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.

What Abraham Lincoln had to face was a culturally and politically cohesive bloc of states comprising half the country, refusing to discuss even the limitation of slavery; while he had only the most feeble means of enforcement. The British and the French could do their emancipating at a distance; Lincoln had armed resistance almost literally at his doorstep.

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.

It's often said that leadership is the art of getting people to do what you want, and making them think it's what they want. This captures a lot of what Abraham Lincoln did.

Patriotism without criticism has no head; criticism without patriotism has no heart.