Lincoln, in common with other members of the Lincoln family, had periods of profound depression alternating with others of boisterous hilarity. Not only did he make others laugh when he was happy; he laughed uproariously at his own jokes. But there were other times when his gloom "dripped from him as he walked". His mind was rocked between mighty emotions.

His ability to tell a story or crack a joke in a time when the emotional strain grew tense was evidence of a high degree of normality. It enabled Lincoln to accomplish an adjustment between emotion and sound logic. "I laugh because I must not cry; that’s all, that’s all", he said.

The character of Abraham Lincoln combined in marked degree, humility and self-confidence. He felt his own limitations and acknowledged them with sincerity and sometimes with sorrow. On the other hand, he was strangely and profoundly conscious of his power. Lincoln was self-assertive to the point of arrogance. When Lincoln worked to advantage, it was always in a position in which he could be the leader. He was never so constituted as to follow other men’s lead. The people who knew him thought of him as a man of towering ambition and inordinate self-assertion. It was this quality in Lincoln that combined with his modesty and made him capable of leadership.

The tests of greatness in politics are not immediate and indisputable. Lincoln was denounced in his own day in terms, which were bitter, cruel, and unjust. But he was able to hold men in working relationships and to accomplish his purposes and secure permanent results. He combined vision with practical sagacity. He was subtle and at times stubborn. He was a man of strange and contradictory qualities.

Lincoln was a shrewd man, but a man unflinchingly honest. He knew how political situations were controlled, and he adopted himself to the political life of his generation. But he struggled on with poverty year after year. When he might have made his politics a basis for prosperity, he still remained poor and in debt.

He was a man of many moods and many sides but never revealed himself entirely to any one man, and therefore to a certain extent remain enveloped in doubt. Even those who were with him through long years of hard study and under constantly varying circumstances hardly say they knew him through and through.

"Now he belongs to the ages", Stanton is supposed to have said as Lincoln took his last breath. Many thought of Lincoln as a martyr. The assassination had occurred on Good Friday, and on the following Sunday, memorable as "Black Easter", hundreds of speakers found a sermon in the event. The posthumous spread of his reputation was influenced by the timing and circumstances of his death, which won for him a kind of sainthood.