Seeking the Soul

The story of the Circassian chief is recounted in two major works on Abraham Lincoln, Team of Rivals by Doris Kearns Goodwin, pp.747-8, and Lincoln’s Melancholy by Joshua Wolf Shenk, p. xiii, from which the account posted earlier is taken nearly verbatim.

It is that it is the Circassian chief’s story--and not Leo Tolstoy’s--that gives the story its power, that knowledge of Lincoln had reached such a remote corner of the world.  But this was Tolstoy’s take on Lincoln:

“This little incident proves how largely the name of Lincoln is worshipped throughout the world and how legendary his personality has become.  Now, why was Lincoln so great that he overshadows all other national heroes?  He really was not a great general like Napoleon or Washington; he was not such a skilful statesman as Gladstone or Frederick the Great; but his supremacy expresses itself altogether in his peculiar moral power and in the greatness of his character…Lincoln was a humanitarian as broad as the world.” (Goodwin, 748)

How did America produce an Abraham Lincoln?  Why has China never?