Lincoln's Journey to Emancipation
             He comes to us in the mists of legend as a kind of homespun Socrates, brimming with
             prarie wit and folk wisdom. There is a counterlegend of Lincoln, one shared ironically
             enough by many white Southerners and certain black Americans of our time. Neither of
             these views, of course, reveals much about the man who really lived--legend and political
             As a man, Lincoln was complex, many-sided, and richly human. He was an
             intense, brooding person, he was plagued with chronic depression most of his life. At the
             time he even doubted his ability to please or even care about his wife. Lincoln remained a
             moody, melancholy man, given to long introspection about things like death and mortality.
             Preoccupied with death, he was also afraid to insanity. Lincoln was a teetotaler because
             liquor left him "flabby and undone", blurring his mind and threatening his self-control.
             One side of Lincoln was always Supremely logical and analytical, he was intrigued by the
             clarity of mathematics. As a self-made man, Lincoln felt embarrassed about his log-cabin
             origins and never liked to talk about them. By the 1850s, Lincoln was one of the most
             sought after attorney in Illinois, with a reputation as a lawyer's lawyer. Though a man of
             status and influence, Lincoln was as honest in real life as in legend. Politically, Lincoln
             was always a nationalist in outlook , an outlook that began when he was an Indiana farm
             boy tilling his farther mundane wheat field.
             Lincoln always maintained that he had always hated human bondage, as much as
             any abolitionist. He realized how wrong it was that slavery should exist at all in a
             self-proclaimed free Republic. He opposed slavery, too, because he had witnessed some
             of it's evils firsthand. What could be done? So went Lincoln's argument before 1854. To
             solve the ensuing problem of racial adjustment, Lincoln ins...