Abraham Lincoln (1809 – 1865), the sixteenth President of America was descended from a Norfolk family, which included Richard and Samuel Lincoln.
After enthusiastic support from the North and West (but no support from the South), moderate Republican Lincoln was elected President in 1860, becoming the first Republican President. He led the United States through the American Civil War, and famously abolished slavery in America.
His Gettysburg Address of 1843, delivered during the Civil War, just under five months after the Union victory over the Confederate Army in Gettysburg, is one of the most famous in American history. Lincoln celebrated America’s dedication to the principles of nationalism, republicanism, equal rights, liberty, and democracy, beginning, “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.”
Lincoln gained re-election in 1864. His assassination by John Wilkes Booth, a Confederate sympathiser, in 1865, sent the nation into mourning. He is regularly rated as one of the three greatest Presidents of America, along with George Washington and Franklin D. Roosevelt.
Abraham Lincoln
Source: http://www.knowledgehouse.info/bio_lincoln.html
Norfolk's American Connections 