Category: Abraham Lincoln

“What was that loud noise?” was Abraham’s second-to-last thought.
Abe slumped forward and moaned. Booth shouted “Sic Semper Tyrannis!’ and leapt to the stage.
Abe heard the ugly crack of Booth’s ankle breaking. As a testament to Abe’s overflowing compassion, he felt badly for the man who would have to walk on such a leg.
His left eye saw nothing but blood. His one remaining eye opened and spotted the gun in Booth’s hand.
He’d been… shot?
“I guess the bullet is stronger than the ballot after all” was his final thought, and then…
Applause?
The audience demanded an encore.

Abe tried to watch the play. The war was coming to a close, and here he was trying to enjoy himself, but his assistants kept interrupting him.
“How can I enjoy the play if you keep interrupting me,” he growled. “I have no idea what’s going on. None at all, assholes!”
Mary Todd wasn’t even going to handjob him tonight. Wasn’t that the point of having the “high box” at Ford’s. People paid extra just for that secret little thrill in public.
Another knock at the door.
He moaned. “I need this like I need a hole in the head.”

Congress, in its infinite wisdom, offered to grant royal powers to Lincoln.
The exhausted president refused them.
“If all earthly power were given to me,” he muttered, “I should not know what to do.”
That evening, he watched as a meteorite streaked across the sky and landed at his feet.
“What have we here?”
In his hands, the glowing green rock pulsed.
Abe smiled as the energy flowed through his body, but his smile quickly faded.
“I still don’t know what to do,” he muttered, sitting down on the back porch.
He went to bed and slept for a week.

Mary Todd was going crazy, but the analyst was curious as to the source of her husband’s misery.
Abe shrugged off all offers to get him on the couch and work out his issues.
“Perhaps it is something in your childhood?” said the doctor.
Abe laughed. “It is a great piece of folly to attempt to make anything out of my early life,” he said.
When the doctor left, Abe took out his flask of Zook’s “Crazy No More” Tonic.
*glug* *glug*
“This is the only doctor I need,” he said, patting the flask and heading back to his office.

Cows, everywhere cows!
Lincoln couldn’t believe the sheer number of cows roaming through the streets of Washington.
Going forth like swarms of Egyptian locusts, devouring every blade of grass and other green thing.
“Where did all these cows come from?” he asked, but nobody had an answer.
As always, Abe came up with a solution. He commanded the city to hold a carnival and a massive barbecue.
Under his direction, the cows were caught, slaughtered, butchered into steaks, and cooked in the remnants of the public parks.
A good time was had by all.
Except for the cows, of course.

Abraham Lincoln didn’t like to lose.
“Rather than yield,” he said. “I would sooner go out into my backyard and hang myself.”
All it took was a bad hand of cards or an argument over dinner, and he’d be out in the backyard, tossing a rope over a branch in order to hang himself.
At first, Mary Todd hid all the ropes, so Abe tried using bed sheets and towels.
That’s when Mary Todd ordered all of the trees cut down.
Abe roamed the back yard, looking for something to hang himself from, but it was just a flat lawn.

Every man is said to have his peculiar ambition.
No visitor to the White House left without being asked of their ambition by Abraham Lincoln.
He thought he’d heard them all, until one child said he wanted to be an astronaut.
“What’s that?” asked Abe.
“I want to explore space!” said the child.
“That’s very peculiar,” said Abe. “How will you get there?”
“With a ladder,” said the child.
Abe put the child to work lighting gas lamps and changing candles.
“How’s space today?” he’d ask and laugh.
The child cried and scraped a candle nub out of the chandelier.

Senator Douglas walked the streets, laughing and rubbing his hands.
“What’s so funny?” asked a farmer.
“Your president is a cannibal!” said Douglas, and he laughed himself silly.
“That’s a lie!” said the farmer, but Douglas was gone, telling some other person the same lie.
Ten thousand times that day, Douglas lied.
The next day, when people accused him of lying, Douglas denied it and held a bloody stump out of his sleeve. “Lincoln tried to eat me!”
Well, Lincoln did try to eat Douglas, but even the slimy Douglas had his pride and wouldn’t show what he’d bitten off.

Lincoln assembled his generals and announced: “I have given you carte blanche, you must use your own judgment and do the best you can.”
He also told that to the landscapers.
The next day, Lincoln awoke to a magnificent garden of flowers, trees, paths, and fountains on the White House grounds.
“This is truly splendid,” said Abe. “But where did the field hospital go that was here?”
“We’ve gotten those bums out of their cots and down to the quarry, mining granite for your pyramid,” said a landscaper.
Lincoln laughed. He’d look splendid, wrapped in linen and decorated in gold.

Abe finished the straw dummy, stripped off all his clothes, and started to dress the crudely-fashioned mannequin.
General Grant, laying with his back to a tree stump, took a pull from his flask. “What are you doing, Abe?”
“My mind is like a piece of steel,” Abe mumbled.
For the next hour, he poked and prodded at the stovepipe hat, never satisfied with the angle it rested on his simulacrum”s head.
“You can”t make him your Vice President, you know,” said General Grant.
Abe pouted and tore the wicked dummy apart.
But he never did bother to get dressed again.