Abraham Lincoln's Birthday

Today is Abraham Lincoln's birthday so I just had to post a little tribute to perhaps our greatest President of all time! Abraham Lincoln was the 16th President of the United States from 1861 until his shocking assassination in 1865. The colorful stories about Lincoln's life really are true: He was born in a log cabin and grew up on the American frontier, educated himself by reading borrowed books, and worked splitting fence rails and clerking in a general store, and then as a country lawyer, long before he became president. He served in the Illinois General Assembly for eight years and in the U.S. House of Representatives for one term (1847-49) before his election as the nation's first Republican president in 1860.

As president he is best remembered for leading the Union through the Civil War and freeing Confederate slaves with the 1863 Emancipation Proclamation; for delivering the Gettysburg Address, the most famous oration in American history, on 19 November 1863; and for his tragic assassination by John Wilkes Booth at Ford's Theater in Washington, D.C. Upon Lincoln's death, Andrew Johnson assumed the presidency. The Lincoln Memorial, with its famous statue of Lincoln by Daniel Chester French, was dedicated in Washington in 1922.