Why abraham lincoln grew a beard

Arthur, Grover Cleveland and Theodore Roosevelt had mustaches. Ulysses S. Grant, Rutherford B. Hayes and James A. Garfield had beards, as did Benjamin Harrison, the 23 rd president. He was the last. On this VeteransDay, we honor the Hoosier men and. Experience beauty that can be seen through the len. A few weeks before becoming president, he declared to one crowd: "I have stepped out upon this platform that I may see you and that you may see me, and in the arrangement I have the best of the bargain.

One paper, despite being pro-Lincoln, decided that even with a beard the president-elect was still "very homely. However, one man almost certainly loathed Lincoln's whiskers, at least at first. In , Milton Bradley had produced a lithograph of a beardless Lincoln.

But Lincoln's new facial hair rendered Bradley's inventory out-of-date and useless. Following this business disaster, Bradley began selling a board game called the Checkered Game of Life. It became the first in a long line of successes. Without Lincoln's beard, Bradley's new career might not have happened. On his way to Washington, D. There was then no Secret Service to provide protection, so Lincoln and his supporters were on their own.

Lincoln decided to follow the advice of Allan Pinkerton, of the Pinkerton National Detective Agency, and alter his publicly known itinerary in order to travel through Baltimore earlier than expected, before any would-be killers would know of his arrival. The new plans required Lincoln to remain incognito while riding in public rail cars and switching between train stations. There was just one bodyguard with him, so if the president-elect were to be spotted he would have little defense against unfriendly crowds.

To keep from being recognized, Lincoln chose a hat in a different style than what he usually wore and hunched over to alter his notable height. His new beard may also have served to shield his identity — though Lincoln had been seen in public with facial hair, he'd been clean-shaven until November of the previous year. Many people still didn't expect to see a bearded Lincoln.

Lincoln safely made it to the capital on February After word of his secret railway dash became public, he was widely mocked in the press with some spreading false rumors that the president-elect had disguised himself as a woman. Lincoln came to regret traveling "like a thief in the night," but at least he was alive, perhaps in part thanks to his new beard.

I have yet got four brothers and part of them will vote for you any way and if you let your whiskers grow I will try and get the rest of them to vote for you you would look a great deal better for your face is so thin. All the ladies like whiskers and they would tease their husbands to vote for you and then you would be President. Until then, the frontier lawyer had lived a clean-shaven life, apparently aiming for a statelier look than Bedell gave him credit for.

In the pioneer day it was the course of least resistance for most of the men on the frontier to allow their beards to grow. It may be said to the credit of Thomas Lincoln that he was always clean shaven.

In this respect, as in many others, Abraham Lincoln followed in the footsteps of his father. But Lincoln was not afraid of change. He appears to have answered his own question, since he began growing his facial hair shortly after.