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.

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.

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.

Patriotism without criticism has no head criticism without patriotism has no heart.

It is possible to have pardon without forgiveness-a murderer can be pardoned by the governor, but that does not mean the victim's family has forgiven him. And there can be forgiveness without pardon.

No one loves an archive better than I do. I can smell a good one half-a-block away - all that brittle papyrus dust is music to my nostrils.

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 one who pursues revenge should dig two graves.

Stephen A.Douglas was a risk-taker by temperament I expect that Lincoln - Douglas debates represented another risk he just couldn't resist. He lived to regret it.

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.

What Thomas DiLorenzo misses is that the other abolitions were either very limited as in the liberation of the serfs by Alexander II or far away from the metropolitan center of those nations - the French and British abolitions were of slavery in the West Indies.

When I need to stretch my legs, I can walk across the street to the museum and relax among the illustrations of Abraham Lincoln's life, too. In a way, it reflects the halves of Lincoln's own character - one all jokes and buffoonery, the other all high-minded seriousness. If he could absorb both into his personality, I think I can, too.

I suppose I've been interested in Abraham Lincoln for almost as long as I can remember. My first Lincoln book was the Classics Illustrated comic book version of the life of Lincoln, and with that, I was hooked.

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.

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.