Lincoln’s Prophetic Dream: The Prophetic Meaning Hidden in Lincoln’s Assassination & The Prophetic Blueprint for America

Troy A. Brewer

I would bet a penny you have heard of President Lincoln’s assassination, but have you heard of his prophetic dream?

The dream tells us to look at the event as if it were a dream. It’s staggering.

If you look at the names, numbers, and circumstances

of the 16th president’s death as if a prophetic dream, you would have a word from God that could change your course and impact your destiny—the way Lincoln’s life and death impacted the course and destiny of the United States of America.

Abraham Lincoln’s Prophetic Dream

The week of his assignation, President Lincoln met with some close friends. Just two days earlier, General Lee had surrendered at Appomattox, and the Union had finally beaten the Confederacy. This dream happened a week before the official end of the war, and Lincoln would die 5 days after the end of the war.

According to Ward Hill Lamon, personal friend and self-appointed bodyguard to Lincoln, he heard the president share this dream with his wife and several friends just 3 days before His assassination:

About ten days ago, I retired very late. I had been up waiting for important dispatches from the front. I could not have been long in bed when I fell into a slumber, for I was weary. I soon began to dream. There seemed to be a death- like stillness about me. Then I heard subdued sobs as if a number of people were weeping. I thought I left my bed and wandered downstairs. There, the silence was broken by the same pitiful sobbing, but the mourners were invisible.

I went from room to room; no living person was in sight, but the same mournful sounds of distress met me as I passed along. I saw light in all the rooms; every object was familiar to me; but where were all the people who were grieving as if their hearts would break? I was puzzled and alarmed. What could be the meaning of all this?

Determined to find the cause of a state of things so mysterious and so shocking, I kept on until I arrived at the East Room, which I entered. There I met with a sickening surprise. Before me was a catafalque, on which rested a corpse wrapped in funeral vestments. Around it were stationed soldiers who were acting as guards; and there was a throng of people, gazing mournfully upon the corpse, whose face was covered, others weeping pitifully. “Who is dead in the White House?” I demanded of one of the soldiers, “The President,” was his answer, “he was killed by an assassin.” Then came a loud burst of grief from the crowd, which woke me from my dream. I slept no more that night; and although it was only a dream, I have been strangely annoyed by it ever since.

If you don’t know about the prophetic dream ol’ honest Abe had about his terrible demise, you might be reading this thinking, Wow! But there is a true historical record of such an event, and I think God gave it not just for our president, but for all prophetic people to consider throughout the ages to follow.

We are going to look at such events through a prophetic lens.

I think the 16th president’s dream was the invitation for all prophetic people to learn to look at this happening with this important question in mind: If the death of President Lincoln was a prophetic dream, what would it mean?

Lincoln himself was a prophetic dreamer on more than one occasion.

A recurring dream that was a big prophetic marker for Lincoln was one in which he was on a ship moving rapidly through the water toward a vast and unknown shore. He had this dream on the eves of Antietam, Gettysburg, and Vicksburg. One such dream encouraged him to move ahead to get the votes for the 13th Amendment. Lincoln considered this one a good word from the Lord. After all, his name means “Lives by the water.”

So here he was, a few days into the celebration of General Lee’s surrender, and he was having prophetic dreams. His latest of the long series of moving forward in dark waters toward another shore was one he believed to be a sign that Confederate General Joe Johnston would soon surrender to William T. Sherman in North Carolina.

Lincoln’s concerns for the perils of reconstruction were actually the work he put in the front of his mind to shake off the foreboding dream of his untimely death.

Speaking from the second-story window, Lincoln addressed a large crowd. Even now, he pushed the envelope of giving freedom to the slaves to another level. Something he had only spoken of privately before, he dared to bring the narrative of Black Americans being able to vote.

“It is unsatisfactory to some that the elective franchise is not given to the colored man.” He suggested they start with those who had served in the army. Lincoln wouldn’t get the chance to put his Reconstruction policies into effect. That night, one member of the crowd outside the White House was the handsome young actor John Wilkes Booth, who snarled to his companion about Lincoln’s address: “That means n— citizenship! Now, by God, I’ll put him through. That is the last speech he will ever make.”

It was.

And so ended the Civil War with the death of the American president.

Recognizing and Interpreting the Assassination and Death of President Lincoln

On Good Friday, April 14, 1865, at 10:15 p.m., a shot from a .44 caliber “pocket cannon” rang out in Ford’s Theatre. Eight hours later, at 7:22 a.m. on April 15, Doctor Robert King Stone pronounced the 16th president of the United States dead.

“Now he belongs to the ages,” Dr. Stone said.

If this was a dream or a prophecy, what would it mean? Could it be interpreted?