For those of you in Arizona, California, Connecticut, Illinois, Missouri, New Jersey, New York, and Indiana, we hope you are enjoying this Holiday as today, February 12, marks the 205th birthday of President Abraham Lincoln. Polls tell us that Lincoln ranks first or second of the best-ever U.S. president for more than 60 years.

To honour Lincoln and this Holiday we decided to do some research and pull some lesser-known Lincoln facts from LincolnWonk.com:

  • Young Abraham Lincoln excelled at “fives,” a precursor of handball. With his exceptionally long arms and legs, he could reach the ball from any angle. He played the game as he awaited the results of the presidential nominating convention in Chicago in May 1860.
  • In 1857, Mary and Abraham Lincoln made their only trip outside the U.S. together – to Niagara Falls in Canada.
  • When asked if her husband had a hobby, Mary Todd Lincoln had a one-word reply: “Cats.” President Lincoln loved cats, and he would spend hours playing with them. When the president found three kittens abandoned at a wartime telegraph hut in 1865, he picked them up and saw to it they found a loving home.
  • President Lincoln’s musical tastes ran to Friedrich von Flotow’s opera “Martha,” the Scottish love ballad “Annie Laurie,” and the Confederate anthem “Dixie.” Dixie had been a popular song throughout the country before the war. After the South surrendered, Lincoln jokingly claimed the song as federal property.
  • Abraham Lincoln was one of two sitting presidents ever to come under fire during a war. It happened at the Battle of Fort Stevens in 1864. The first president to be in that position was James Madison during the War of 1812.
  • Lincoln was in greater peril than Madison on the battlefield, though. He was about a foot taller.
  • On the last day of the president’s life, the Lincolns talked about traveling to the Holy Land or to California, where there might be more opportunities for their sons.
  • President Lincoln was the first U.S. president to be embalmed. Nineteen days passed between his assassination in Washington, D.C. and his burial in Springfield, Ill. The funeral train stopped in cities along the way, and 1.5 million Americans viewed the casket. Because he was the most photographed man in America and instantly recognizable, Lincoln’s body became a sterling advertisement for the then-fledgling embalming industry. The embalmers, who rode the funeral train, touched up their work so often that the president’s face was still intact when his coffin was opened in 1901.

Here are three of President Lincoln’s most powerful quotes:
“Whenever I hear anyone arguing for slavery, I feel a strong impulse to see it tried on him personally.”

“If you want to test a man’s character, give him power.”

“Most folks are as happy as they make up their minds to be.”