Remember that Abraham Lincoln was a Whig far longer than he was a Republican. As a whole, the Whigs looked upon banks and corporations as a more efficient means of development; the Jacksonian Democrats thought they were the tools of the devil, but Whigs like Lincoln disagreed. During his presidency, Lincoln favored the re-construction of a national financial system, and his most important 'internal improvement' project was the Pacific railroad.

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.

Was all of Stephen A. Douglas's promotion of 'popular sovereignty' a plausible device for getting him elected president? With his death in June, 1861, any possible answer to that question went to Douglas's grave with him.

It would be pleasant to believe that some of Lincoln's DNA is actively swimming around in somebody's soup, but all the evidence is against it. And of course, there's always the risk that what we might get would be more Robert Todd Lincoln than Abraham Lincoln.

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.

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.

One thing which Stephen A. Douglas was temperamentally incapable of doing was admitting he was wrong. He always believed that 'popular sovereignty' - the core doctrine of the Kansas-Nebraska Bill - was the right solution to the slavery controversy; and even though it had failed to solve much of anything in Kansas and Nebraska, he stubbornly insisted that this was because it had never been adequately tested.