How's everybody doing today? My name is Derek Zeman, and I'm doing very good so far. Here are some of my thoughts about being on my blog. Here's the first one. My favorite person in American history is Abraham Lincoln because he was the 16th president of the United States from 1861 to 1865. Abraham Lincoln was not from Illinois, he was originally born in Kentucky. When he grew older, Lincoln and his family moved from Kentucky to Illinois, where Lincoln had built a plantation in Illinois and he stayed there. In 1833, Lincoln married a young widowed woman named Mary Todd. The couple soon found out that they're gonna have children at the Illinois plantation, or Lincoln's home. In 1860, Abraham Lincoln was running for president with his vice-presidential running mate, Hannibal Hamlin. Lincoln finally won the election, but he noticed that in 1861, there's gonna be a famous war called the Civil War. Lincoln was president during the Civil War. In 1863, President Lincoln issued an Emancipation Proclamation, which he had said about a new country where the Founding Fathers brought forth. He said to the people while reading in his Gettysburg Address, "Four score and seven years ago, our fathers brought forth to this continent, a new nation. Conceived with Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition, that all men are created equal. Now we are engaged in the great Civil War. Tested for any nation, or any nation whom all conceived, also dedicated, whom all endure." When the North finally won the Civil War in 1865, President Lincoln was relieved that the war had been a bloody and insecure war. When President Lincoln won the second term with his second vice-presidential running mate, Andrew Johnson, the people were ecstatic about it. It was April of 1865. President Lincoln and his wife Mary were at Ford's Theatre watching an American play called Our American Cousin. Suddenly, an actor named John Wilkes Booth was creeping on the balcony and he took out his gun and shot President Lincoln right in the head. Lincoln's wife Mary was being told that her husband was dead. Vice president Andrew Johnson became president of the United States while the people remember Abraham Lincoln being assassinated. Well, that's all I know about Abraham Lincoln and his hometown in Illinois and also his wife Mary.