I suppose I've been interested in Abraham Lincoln for almost as long as I can remember. My first Lincoln book was the Classics Illustrated comic book version of the life of Lincoln, and with that, I was hooked.

Abraham Lincoln would have been happy to have solved the slavery problem by compensation - in fact, drew up a gradual, compensated emancipation plan as early as November, 1861 - but no slaveholders were willing to go along with it.

It is possible to have pardon without forgiveness-a murderer can be pardoned by the governor, but that does not mean the victim's family has forgiven him. And there can be forgiveness without pardon.

Corporations did not achieve the scale we normally associate with them until the 1880s; but it's still hard to imagine that Abraham Lincoln would offered much in the way of determined opposition. William Herndon said that they always thanked the Lord when a corporation came knocking at their office door to hire them.

The best one-volume biography of Abraham Lincoln is still Benjamin Thomas's 1952 biography. David Donald's 1995 biography is a close second, and close enough that if you can only obtain the Donald rather than the Thomas, your book club will still be doing just fine.

I suspect, too, that the modern debates represent the effort of candidates with widely-varying constituencies and special interests to please to tip the hat as quickly as possible to as many of the constituencies and interests as possible. That leaves no time for big-picture issues. Contrast this with Abraham Lincoln and Stephen A. Douglas, where the subject was only ever slavery, and the discussion went right to the bedrock of what a democracy is all about.

I suppose I've been interested in Abraham Lincoln for almost as long as I can remember. My first Lincoln book was the Classics Illustrated comic book version of the life of Lincoln, and with that, I was hooked.