Sixteen hundred Pennsylvania Avenue. The White House. Lincoln lived here for four years, led a war from the second floor, and — if you believe the staff — never left.
The morning of April fourteenth — the day he was shot — Lincoln told his cabinet something strange. He described a recurring dream. In it, he was sailing across unknown waters at great speed in an indistinct vessel. He said this dream had come to him before every major event of the war — before Bull Run, before Antietam, before Gettysburg, before Vicksburg.
Secretary of the Navy Gideon Welles wrote about it that evening. Multiple cabinet members confirmed the story independently. Lincoln had the sailing dream the morning of his last day alive.
But there's an older story. According to his friend Ward Hill Lamon, Lincoln dreamed — days before the assassination — that he was wandering the White House searching for the source of mournful sobbing. He entered the East Room and found a covered corpse on a platform, surrounded
by weeping mourners. He asked a soldier — who is dead in the White House? The soldier answered — the President. He was killed by an assassin.
Lincoln said the body in the dream wasn't his. He didn't think it was a prediction of his own death. The story was first published twenty years later, and historians have flagged inconsistencies. Whether he actually dreamed it or whether Lamon told a good
