"I have chosen my title not merely for its poetic qualities, but because it points us in the right direction on Lincoln: he supplies matter for thinking beyond any other figure of our national life.1 Something of why this is so is suggested by Woodrow Wilson, who looked back to Lincoln in order to understand what Lincoln’s greatness implied for the challenges the U.S. and Wilson himself faced in the early twentieth century. On the 100th anniversary of Lincoln’s birth Wilson asked his audience: Have you ever looked at some of those singular statues of the great French sculptor Rodin – those pieces of marble in which only some part of a figure is revealed and the rest is left in the hidden lines of the marble itself; here there emerges the arm and the bust and the eager face, it may be, of a man, but his body is appears in the general bulk of the stone, and the lines fall off vaguely?"(...)