From “The Wit and Wisdom of Abraham Lincoln,” by Alex Ayres

A well-bred woman with a haughty air accosted President Lincoln at a reception and made this appeal: "Mr. President, you must give me a colonel's commission for my son. Sir, I demand it, not as a favor, but as a right. Sir, my grandfather fought at Lexington. My uncle was the only man who did not run away at Bladensburg. My father fought at New Orleans, sir, and my husband was killed at Monterrey."

Lincoln's bushy eyebrows rose a notch up his fur-rowed forehead. "Madam," he said, "your family has done enough for the country. It is time to give somebody else a chance."

Six feet four inches tall, Abraham Lincoln towered over most men. But one day while inspecting a Union army regiment, he encountered a soldier nearly seven feet in height. "Hello, comrade," said President Lincoln, gazing earnestly upwards at the giant. "Say, how do you know when your feet are cold?"

P. T. Barnum brought his circus to Washington during the Civil War. Huge crowds came to see the world-famous midgets, General Tom Thumb and Admiral Nutt. Lincoln came, too, and paid his respects. "You have some pretty small generals," he told Barnum, "but I think I can beat you."

Abraham Lincoln made many self-deprecating jokes about his homely appearance. Once while speaking to a convention of newspaper editors in Bloomington, Indiana, he said he felt out of place there because of his lack of editorial credentials and he wondered whether he should have come at all. "I feel like I once did when I met a woman riding on horseback in the woods. As I stopped to let her pass, she also stopped and looked at me intently and said, 'I do believe you are the ugliest man I ever saw.' " 'Madam,' I said, 'you are probably right, but I can't help it.' " 'No,' said she, 'you can't help it, but you might stay at home.' "

Abraham Lincoln was not only a teller of many jokes, he was a subject of many jokes as well. He declared that his favorite among the many "Lincoln jokes" printed in the newspapers was the following:

'Two Quakeresses were riding on the railroad and were heard discussing the probable outcome of the war. "

'I think,' said the first, 'that Jefferson Davis will succeed.'

" 'Why does thee think so?' asked the other.

" 'Because he is a praying man.'

" 'And so is Abraham a praying man,' the other objected.

" 'Yes,' replied the first, 'but the Lord will think Abraham is joking.' "

Abraham Lincoln's son, Robert Todd Lincoln (1843-1926), enjoyed what was perhaps the most distinguished career of any presidential progeny in U.S. history to date. After graduating from Harvard, he served in the Civil War as a captain on the, staff of Ulysses S. Grant. When the war was over he attended Harvard Law School and became a corporate lawyer. In 1881 he was appointed by President James A. Garfield to be secretary of war. He served in that cabinet post until 1885. Under President Benjamin Harrison he served as U.S. minister to Great Britain from 1889 to 1893. Later he resumed his law practice and became president of the Pullman Company from 1897 to 1911, after which he was chairman of the board and director of various banks until his death in 1926.

Robert Todd Lincoln's life was crisscrossed with tragedy. It is a curious footnote to history that he was present as three different presidents lay dying from assassins' bullets. He was by his dying father's bedside in 1865; he witnessed the shooting of President Garfield in Washington, D.C., in 1881; and he was a guest at the Exposition in Buffalo, New York, when President William McKinley was shot in 1901. He wrote laconically, "There is a certain fatality about presidential functions when I am present."