Lincoln Wrestled, Even with the Greatest Issues

By David J. Kent

Washington, DC

Monday, November 3, 2025

Abraham Lincoln was many things in his life - farmer, laborer, shopkeeper, postmaster, surveyor, lawyer, politician - and wrestler! In fact, Lincoln was inducted into the National Wrestling Hall of Fame.

You could say that Lincoln wrestled with the great issues of his time - promoting the idea that the Declaration of Independence's "all men are created equal" applied to ALL men (and women), grappling with the "peculiar institution" to end slavery, and scuffling with competing forces during the Civil War to save the Union. For that, he deserves to be in every Hall of Fame imaginable.

Born in Kentucky and moving to Indiana and then Illinois, the younger Lincoln was a tall, scrappy kid whose days filled with farming, chopping trees, and splitting rails gave him an impressive physique. He was tough as nails, as the saying goes, and often found himself engaged in the most common form of acceptable violence among the men folk of the villages where he lived. That is especially true for New Salem, Illinois, where Lincoln first met the Clary Grove Boys, a group of toughs led by Jack Armstrong.

Variously known as scuffling, grappling, or wrestling, these were no-holds-barred engagements with little resemblance to the more formal wrestling matches of today. The legend goes that Lincoln wrestled in 300 matches and lost just once. Some people say that he was a state and regional wrestling champion. None of that is true as formal competitions did not exist at the time and mostly these were impromptu altercations to demonstrate one's strength or simply relieve boredom. Even the one match with Jack Armstrong, which many people witnessed and reported on to William Herndon after Lincoln's assassination, is rife with misinformation. A closer look at the Wrestling Hall of Fame reveals they make no such claims. Instead, they inducted him in 1992 as an "Outstanding American."

By the way, apparently Lincoln wasn't the only US president to have wrestled (given a broad definition of "wrestling"). The Hall of Fame notes that several presidents wrestled in one form or another: Washington, John Adams, Jackson, Taylor, Pierce, Lincoln, Garfield, Arthur, Theodore Roosevelt, Coolidge, and Eisenhower.