I am currently, as is my sometimes annoying (at least, to those who might be around me) habit to do, listening to a series of lectures on my car CD. The current set is titled "Biology and Human Behavior" by Robert Sapolsky, Ph.D. currently Professor of Neuroscience at Stanford University. He is a very able instructor and is focusing on the nature of violence as a biological trait in humans. The battle that rages within us all is, as I understand Dr. Sapolsky, primarily between two regions of the brain: the amygdala, which controls emotions, and the frontal lobe, which is the center of impulse control. In the poetic words of the subject of this, the second of our American Tragedies series, the frontal lobes would be the seat of "the better angels of our nature." More to the point, the frontal lobes, according to Dr. Sapolsky, are the neural control that cause us to "do the harder thing" or, often enough, "the right thing." While the more primitive amygdala may be saying "do X because it will feel good," the frontal lobes tell us to "do Z because it is the right thing." X may be the easier thing, but Z is the right - the socially and culturally correct - thing.

The story of Lincoln, unlike that of our first subject Benedict Arnold, is well known to most all Americans. He has been honored with a monument on the National Mall and his likeness decorates our coinage and currency and the pantheon of Mount Rushmore. We fondly recall him as "The Great Emancipator" who freed the slaves, the leader of our nation in its most perilous times and the first President to be assassinated. "Honest Abe" is almost as famous as the mythic "I cannot tell a lie" We remember he was tall and wore stovepipe hats. Some of us might even remember fragments of the most eloquent 272 words ever written - the Gettysburg Address. But there is so much more to this man and his American Tragedy.

To the degree that Benedict Arnold was driven and transparent, Lincoln was - and remains - complex and opaque. It seems that every generation recasts his life to give it new meaning. Most recently, he was "outed" as a clearly gay man by one author while two-time Pulitzer Prize winning David Donald paints him as a red-blooded, skirt-chasing frontier scallywag with a bawdy sense of humor. A History Channel documentary in 2005 portrayed Lincoln as a chronic depressive who was haunted by suicidal thoughts. In the Reagan years, pregnant with religious rebirth in American, one author wrote a book about Lincoln’s Christianity; however, most historians agree that Lincoln was, at best, a Deist and, at worst, an agnostic. Most, however, can agree that he was convinced that he was destined for great things but was, with regularity, cursed by self-doubt and, perhasps, a full-blown inferiority complex. Clearly, the true character of the man we "know" as Lincoln is a closed book whose pages have grown even more faint over the years since his death. But we can examine his life in the context of classical tragedy.

What we do know about Lincoln is that he was born on February 12, 1809. His parents were Frank and Nancy Lincoln, a couple of the lowest social order who were hardscrabble farmers on the Western Kentucky frontier. Nancy Hanks, quite probably, was the illegitimate child of an unnamed Virginia aristocrat and Lucy Hanks, Lincoln’s grandmother. Abraham Lincoln, at least in one story recounted years later by his law partner, believed that he had received a unique genetic endowment from his maternal grandfather that enabled him to think of himself as "better" than the his humble stock would suggest. From an early age, Abraham Lincoln viewed himself as destined for great things.

Unlike many of the age who manufactured their "common" origins to garner popular appeal, Lincoln could (and did) truly claim for his biographer John Locke Scripps, that his childhood was "the short and simple annals of the poor." He grew up in destitute poverty in a log cabin on the western frontier of early America. His father was harsh, illiterate and generally without ambition, His mother could read and encouraged Abraham to do so as well. When she could - and despite her husband’s protests - she nudged him to attend whatever makeshift schools were nearby. The family moved from Kentucky to Indiana when Abraham was seven. The next year, his mother died of "milk sickness" and Lincoln helped his father bury his "angel Mother." His father remarried quickly, as he realized that he could not raise his children alone on the frontier. He took Sarah Bush Johnston, a widow with three children of her own.

Young Abraham grew to love his new mother. She brought with her some of the trappings of "city life" (table and chairs, a spinning wheel and such), reorganized the harsh Lincoln household and blended the two little families into one. It was an early version of "The Brady Bunch," frontier style. But like his biological mother, her greatest gift to the future President was an even stronger sense that education was vital to success in America. Young Lincoln, with other children of the blended family, sporadically attended various frontier school and he quickly realized that he loved to read more than he loved to work. The latter was to be a constant irritant to his illiterate father.

As Lincoln grew to love words, his father became more and more demanding of his eldest son with the precocious size and prodigious strength. He would "rent" his eldest son out for work on other neighboring farms and, due to the traditions of the day, kept the money as his own. Lincoln probably grew to despise his father’s lowly plight (and, equally, his lack of ambition) around this same time and determined he would not live this sort of "hand to mouth" life. It probably also gave him an awareness of the wrongs of slavery as he was little above their situation. He was a "white slave" for his father’s sloth and avarice. As soon as reached the age of consent, he left the Lincoln family and, by all accounts and through all his writings and the research of others, never referred to his father again.

Eventually, Lincoln settled in New Salem, Illinois and, primarily through his wit and likeability, he became popular enough in the tiny town to be elected to the Illinois legislature. It was here - in the political arena - that Lincoln flourished. He studied law and was accepted to the Illinois bar. He met and married Mary Todd, the belle of Springfield, Illinois, and started a family. His law practice flourished to the point that he acquired a partner, William Herndon, who remained his lifelong friend and later biographer. Life as a frontier bachelor came to end; the focused, driven Lincoln arose like a Phoenix from the dirt of his Kentucky log cabin.

From there, the story is well known. He was elected for one term in the U.S. Congress during which he - unpopularly - opposed the Mexican-American War as unfounded. His frontal lobe, already structurally sound, forced him "to do the harder thing," knowing full well that this position - in the whirlwind of national patriotism often found in wartime - was not mainstream. He was, predictably, not re-elected because of his stand and retired from politics to practice law from 1849 to 1854. But, always, he knew he was destined for greater things. With the repeal of the Missouri Compromise and the adoption of the Kansas-Nebraska Act (both instigated by his future opponent, Senator Stephen Douglas) Lincoln was drawn back into the political fray. He became the articulate leader in the new Republican Party and, ultimately, its successful candidate for President in the election of 1860.

The tragedy that is Abraham Lincoln is, in one sense, fully Shakespearean: the journey of a man who conquered seemingly insurmountable obstacles to achieve the highest office in the land, led his nation through its greatest crisis and, finally, was assassinated within a week of his final triumph. For all his shortcomings, personal flaws and tragedies (and there were many), Lincoln doggedly overcame everything to achieve immortality. His tragic death, which he often dreamed of and, by all reports, consciously accepted its inevitability, never hindered any of his decisions. Truth be told, it seemed to those around him that he was forever seeking it out, marching toward it, welcoming it and embracing it. Fittingly, it came to him when he was finally able to regain a sense of peace and personal happiness, 6 days after Appomattox and, ironically, on Good Friday, the historical day of Jesus’ crucifixion. That very day, April 15, 1865, Mary Todd Lincoln recalled President Lincoln was "cheerful - almost joyous". She mentioned a conversation they had during a carriage ride that afternoon when she remarked: "Dear husband, you almost startle me by your great cheerfulness." He replied: "And well I may feel so, Mary. I consider this day, the war has come to a close. We must both be more cheerful in the future - between the war and the loss of our darling Willie [who had died in 1862] - we have both been very miserable." He finally, after a trial-by-fire endured by no American leader before or since, had achieved contentment and a sense of his destiny.

The greater tragedy, often overlooked by history and the bloody act of Booth, was that which befell the nation with Lincoln’s loss. The magnanimous leader was replaced by a seemingly endless line of incompetents - Andrew Johnson and, later, Grant were only the first two. [The line would not be broken until another President was felled by an assassin and Theodore Roosevelt returned a sense of strength to the Executive Branch] The vision so ardently held by Lincoln of a rapid healing of the nation’s wounds under his acknowledged and accepted leadership was lost forever. Instead of the rapid and benevolent "reconstruction" that Lincoln would have formulated - "with malice toward none, with charity for all" - died with him. When the radical Republicans gained control of Presidency (Grant) and Congress (led by Charles Sumner) from 1866 to 1873, all hope for a smooth transition to national reconciliation was buried with Lincoln. The age of the "carpetbaggers and scalawags" led to the inevitable backlash of Southern hostilities that bred the onerous reign of the Ku Klux Klan and the "redeemers." As a result of failed leadership - which would have been, undoubtedly, avoided if Lincoln had lived - the gaping wounds opened by succession were left to fester and drained the poison of segregation for nearly a century. The wounds, unattended and inexpertly treated, have not completely healed even today.

The tragedy that is the legacy of Lincoln lies not for the man but for the nation he so suddenly and sadly left, wounded and still bleeding. We should lament the death of any life cut short as Lincoln’s surely was. However, often we must look upon the lost possibilities that result from the loss of such a man. This is one "What if?" question that we can only ponder with a great deal of melancholy and wistfulness. Personally, I believe Lincoln would have served at least for 12 years as there were no term limits on the Presidency until the 22^nd Amendment (1951). I believe Grant would have never been elected which, in itself, is a good thing. I believe that the South would have come to realize, much sooner than it did, that segregation was never the solution to the dilemma of the freed slaves and there would have been a much smoother return to national unity and sense of purpose. I believe, in short, that we would be - today - a much more "united" country.

But imagining a better today is the truest measure of yesterday’s tragedies.