In survey after survey of historians and political scientists, Abraham Lincoln consistently ranks at or near the top of the list of the greatest U.S. presidents. He towers over American history and the National Mall in Washington, D.C., where his 19-foot tall marble likeness sits enthroned in a quasi-temple.

Anyone with even a rudimentary knowledge of American history knows Lincoln is famous for two things: preserving the union and emancipating the slaves. Along the way, he also managed to deliver a few of the most memorable speeches in American history. Four score and seven years ago…

Not a bad legacy.

Most people also recognize that Lincoln rose to those lofty heights only after overcoming a series of seemingly insurmountable obstacles, including poverty; the death of his mother, sister, and first love, Ann Rutledge; lack of a formal education; and a series of financial and political setbacks, including defeat in his famous 1858 campaign for the U.S. Senate. Lincoln’s contemporaries and historians who have chronicled his life acknowledge that the prairie lawyer was able to overcome these incredible odds and achieve a monumental legacy because of the tremendous strength of his moral character.

Recently, I completed Team of Rivals, Doris Kearns Goodwin’s Pulitzer-prize winning account of Lincoln’s path to the presidency and the stories of the team that surrounded him during his four years in the White House. Goodwin is a superb writer who does a fantastic job of weaving together the stories of Lincoln and the men who filled his cabinet. In the process, she highlights the extraordinary depth of Lincoln’s character.

I’m no Lincoln expert, but, after completing the book, I am convinced that few men could have kept the United States from falling apart during the tumultuous decade of the 1860s. Indeed, the government did descend into a state of semi-chaos during the tenure of his successor, Andrew Johnson.

Lots of great things could be written about Abraham Lincoln, but I was especially struck by the following qualities and characteristics that seem to me to be the reasons he belongs to an elite class of men.

He was ambitious and eager to learn

You don’t reach the White House without a healthy dose of ambition, and Lincoln certainly wasn’t lacking that important ingredient. From his earliest days, he longed to rise above his humble and hardscrabble beginnings and become a difference-maker.

Lincoln was just 23 years-old when he decided to run for a seat in the Illinois state legislature. During the campaign, he wrote a letter to the people of Sangamon County in which he proclaimed: “Every man is said to have his peculiar ambition. Whether it be true or not, I can say for one that I have no other so great as that of being truly esteemed of my fellow men, by rendering myself worthy of their esteem.”

It was his ambition that preserved Lincoln through some of his darkest hours. During his early years in Springfield, he became severely depressed to the point that he confessed to his closest friend, Joshua Speed, that he was willing to die. The thought that gave him pause, however, was that “he had done nothing to make any human being remember that he had lived.”

Lincoln’s tremendous ambition also motivated him to pursue self-education. As a young man, he moved to the small community of New Salem, Illinois, where he took a series of jobs as a flatboatman, clerk, merchant, postmaster, and surveyor. None of these promised the sort of prosperous future Lincoln envisioned for himself, so, when he wasn’t working, he read and studied a variety of subjects, including English grammar, literature, geometry and trigonometry.

When he was 25, Lincoln decided he wanted to be a lawyer. He couldn’t afford a high-priced legal education from an eastern college, so he borrowed copies of law books from a friend and buried himself in their pages, mastering their concepts and principals. In time, Lincoln moved to Springfield and became a very successful attorney. His legal practice gave him a chance to travel across the region, where he established contacts that eventually would help him capture the 1860 Republican presidential nomination.

After Lincoln became a prominent attorney, a law student asked him for some career advice. “Get the books, and read, and study them,” Lincoln replied. “Always bear in mind that your own resolution to succeed, is more important than any other one thing.”

He was compassionate and tenderhearted

Lincoln longed for greatness, but, at the same time, he showed tremendous care and concern for others. After meeting the president, Union General William Tecumseh Sherman remarked that he was “impressed by his kindly nature, his deep and earnest sympathy with the afflictions of the whole people.” Sherman later said, “Of all the men I ever met, he seemed to possess more of the elements of greatness, combined with goodness, than any other.”

One of Lincoln’s particular delights was in proffering presidential pardons. His willingness to show clemency to the condemned became almost legendary. John Hay, Lincoln’s private secretary, recalled a particular Sunday during the height of the Civil War when he and the president reviewed the results of 100 courts-martial. Many of the cases involved soldiers who had been sentenced to death for acts of cowardice, desertion, or falling asleep while on guard duty. Hay noted that Lincoln “caught at any fact which would justify him in saving the life of a condemned soldier.”

Some military officers worried that Lincoln was too lenient, and that his willingness to pardon the guilty would undermine discipline. But Goodwin writes, “Rather than fearing that he had overused his pardoning power, Lincoln feared he had made too little use of it. He could not bear the sound of gunshot on the days when deserters were executed. Only ‘where meanness or cruelty were shown’ did he exhibit no clemency.”

Even when the death penalty was warranted, Lincoln took no pleasure in its application. Early in 1865, captured former Confederate officer and spy John Yates Beall was scheduled to be executed for his efforts to lead rebel raiding parties from Canada into the area around the Great Lakes. Beall’s sister visited Lincoln and begged for her brother’s life, but Lincoln, acting on the advice of a leading Union general, ordered that the execution proceed as planned. After Beall was dead, Lincoln confessed, “I can’t get the distress out of my mind.”

As the Civil War came to a close, Lincoln determined to show mercy to Southern leaders. Upon learning that a notorious Confederate marauder was attempting to escape to Europe, Secretary of War Edwin Stanton ordered that the man be arrested. Lincoln overruled his secretary, saying, “When you have got an elephant by the hind leg, and he’s trying to run away, it’s best to let him run.”

He was forgiving

Perhaps Lincoln’s most impressive character quality was his willingness to overlook grievances and not hold grudges. Lincoln not only forgave, but was willing to build friendships with those who had wronged him.

One of the most striking illustrations of Lincoln’s graciousness is the story of his first meeting with Edwin Stanton. It was 1855, and Lincoln was in Cincinnati to assist renowned attorney George Harding in defending an Illinois manufacturer from a lawsuit that was making headlines nationwide.

Without notifying Lincoln, Harding dropped him from the team and secured the services of Stanton, a prominent Ohio lawyer. Lincoln showed up in Cincinnati, where he encountered Harding and Stanton on their way to court. After sizing Lincoln up, Stanton told Harding that the Springfield lawyer was a “long armed ape” who did not “know anything and can do you no good.”

For the next week, Stanton and Harding snubbed Lincoln at every turn. Lincoln stayed in town to hear the case, but was so upset at the shabby treatment he received that he told a friend he never wanted to return to Cincinnati.

Six years later, both Lincoln and Stanton were living in the nation’s capital: Lincoln at the White House, and Stanton in a brick mansion, paid for from the profits of his extremely successful legal practice. The Civil War was raging, and Lincoln needed a new man to head up the War Department, which was embroiled in scandal.

Lincoln considered several candidates, but soon realized Stanton was best suited for the job. In making the nomination, Lincoln had to overlook their initial meeting, as well as the fact that Stanton was a vocal critic of the administration. Nonetheless, Lincoln offered his rival an olive branch and the office of secretary of war. (Lincoln previously had made George Harding head of the Patent Office.)

Stanton accepted, and became part of the “team of rivals,” as Goodwin calls Lincoln’s cabinet. Stanton quickly learned to appreciate the president’s many strengths, and the two became close friends. When Lincoln was cut down by an assassin’s bullet, it was Stanton who uttered the immortal words, “Now he belongs to the ages.”

Any man who can forgive like that certainly is a man for the ages.

The lesson of Lincoln

Ironically, most of the men who served in Lincoln’s cabinet had better credentials for the office of the presidency. Before the election of 1860, Lincoln was a little-known lawyer from a sparsely populated western state who had served one term in Congress. His cabinet included men like former Ohio Governor Salmon P. Chase and former New York Senator William H. Seward, both of whom had been the recipients of elite educations. Others, like Stanton and Edward Bates, also had enjoyed careers that could be considered more successful than Lincoln’s.

But it is doubtful that any of the men who surrounded Lincoln had as much character as their chief executive.

Goodwin includes this observation from the writer Leo Tolstoy. “Why was Lincoln so great?” Tolstoy asks. “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.

Our destiny may not include taking up residence at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, but, regardless of where we lay our head at night, we still face challenges that demand strong character. Our families, churches, schools and communities need the leadership of men who possess more than brilliant resumes, charisma or charm: the times demand men of character.

To me, that’s the lesson of Lincoln: in trying times, character counts more than anything else.

"The Peacemakers," an 1868 oil painting by George P.A. Healy, depicts the March 28, 1865, strategy session by the Union high command on the steamer River Queen during the final days of the Civil War.