As we approach the first part of August, we're about to hit my one year anniversary on the second podcast that I host called True Stories with Seth Andrews.

We crossed a half a million downloads just recently and I just want to thank you for listening.

If you haven't listened, I want to encourage you to listen and so from time to time, I'm posting these little five six minute vignettes.

I'm sort of cross pollinating the shows for you and I've got one here, just a nice and short distraction.

If you like what you hear, if you would do me a favor, share it on your page, put it on your Facebook or Twitter or threads or whatever you've got and help me get the word out.

It's evergreen.

Anybody can listen, no religion, no atheism, no politics, just stories and share as much as you can.

This is a show for everyone and it might just be a gateway into the other conversations that we're having right here.

Okay, this is a six minute true story for you.

It's called kidnapping president Lincoln enjoy.

I'm Seth Andrews and what you're about to hear is a true story.

The United States Secret Service was founded in 1865, originally not to protect presidents.

Originally, the Secret Service was designated for finding and prosecuting counterfeiters, but after the 1901 assassination of President William McKinley, Congress expanded.

The role of the Secret Service to include the protection of the President and the Vice President and also of foreign dignitaries on U.S. soil.

And we certainly could have used the protective powers of the Secret Service well before 1901 and not just for the assassination attempts against presidents.

There were so many kidnapping attempts, including an attempt to kidnap Abraham Lincoln.

Now, that's a piece of history that few of us were ever taught.

Everybody knows about the assassination and John Wilkes Booth and Ford Theater and the Great National Morning on that terrible April day in 1865.

Even some people even know about the other unsuccessful assassination attempts against Lincoln.

There was one in 1861 that happened after the election, but before he was even inaugurated.

On that occasion, there was apparently a group of men who wanted to assassinate Lincoln with knives on one of his train stops as he traveled to Baltimore that President snuck into the city secretly for that reason.

Later on, a country doctor, a guy named Luke Prior Blackburn, he hated Abraham Lincoln so much that he took clothes off of yellow fever victims, right?

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