Finally saw Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter the other day. Once I stopped worrying about the divergence of even the nonsupernatural timeline from actual history, I had plenty of guilty fun. I also came away wondering at the upsurge of interest in our 16th president these past few years.

Every season seems to bring a dozen new Lincoln books. Or maybe more than a dozen: Starting this year, visitors to Ford’s Theatre in Washington have been able to view a 34-foot tower constructed largely of some of the 15,000-odd books published about Lincoln. That’s an average of about 100 books each year since he was assassinated. Even an amateur Lincoln buff such as myself can always find fresh reading material.

The Great Emancipator has long been an attractive subject for filmmakers, and over the years many a great actor, from Henry Fonda to Gregory Peck, from F. Murray Abraham to Sam Waterston, has portrayed him. More recently, in addition to his feats slaying vampires, Lincoln has loomed large in the second films of both the National Treasure and Night at the Muse um franchises. He shows up in the Fight Club and Fallout video games. He will be the subject of a Steven Spielberg epic this fall.

Not every Lincoln appearance in fiction is accurate or even respectful, of course, and few of the many biographies published each year will make the serious buff forget Carl Sandburg or David Herbert Donald. But the way we keep returning to Lincoln suggests a trend, and some explanation is in order. I suspect that our fascination with Lincoln says less about him and his times than it does about us and ours.

Many Americans, looking around at a nation and a world whose problems seem unsolvable, turn toward the past. Our leaders today seem small compared with the heroes of history. There were giants upon the earth in those days, we tell ourselves, even if deep down we know it isn’t true.

History runs over the facts like rushing water, wearing the jagged edges smooth. When today’s politicians invoke the name Lincoln — and they all do, all the time —they mean us to envision the bearded Father Abraham who saved the Union, freed the slaves, and broods over Washington from his intimidating Memorial. They do not conjure the canny politician whose handpicked managers printed thousands of counterfeit tickets to the Republican convention that nominated him for president in 1860, allowing them to fill the seats with “Lincoln men”; or the single-minded commander in chief who, during the Civil War, allowed his secretary of State to shutter opposition newspapers and throw journalists in prison for impeding the war effort.

In any moment of democratic life, we do — or we should — value the means more than the ends. This bias preserves our liberty. Thus it is not enough, or shouldn’t be enough, that the government pursue the right goal. It must also follow a proper method in pursuing its goal. Otherwise we might as well appoint a dictator with whose views we agree, and let it go at that.

This inchoate sense of the importance of means is part of why we pay so much attention to the scandals of a given moment, rather than taking a longer view. Scandals, as a rule, involve abuse of means, not ends.

Viewing events through the lens of history, however, we tend to magnify the ends, not the means. What we see are Lincoln’s acts — winning the Civil War, issuing the Emancipation Proclamation, demanding a constitutional amendment to abolish slavery — and not the means that he might have used to attain them.