Why was Lincoln "great?"

[LincolnToddFan]

He had the hide of a rhino...he must have, to have been able to withstand the almost constant vicious attacks on his character. He was under almost an inhuman amount of pressure from the time he took the oath of office as President, until he sat down in that rocker at Ford's Theater on the night of April 14th, 1865. Yet he never became self-pitying like Lyndon Johnson. He never resorted to a vindictive, paranoid "enemies list" a la Richard Nixon. During the fierce storm he remained what he had been all his life...generous, tough, dreamy, pragmatic, visionary.

Deep inside, he must have realized that he was the intellectual superior of everyone around him, yet he was never arrogant or condescending to "lesser" men. He took and accepted everyone as he found them.

His iron will is part of his legend, but so is his tender heartedness. The same man who could order hundreds of thousands of young men to their deaths in battle could also weep and grieve for them, and be haunted by their ghosts in his dreams. He would contrive to issue pardons to deserters who had been condemned to the firing squad.

How many "tyrants" cuddle kittens on their lap, and fret about them being hungry and lonely in the midst of orchestrating an army to victory during a bloody, divisive civil war?

Humility, dazzling intellect,political brilliance, toughness, magnanimity, pathos, humor, almost freakish physical strength combined with the gentleness of a child, flawed and overwhelmingly human...who else can we think of in American political life who embodied all those qualities in one person?

If AL isn't great, I don't know who is.