Sixteenth president of the United States, the Great Emancipator, and an eloquent spokesman for Union, freedom, and human decency, Abraham Lincoln is one of the most studied and beloved Americans in history. 

Lincoln speaks to us not only as a champion of freedom, democracy, and national unity but also as a model of psychological wholeness. Without his emotional maturity – as well as his monumental patience, tact, diplomacy, eloquence, and forbearance – he could not have tamed the factionalism that threatened to divide the loyal states and to guarantee victory for the Confederacy. Most politicians, indeed most people, are dominated by their petty egos. Psychologically unconscious, they take things personally, waste time and energy on feuds and vendettas, engage in power struggles, project their unacceptable qualities onto others, displace anger and rage, and put their own ego needs above all other considerations. A dramatic exception to that pattern, Lincoln achieved a kind of balance and wholeness that led one psychologist to remark that he had more “psychological honesty” than anyone since Christ. 1

Few will achieve the world historical importance of Lincoln, but many can profit from his personal example, encouraged by the knowledge that despite a childhood of emotional malnutrition as well as grinding poverty, despite a lack of formal education, despite a series of career failures, despite a miserable marriage, despite a tendency to depression, despite a painful midlife crisis, despite the early death of his mother and his siblings as well as of his sweetheart and two of his four children, he became a model of psychological balance, moral clarity, and unimpeachable integrity. His presence and his leadership inspired contemporaries; his life story can do the same for generations to come.

Michael Burlingame
Sadowski Professor of History Emeritus
Connecticut College
New London CT 06320

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