Barack Obama, with the burden of global hope weighing heavily on his shoulders, is leaning for support and inspiration on another eloquent Illinois lawyer who was sworn in as president at a time of national crisis.

Planning for next week’s inauguration has been painstakingly themed around Abraham Lincoln. Mr Obama is today embarking on a train journey from Philadelphia designed to follow the tracks taken by the man who would become arguably America’s greatest President on his journey to Washington in 1861.

Tomorrow he will join a celebratory rock concert at the Lincoln Memorial and the Bible with which Mr Obama will swear his oath of office on Tuesday is the same one used in the ceremony 148 years ago.

The title of his speech, A New Birth of Freedom, is borrowed from the Gettysburg Address, while the menu for the official banquet afterwards — stewed seafood, pheasant and apple cake — is modelled on the tastes of the 16th US President.

This is not merely an exercise in retro-political branding or evidence that even the supremely self-confident Mr Obama feels the need for some talismanic relics of a political hero. If that were the case it would have been natural for America’s first black President-elect to make more of Monday’s national holiday marking the birthday of Martin Luther King, the slain civil rights leader.

Instead the focus on an earlier victim of assassination shows how much the incoming President uses Lincoln as an inspiration and a guide to help him to navigate the treacherous waters coursing across American politics. Sometimes his efforts to wrap himself in the dead President’s mantle have provoked snorts of derision from critics, who diagnose more than a touch of hubris.

For instance, four years ago, shortly after being elected to state-wide office for the first time, he wrote: “Lincoln’s rise from poverty, his mastery of language and law, his capacity to overcome personal loss and remain determined in the face of repeated defeat — in all this, he reminded me not just of my own struggles, he also reminded me of a larger fundamental element of American life — the enduring beliefs that we can constantly remake ourselves to fit our larger dreams.”

It is the second half of that sentence which, friends say, most accurately describes an analysis of Lincoln’s relevance today that has become woven into his own political credo. He consciously chose to launch his campaign for the presidency two years ago on the steps on the Illinois legislature in Springfield where Lincoln had, in 1858, warned of impending civil war and “a house divided”.

On the night of his election victory in November Mr Obama cited another of Lincoln’s appeals to a turbulent nation. “We are not enemies but friends,” he quoted the former President saying, “though passion may have strained it must not break our bonds of affection.”

Mr Obama has since been using every opportunity to hammer home his message that America stands at a critical but potentially transformative moment in history and must come together to overcome partisan divisions.

“My job is simply to explain as honestly as possible what the circumstances are, what the best ideas are that are out there of meeting those challenges,” he said last week. “If I do that, I feel confident that we’ll come together to solve these problems.”

His inheritance is certainly one of the hardest in recent history with the economy in freefall, unfinished wars abroad and an era of global American hegemony being challenged.

Sometimes it is difficult to discern exactly what Mr Obama wants to do. There have been conflicting signals — progressive, centrist, sometimes even hawkish.

Mr Obama, like Lincoln in 1861, however appears willing to trim the sails of his campaign promises to bring opponents on board. He has sought to re-create Lincoln’s “team of rivals” by appointing the likes of Hillary Clinton and Robert Gates — a Republican — to senior posts in his Cabinet.

There has already been criticism from the Left for ceding too much ground to Republicans by promising substantial tax cuts in return for their support of a vast $800 billion (£545 billion) economic stimulus package.

Similar cries of pain will be heard from liberal ranks if, as expected, he maintains a fiercely pro-Israel foreign policy and an uncompromisingly tough national security stance against the nuclear ambitions of Iran.

Lincoln had intended to use his first inaugural address to challenge the rebel Southern states with the words: “Shall it be Peace or a Sword?” But he abandoned such bellicosity, saying that he had neither power nor inclination to abolish slavery. Instead, he ended his speech with an appeal to the “mystic chords of memory” to unite the country.

It did not work. Abolitionists such as Frederick Douglas accused him of betrayal and civil war began anyway. In his book The Audacity of Hope, Mr Obama defends Lincoln, saying that the attempted bargains with the South were “never a matter of abandoning conviction for expediency” but a recognition of the “terrible price” to be paid for pursuing “absolute truths”.

But 2009 is not 1861. America, far from being on the brink of civil war, has just gone a long way to healing racial division by electing a black President and appears collectively to be willing him to succeed.

Lincoln, by contrast, won only 39 per cent of the vote and had virtually no support in the South. His inaugural address, for all its natural poetry, was heard by just 30,000, with pony- express riders taking more than a week to get copies across the country.

Presidents past and future have always known that their greatest power is to enthuse a nation.

Mr Obama’s speech on Tuesday will be watched by more than a million people in Washington and billions around the world. He has an army of grassroots internet activists ready to wade into battle for him. For all his problems, he is in a better position than Lincoln to follow his convictions — whatever they turn out to be.

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