February 12 - Abraham Lincoln's Birthday

Happy 211th Birthday, Abraham Lincoln! Today we celebrate the 16th U.S. President, who also went under the bynames of Honest Abe, the Rail-Splitter, or the Great Emancipator). Lincoln is best known for leading the nation through its greatest moral, constitutional, and political crisis in the American Civil War. 

Born in a one-room log cabin on Nolin Creek in Hardin County, Kentucky on this day back in 1809, Lincoln, years later, led the United States through the American Civil War—its bloodiest war.

On January 1, 1862, President Lincoln wrote Proclamation 95, or The Emancipation Proclamation. This was the presidential proclamation and executive order issued on that date. The law changed the federal legal status of more than 3.5 million enslaved African-Americans in the designated areas of the South from slave to free. 

Afterwards, President Lincoln helped to ratify The 13th amendment, passed on April 8, 1864. The Thirteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution abolished slavery and involuntary servitude, except as punishment for a crime. In the U.S. Congress, it was passed by the Senate on April 8, 1864, and by the House on January 31, 1865.  

  

On February 1, 1865, President Lincoln approved the Joint Resolution of Congress, submitting the proposed amendment to the state legislatures. The amendment was ratified by the required number of states on December 6, 1865. 

The earliest known observance of Lincoln's birthday occurred in Buffalo, New York, in either 1873 or 1874. A Buffalo druggist named Julius Francis made it his life's mission to honor the president. Francis repeatedly petitioned U.S. Congress to establish Lincoln's birthday as a legal holiday. 

This day is marked by traditional wreath-laying ceremonies at Lincoln's Birthplace National Historic Site in Hodgenville, Kentucky, and at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C. The latter has been the site of a ceremony ever since the Memorial was dedicated.  

  

Since that event in 1922, observances continue to be organized by the Lincoln Birthday National Commemorative Committee and by the Military Order of the Loyal Legion of the United States (MOLLUS). 

A wreath is laid on behalf of the President of the United States, a custom also carried out at the grave sites of all deceased American presidents on their birthdays. Lincoln's tomb is located in Springfield, Illinois. 

Though tragically assassinated by John Wilkes Booth at Ford's Theatre on April 15, 1865, Lincoln will continue to and will always remain an iconic and historic American lawyer, legislator, statesman and president.  

  

His work and memory are forever embellished and enshrined in our nation's history as one of the leading figures of successfully declaring forever free those slaves within the Confederacy and prosecuting the Civil War to preserve the nation.

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