This year is rich with historical milestones. The U.S. has elected its first African American president, which is significant, to say the least. Next year we observe the 200th anniversary of Abraham Lincoln’s birth in Kentucky in 1809, and this year marks the 150th anniversary of the Lincoln-Douglas debates during the Illinois Senate race.

President-elect Obama has quoted or paraphrased Lincoln a number of times. So let us compare and contrast the two leaders. There are some surprisingly similarities in their backgrounds.

Both lost parents at an early age–Lincoln his mother, and Obama his father–and both were raised by single parents for a time. Both had parents who were restless souls and moved around a lot–Lincoln’s father to Indiana and then to Ohio, and Obama’s mother literally all over the planet. Both rose from humble backgrounds to join the legal profession–although Lincoln, in the custom of the time, simply trained with an established lawyer, while Obama graduated from one of the best law schools in the country. Both have shown that they are gifted writers. Both have advocated the values of the Enlightenment, the pursuit of reason, and the use of the intellect to solve political problems.

Lincoln did not always transcend the values of his time, however. He was against interracial marriage and said so during the debates with Douglas. He advocated “colonization,” that is, the voluntary exile of the black population, which most people rejected as deeply inhumane and hopelessly impractical.

But Lincoln had a flexibility and a capacity for growth, and these qualities were evident during his presidency. Obama has this and more. He seems to have a stable, even temperament and does not appear to suffer from depression as Lincoln did.

For all these reasons, I think Lincoln would be proud of the choice made by the American people this November. He identified with working people from ordinary circumstances, and he thought the United States the most egalitarian society in the world, although he understood that the country does not always live up to its noble principles. Obama’s election brings us closer to fulfilling the ideals Lincoln articulated: a government of the people, by the people, and for the people.

Joan E. Cashin received her doctorate from Harvard University, and she is an associate professor of American history at Ohio State University.  She is the author of A Family Venture: Men and Women on the Southern Frontier (1991) and First Lady of the Confederacy: Varina Davis’s Civil War (2006) and the editor of Our Common Affairs: Texts from Women in the Old South (1996) and The War Was You and Me: Civilians in the American Civil War (2002).  She is currently working on a book on the civilian population in the South during the Civil War.