John Quincy Adams wrote this letter to his father at age 10, June 2, 1777:

DEAR SIR,–I love to receive letters very well; much better than I love to write them. I make but a poor figure at composition, my head is too fickle, my thoughts are running after birds eggs play and trifles, till I get vexed with myself. Mamma has a troublesome task to keep me steady, and I own I am ashamed of myself. I have but just entered the third volume of Smollett, tho’ I had designed to have got it half through by this time. I have determined this week to be more diligent, as Mr. Thaxter will be absent at Court, and I cannot pursue my other studies. I have Set myself a Stent and determine to read the 3rd volume Half out. If I can but keep my resolution, I will write again at the end of the week and give a better account of myself. I wish, Sir, you would give me some instructions, with regard to my time, and advise me how to proportion my Studies and my Play, in writing, and I will keep them by me, and endeavor to follow them. I am, dear Sir, with a present determination of growing better, yours.

P.S.–Sir, if you will be so good as to favor me with a Blank Book, I will transcribe the most remarkable occurances I meet with in my reading, which will serve to fix them upon my mind.

Five years later, at age 14, he was serving as private secretary to the American minister to Russia.

In the 1940s, journalist Stefan Lorant was researching a book on Abraham Lincoln when he came upon a photograph of the president’s funeral procession as it moved down Broadway in New York City. The image was dated April 25, 1865.

As Lorant tried to identify the location, he found that the shuttered house on the left belonged to Cornelius van Schaack Roosevelt, the grandfather of future president Teddy Roosevelt and his brother Elliott. Teddy would have been 6 years old at the time of the procession. And visible in a second-story window are the heads of two boys.

As it happened, Lorant had an opportunity to ask Roosevelt’s widow Edith about the image. “Yes, I think that is my husband, and next to him his brother,” she said. “That horrible man! I was a little girl then and my governess took me to Grandfather Roosevelt’s house on Broadway so I could watch the funeral procession. But as I looked down from the window and saw all the black drapings I became frightened and started to cry. Theodore and Elliott were both there. They didn’t like my crying. They took me and locked me in a back room. I never did see Lincoln’s funeral.”

On the day after Abraham Lincoln’s assassination, Army surgeons Edward Curtis and Joseph Janvier Woodward performed an autopsy at the White House. Curtis mentioned one sobering moment in a letter to his mother:

I proceeded to open the head and remove the brain down to the track of the ball. The latter had entered a little to the left of the median line at the back of the head, had passed almost directly forwards through the center of the brain and lodged. Not finding it readily, we proceeded to remove the entire brain, when, as I was lifting the latter from the cavity of the skull, suddenly the bullet dropped out through my fingers and fell, breaking the solemn silence of the room with its clatter, into an empty basin that was standing beneath. There it lay upon the white china, a little black mass no bigger than the end of my finger — dull, motionless and harmless, yet the cause of such mighty changes in the world’s history as we may perhaps never realize.

He added, “[S]ilently, in one corner of the room, I prepared the brain for weighing. As I looked at the mass of soft gray and white substance that I was carefully washing, it was impossible to realize that it was that mere clay upon whose workings, but the day before, rested the hopes of the nation. I felt more profoundly impressed than ever with the mystery of that unknown something which may be named ‘vital spark’ as well as anything else, whose absence or presence makes all the immeasurable difference between an inert mass of matter owning obedience to no laws but those covering the physical and chemical forces of the universe, and on the other hand, a living brain by whose silent, subtle machinery a world may be ruled.”