In his 1994 survey of Lincoln in American Memory , Merrill D. Peterson identified five themes which have summed-up the meaning of Abraham Lincoln for Americans since Lincoln's death in 1865. Those five themes hold little surprise—Lincoln as Savior of the Union, Lincoln as the Great Emancipator, Lincoln as the Man of the People, Lincoln as the First American, and Lincoln as the Self-Made Man—and they are mirrored perfectly by the Lincoln who sits in the majestic chair of state in his Memorial (