According to tradition, the Indian warrior was then about to take one of Captain Abraham’s young sons captive. For Meacham, Lincoln is above all “an example of how even the most imperfect of people, leading the most imperfect of peoples,” can bend the arc of the universe toward justice.

Lincoln would come to see democracy as a work in progress, a process in which reason took its chances against prejudice and passion. God, who said, ‘Let light shine out of darkness,’ made his light shine in our hearts to give us the light of the knowledge of God’s glory displayed in the face of Christ” (2 Corinthians 4:6). This book tells the story of Lincoln from his birth on the Kentucky frontier in 1809 to his leadership during the Civil War to his tragic assassination at Ford’s Theater on Good Friday 1865: his rise, his self-education through reading, his loves, his bouts of depression, his political failures, his deepening faith, and his persistent conviction that slavery must end. Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published. Written with wisdom and grace, his story of Lincoln's complex moral journey to Emancipation mirrors America's long quest to live up to its founding ideals.

Pulitzer winner Meacham more than justifies yet another Lincoln biography in this nuanced and captivating look at the president's 'struggle to do right as he defined it within the political universe he and his country inhabited'.

Another son, Mordecai, “jumped over the fence—ran to the fort” and shot the Indian at a distance of about 160 paces.

Stories of Lincoln's youth come straight from William Herndon's telling and are recounted without caveats or question.

Hearing a defense lawyer make a powerful case for his client in a murder trial, Lincoln later remarked that his “soul would have been satisfied” if he could have made as good a speech as that. He will help keep our feet from rushing toward sin as well as He will keep our hearts focused on Him. As a child and a youth, living in poverty, embarrassed by stories of promiscuity in his mother’s family, and facing a life of spirit-sapping labor and drudgery, Lincoln likely sought solace in the belief that he was a son of forebears who had transcended their time and place.

Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition.

Though he’d lost his Senate race in Illinois against Stephen Douglas, the Republican political world had taken note of him. While there are countless books on Lincoln, one of the most studied and written-about figures in history, Meacham's latest will undoubtedly become one of the most widely read and consulted. One story in local circles was that Nancy Hanks had been impregnated by a man named Abraham Enlow (also sometimes spelled “Enloe”) before her marriage to Thomas Lincoln and that Abraham Lincoln was Enlow’s natural son.I will say … that I am not, nor ever have been in favor of bringing about in any way the social and political equality of the white and black races. Following familial pattern, Captain Abraham soon pressed on—in his case, leaving his father’s orbit in the Shenandoah for the Kentucky wilderness in 1780.