Abraham Lincoln Was Born February 12, 1809 

President Lincoln was the 16th president of the United States. He was assassinated on Good Friday, April 14, 1865, by John Wilkes Booth while attending a play entitled our American Cousin at Ford's Theatre. This was the first Presidential assassination in American history.

The first formal observance of his birthday took place in 1866, the year after his assassination, when both houses of Congress gathered for a memorial address. While Lincoln's Birthday did not become a federal holiday like George Washington's, it did become a legal holiday in sereral states.  

Lincoln's Gettysburg Address

Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.
Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. we are met on a great battlefield of that war....etc.
Delivered at the dedication of the cemetery at Gettysburg November 19, 1863