Hello, and welcome to This Day in History. Here’s what happened on February 12th. Americans consistently rank our 16th U.S. president, Abraham Lincoln, as the greatest in American history, and on this day in 1809, Honest Abe was born in a log cabin in Hodgenville, Kentucky. Lincoln was elected president at age 51, just before the outbreak of the Civil War. By the time Lincoln was inaugurated, seven Southern states had already seceded from the Union.

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