Lincoln's Bicentennial comes at a magical moment in American life, or rather it would be magical, if we were not so cynical, over-stimulated, partisan and distracted.

Precisely 200 years after the birth of the man who freed the slaves, the United States inaugurates its first African-American president. He, too, is a relatively obscure Illinois politician who burst upon the national scene - as if out of nowhere - at a time of national crisis.

Barack Obama self-consciously launched his campaign in Springfield, Ill., back in 2007 and, in a moving tribute to his illustrious predecessor, last month he retraced Lincoln's pre-inaugural journey from Springfield to the national capital by way of a special historic train.

The only difference is that in 1861 president-elect Lincoln had to slip into Washington, D.C., quietly, almost clandestinely, because of assassination threats. Obama, in spite of his carefully cultivated detachment, entered the national capital like a Caesar in triumph.

Beware of hubris.

President Obama took the oath of office on Abraham Lincoln's Bible. He has invited some of his political rivals to join his administration, principally his "William H. Seward," Hillary Rodham Clinton. Thanks to this and other parallels, Doris Kearns Goodwin's "Team of Rivals" has become one of the most talked about books of our time.

All of this is fascinating - and deeply moving if you let it get inside your perimeter fence of skepticism. At the beginning of his tenure as president, Obama has done an exceedingly bold and risky thing. By invoking the sainted Lincoln so often in so many ways, he has invited comparison with the man widely regarded as America's greatest president.

This is bound to rub some people the wrong way. If I were the president-elect, I'd be invoking Millard Fillmore and Gerald Ford! The next four years will be among the most interesting in American history. I admit to being as skeptical as I am hopeful, as fascinated as I am anxious.

Lincoln belongs to the very small club of presidents who grew in office. In his first inaugural address, the hypersensitive Thomas Jefferson correctly predicted that "it will rarely fall to the lot of imperfect man to retire from this station with the reputation and the favor which bring him into it."

Jefferson himself was diminished by the presidency. In response to the victimization of American shipping by both Britain and France in the Napoleonic War, Jefferson formulated a total economic embargo (nothing in, nothing out) as a peaceful alternative to war. The embargo failed. It cost Jefferson much of his political popularity. He fell into a kind of presidential paralysis during the last year of his second term, and left office in a kind of bewildered Mr. Magoo disarray.

Most presidents decline rather than grow in office. Here's a short contemporary list: Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon, Jimmy Carter, George Bush I, George Bush II, Bill Clinton, even Ronald Reagan (remember Iran-Contra?).

Lincoln entered the presidency with one goal - to hold the union together. He famously said: "If I could save the Union without freeing any slave I would do it, and if I could save it by freeing all the slaves I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing some and leaving others alone I would also do that."

Lincoln was certain that slavery was wrong, but he did not believe the Constitution gave him the authority to interfere in the internal affairs (the sovereignty) of existing states. What he wanted to do was keep slavery out of the new territories of the American West.

At the start of his presidency, Lincoln was not exactly a racist, but he did not advocate the emancipation of enslaved Americans, and he did not support social equality between America's black and white populations.

In other words, at the time of his first inauguration (March 4, 1861) Lincoln was dedicated to a very limited goal and he embodied what we would regard as a very limited enlightenment on the question of race.

Four years later, in his second inaugural address, without ever calling attention to himself, Lincoln explained how he and the United States had been transformed by what his hero Jefferson called "the course of human events."

If you haven't read Lincoln's second inaugural address recently, I strongly urge you to do so. It is unquestionably the greatest inaugural address in American history, in part because it is one of the shortest (third shortest, in fact, at 701 words). Lincoln could write better even than Thomas Jefferson.

Nobody really wanted the Civil War, says Lincoln, but "the war came." It was more costly than anybody could have predicted. It lasted longer than anybody could have foreseen. And nobody could have ever imagined how violent and unbelievably deadly it would be.

The death toll reached 623,000. The combined death tolls of all subsequent wars in American history, including the two world wars of the 20th century, barely exceed the number of Civil War casualties.

Lincoln's point, in the second inaugural address, is that the tragic magnitude of the war had engulfed the earlier constitutional argument, which now seemed quaint, even trivial, in the face of so much national catastrophe.

The shattering of the American social order and the devastation of the American landscape had changed the terms of the argument. The grief, the gore, and the gravitas of the last four years now imposed a new meaning on what had begun as a sectional conflict. In fact, said Lincoln, the meaning of the war was now no longer in human hands, but in God's.

In the harrowing crucible of office, Lincoln had grown to understand that the Civil War was not finally about states' rights and the Constitution, but about slavery. He grew to understand that America literally could not go on unless and until slavery were eliminated in the land where "all men are born equal," once and for all.

Then Lincoln uttered the darkest words of his life, the darkest words of American history: "If God wills that it (the war) continue, until all the wealth piled up by the bondman's 250 years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash, shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said 3,000 years ago, so still it must be said, 'the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.'"

In the inaugural crowd that day, while Lincoln spoke these unbearably powerful and painful words, stood a 26-year-old actor, a bitter and unreconstructed Confederate. His name was John Wilkes Booth. One month and 11 days later, he killed the man who had the audacity to read the war this way.

(Clay Jenkinson is the director of the Dakota Institute. He also is the Theodore Roosevelt Scholar-in-residence at Dickinson State University. He lives in Bismarck. Contact Clay at Jeffysage.) @aol.com