Thursday, 2/12. Today is . . .

Today is the birthday of former President Abraham Lincoln

President Lincoln was teh son of a frontiersman of Kentucky. Five months before receiving his Republican Nomination, he wrote about his life:

"I was born Feb. 12, 1809, in Harden County, Kentucky. My parents were both born in Virginia, of undistinguished families -- second family, perhaps I should say. My mother, who died in my tenth year, was a family of the name Hanks . . . My father . . . removed from Kentucky . . . Indiana, in my eighth year . . . It was a wild region, with many bears and other wild animals still in the woods. There I grew up . . . Of course when I came of age I did not know much. Still somehow, I could read, write, and cipher . . . but that was all."

He married Mary Todd. They had 4 boys. Only one child lived to adulthood.

In 1860, he won the Republican nomination, and won the re-election in 1864.

On Good Friday, April 14, 1865, Lincoln was assassinated at Ford's Theatre in Washington by John Wilkes Booth, an actor.