Two hundred years ago on the Kentucky frontier was born a man few people today know anything about. He eventually became the most reviled politician in his time, a man who was known to ridicule other men in public, who put on demonstrations of physical strength to impress those he was with, and who once belittled a woman as “too full of fat … Nothing could have commenced at birth and reached her present bulk in less than thirty-five or forty years.” He was a shrewd tactician, a tireless organizer, the consummate partisan politician. Once in a position to approve 1,900 federal appointments, he made sure 1,500 of them went to loyal party men.

Also born at that time was a man unshakable in his belief that all men were created equal and free. He believed that the United States was the only place on earth that people could live that way, and that the country was therefore worth preserving. He was incorruptibly honest and deeply compassionate, and he courageously navigated the country through its most lethal peril, the Civil War. In four years he brought government of, by and for the people back from the brink of suicide, destroyed the institution of slavery in America, and set the stage for the country to heal from the butchery that accompanied its destruction. He willingly undertook, and prevailed in, a battle he knew would “nobly save, or meanly lose, the last best hope on earth.”

The second man, of course, was Abraham Lincoln. So was the first.

Much of the character etched into the somber face peering back at us from those grainy black and white photographs is the product of a rich back-story few people know. For example, author William Lee Miller’s 2002 book “Lincoln’s Virtues, An Ethical Biography” explains how the man known best for embracing all humanity created himself by embracing very little of the life that surrounded him:

“In a society of hunters, Lincoln did not hunt. Where many men shot rifles, Lincoln did not shoot; among fishermen, Lincoln did not fish; among many who were cruel to animals, Lincoln was kind; surrounded by farmers, Lincoln fled from farming; with a father who was a carpenter, Lincoln did not take up carpentry …

“In a world in which men smoked and chewed, Lincoln never used tobacco; in a rough, profane world, Lincoln did not swear; in a social world in which fighting was a regular male activity, Lincoln became a peacemaker; in a hard-drinking society, Lincoln did not drink; when a temperance movement condemned all drinking, Lincoln the non-drinker did not join it …

“In a southern setting soft on slavery, Lincoln always opposed it; in a white world with strong racial antipathies, Lincoln was generous to blacks; in an environment indifferent to education, Lincoln cared about it intensely; in a family active in a church, Lincoln abstained …

“Young Lincoln did not, if he could help it, hunt, fish, swear, fight, farm, perform manual tasks, despise Indians as many around him did, vote as his neighbors did, join the church as his family did, believe what his neighbors did; what he did do, when he could, was read.”

The iconic Lincoln most people are familiar with, however, is generally free from such analysis and lacks most of its historical context. That’s OK, though, because there’s something to be said for the symbolic figure of Lincoln, shorn of its back-story, serving as the purified standard for our great national ethos. In revering Lincoln’s qualities of compassion, honesty, fairness and dedication to freedom and equality, we thereby declare that those virtues are worthy of reverence, and the image with the penetrating eyes, crooked necktie and tousled hair becomes simply the vessel they are borne in so that we might easily keep them with us.

Happy 200th birthday, Abraham (he did not like the nickname “Abe”) Lincoln. Thanks for giving the spirit of America something to look like, and for continuing to remind us of what we, as a nation, hold dear.