I don't know that there has ever been a time when Abraham Lincoln didn't stand head-and-shoulders above all other presidents in the historians' eye. But relatively speaking, there have been peaks and a troughs. One peak was in the 1910s-20s; a major trough was in the 1970s-80s. We are certainly on a peak again, something which began in 1994 with Michael Burlingame's 'The Inner World of Abraham Lincoln,' which showed in fabulous detail how many new and untapped sources were available on Lincoln.

I think, a general anxiety, after the end of the Cold War, to find a new basis for affirming American nationhood. And perhaps another, in plainer terms, is the lure of the approaching Abraham Lincoln bicentennial has been made a resurgence in interest in Lincoln.

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.

Until the early 90s, when I was working on a project about the idea of free will in American philosophy. I knew that Lincoln had had something to say about "necessity" and "fatalism," and so I began writing him into the book. In fact, Lincoln took over. I wrote instead 'Abraham Lincoln: Redeemer President,' in 1999, and I've splitting rails with Mr. Lincoln ever since. If there's a twelve-step process for this somewhere, I haven't found it yet.

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.

Abraham Lincoln did speak about keeping the man before the dollar, but he was talking at that moment about slavery, and referring to keeping the humanity of the slave higher in view than the self-interest of the slaveholders. This does not quite make Lincoln a challenger of the corporations; in fact, he prefaced those words by saying that Republicans were for the man AND the dollar.

We still know so little about how the brain interacts with the body chemistry or, for that matter, whether we should be talking about the brain or the mind, that it would be perilous to hazard any guess about the way Abraham Lincoln's biological health may or may not have affected him. Of course, we don't have Lincoln on hand to ask him directly; but even if we did, we still might not be able to make sense of how all the parts worked together.