewise, ascribing an infiu-
ence In his career to signs and Lmens
Noah Brooks, his Biographer, says
was also one of his intimates. says
of Lincoln that by nature he was very
superstitions, and attributes this to
his b~ackwoods upbringing. He gives
us two or three instances in line with
this assertion which we may take for
they are worth. The first refers to
Lincoln's second trip to New Orleans,
when he and Dennis Hanks, his cous-
in, took a flatboat down the rivers to
that port for Denton Offtutt. There
is a tradition" says Brooks, that dur
ing this visit to Louisiana Tin May,
1881, when he was 22), Lincoln met
an aged negress, who pretended to be
a voodoo queen or fortune teller, and
that she said to him: You will some
day be president and all the negroes
will be free But this is not authen.
ticated. 1t is not unlikely that the
woman had said the same thing to a
great many young men,"
The other story is of darker portent
and more positive particulars. It is
Of the year 1860, the time Of his first
election as president, Lincoln" says
our authority, took his election with
a composure not untinged with sad
ness. A tremendous responsibility was
now to be placed on him. The south
had openly and repeatedly threatened
to break up the union. He
was oppressed with many weighty and
anxious thoughts. On the day the
news came of his triumph a strange
thing happened to him. Years after,
when he had been nominated a second
time to the presidency, he told this
story to the writer:
cit was just after my election in
1860, when the news had been coming
in thick and fast all day and there
had been a great "Hurrah boys!" SO
that I was well tired out and went
home to rest, throwing myself down on
a lounge in my chamber. Opposite
where l lay upon a bureau, with
4 swinging glass upon it (here he
got up and placed the furniture
to illustrate the position), and,
looking in that glass / saw
myself reflected nearly at full
length; but my face, l noticed, had
two separate and distinct images. the
tip of the nose of one being about
three inches from the tip of the other.
/ was a little bothered, perhaps start
led, and got up and looked in the glass,
but the Illusion vanished.
con lying down again I saw it a
second time-plainer, if>possible, than
before; and then noticed that one of
the faces was a little paler, say five
shades, than the other. l got up and
the thing melted away, and | went off,
and in the excitement of the hour, for
got all about it-nearly, but not quite
for the thing would, once in a while,
come up and give me a little pang, as
though something uncomfortable had
happened. Later in the day l told my
wife about it, and a few days after l
tried the experiment again, when
with a laugh, sur enough the thing
came back again; but l never succeed
ed in bringing the ghost back after
that, though l once tried very industri-
ously to show 1t to my wife, who was
worried about It. She thought It a
sign that I was to be elected to a
second term of Office and that the
p~aleness of one Of the faces was an
omen that l should not see life through
the last term.'a
Lincoln studied the problem for a
while, the writer goes on to say, and
came to the conclusion that 1t was an
optical illusion caused by a flaw in the
mirror. Mrs. Lincoln, however, he
says, continued to take 1t as a warn
ing. He had told the story before, he
says, in an article in Harper's Maya
zine for July, 1865, while Mrs. Lincoln
was yet alive to see it.
This same biographer mentions also
the fact that at the cabinet meeting
of the fateful April IA, 1866, the day
he was killed, the president spoke of
a strange dream" he had had the
night before: what It was, however,
he did not say.