Frostburg Mining Journal

LINCOLN'S
ODD
PERSONALITY
By
DAVID H. BARNES
(Copyright, 1904, by Hamilton Musk.)

The unique personality of Abraham
Lincoln was in no way
more marked than in his physical
appearance.
His height
was six feet four inches. His figure
was gaunt and slightly bent. He was
swarthy as an Indian, with wiry, jet
black hair not easily amenable to the
comb. His face was grotesquely rough
and square, "lantern jawed," he called
himself. During the latter part of his
life he wore a rough, black beard "to
hide his homely features," he said. His
hands and feet were very large.
He
wore a No. 11 boot on his left foot and
a No. 11½ on his right.
Lincoln's clothes were always loose
fitting and usually in need of pressing.

THE STALWART LINCOLN,

His trousers were always too short.
His cloak, for which he often substituted
a shawl, was short and voluminous.
He carried a faded green umbrella
with "A. Lincoln" in white cotton letters
sewed to the outside. His eyes
were bright, keen and of luminous
gray in color, and his eyebrows were
black. His voice was a musical tenor
of rich timbre. When he was a lawyer
in Illinois he wore a brown, faded felt
hat, with the nap rubbed off.
On his first visit to Boston, in 1848,
Lincoln excited the derision of the effete
east. He is described as wearing
an ill fitting, badly worn suit of bombazine,
without vest or cravat, and a
twenty-five cent straw hat, in the
sweatband of which he carried his
memoranda and correspondence. From
Boston he went to Dedham to speak at
the convention held to nominate Horace
Mann for congress. He was greeted
coldly by an audience which but
half filled the hall and which saw in
him a man morose and apparently
stupid. But when Mr. Lincoln rose to
speak, his head almost touching the
ceiling, all was changed. He was no
longer indifferent, but started off with
fine effect. "Pretty soon," says George
Monroe of Boston, who was one of the
reception committee, "Lincoln turned
up the sleeves of his bombazine sack
coat, then he turned up the cuffs of his
shirt and by and by loosened his neck-
tie and wound up by taking it off altogether,
the enthusiasm of his listeners
rising steadily as the transformation
progressed."
Lincoln's high silk hat, which he assumed
with his increasing honors, was
a treasure to the cartoonists of the
day. It was a very tall "stovepipe,"
with a brim like a sombrero. The hat
which he wore toward the end of his
Lincoln's Speech at Dedham.
life is preserved in the Oldroyd museum
in Washington. It is a good 7¼
in size. A legend credits this hat with
having saved the president's life. It is
said that he was riding alone near the
capitol when a concealed assassin fired
at him. Misjudging the size of the
famous hat, the assailant shot too high,
the bullet going through the tile about
an inch below the top and just missing
the hair of the president, who was
later to be the victim of John Wilkes
Booth's pistol.