197 years young

or he would be if he were alive today.


I'm talking about my favorite US President of the past, whose birthday is today. The first Republican President, Abraham Lincoln.

History shows that Lincoln was a humble, religious, God fearing man. From a book entitled "The Wit and Wisdom of Abraham Lincoln" I give you this story:

After the battle of Gettysburg Lincoln urged General Meade in a peremptory order to pursue General Lee in his retreat, attack him, and with one bold stroke end the war. A friendly note came with it:
"The order I inclose is not of record. If you succeed, you need not publush the order. If you fail, publish it. Then, if you succeed, you will have allthe credit of the movement. If not, I'll take all the responsibility."
Is there in our history a more generous act, a nobler patriotism?

One of the most famous speeches in American history was given by Lincoln on Nov. 19, 1863:

"Fourscore and seven years ago our fathers brought forth, upon 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. We have come to dedicate a portion of it, as a final resting place for those who died here, that the nation might live. This we may, in all propriety do. But in a larger sense, we cannot dedicate, we cannot consecrate, we cannot hallow, this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have hallowed it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here; while it can never forget what they did here.

It is rather for us the living, we here be dedicated to the great task remaining before us--that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they here gave the last full measure of devotion--that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain, that this nation shall have a new birth of freedom, and that government of the people, by the people, for the people shall not perish from the earth."