Why was Lincoln "great?"

[Eva Elisabeth]

When I reflected my instant answers to your question I began to wonder what greatness is, where it begins. It’s a word like “friendship”, I would need a closer definition. So many people do great things in their scope, aren’t they all great? If Lincoln had lost the 1860 election we probably wouldn’t have discussed his greatness because we wouldn’t have come to know about it.

Nevertheless, these are three of the points that came to my mind first:

- I think that Lincoln was always willing to grow and to reconsider former believes, although sometimes slowly, and that his intentions at all were pro humanity. (I guess someone will object now that his good intentions didn’t make 618,000 victims feel better.)
He treated people kindly and respectfully and, exept for his father he didn’t hold grudges even where most people would have done.

-Although his presidency was one of the hardest one could imagine and the pictures of him witness what he went through he didn’t give up or break down.

- Lincoln was often said to be shrewd when it came to dealing with people in difficult situations, and I would second this. Some incidents fascinated me, they developed like a drama and while reading I wondered how he would ever manage to get out of that dilemma. And then he did. He acted for himself as a deus ex machina and I just thought “Wow. How clever”. Two examples are the way he manipulated Seward in the Trent Affair (when he let him write the “pro-release” argumentation) and the way he dealt with the Republican caucus against Seward in 1862.