The statue of Abraham Lincoln that stands at the northern end of Union Square was created by Henry Kirke Brown shortly after Lincoln's death. It is, like the man, larger than life, and poses him conventionally as the Great Emancipator. What I never realized about Lincoln, however, until recently was just how complicated a man he was. In fact, rather than the iconic savior, recent scholarship has focused on Lincoln Agonistes: a man who failed constantly, whose family life was marked by insanity and loss after loss, whose sexuality was a gray area, who was a relatively late convert to complete abolitionism, and who was not only a depressive, but perhaps physically disabled.

In other words, he was a man as wounded and yet as persistent as the Union he saved, a man defined by the lives lost as much as the future maintained; as much by the rage that he unleashed in the Civil War as the liberties he secured. He reminds me of the unfathomable sorrow of genuine leadership, of how the truly great feel the weight of the expectations placed on them. Taylor Branch, a historian of the Civil Rights Movement, has said that when the body of Martin Luther King's 39-year-old body was autopsied, they found that his heart was as old and scarred as that of a 60-year-old man. All that stress and anxiety: MLK literally was dying for his country, even before he was shot. I imagine the 56-year-old Lincoln's heart was in not much better shape when he was shot. You can see the country's sorrows etched on his face and sculpted in his death mask. Contrast it with this face, and consider how much weight this man is carrying for the nation he leads.