Radical Lincoln: Inside the Mind of America's Most Fascinating President

By K. M. Kostyal

Lincoln, the 16th President of the United States, held a nation together during a brutal Civil War and changed the course of history by ending slavery. He has more books written about him than any other President of the United States but what do we really know about the "man" himself? There are a handful of facts: he was from the frontier, was raised in a poor farmer family, had a passion for learning, was quiet, and a skeptic. Millions of words have been spilled over the details of his life. But who was the real Lincoln?

In this daring ebook short, K.M. Kostyal uses the facts of Lincoln's early life to build a psychological profile of the man who would change the course of history. She examines his early life to understand how this bright frontier lawyer would come to lead a nation, noting especially the dramatic influence of Lincoln's hard-driving father and his brilliant, political, and often misunderstood wife Mary in challenging him to reach for the highest office in the United States. She further looks at just how such a brilliant political mind was able to maintain his connection to simple country folk, and how that connection has amplified over the decades so that the 'cult of Lincoln' that only grows larger with each passing year.

Bringing fresh insights and a brilliant grasp of history to one of history's most enigmatic characters, Kostyal paints a compulsively readable portrait that will be a popular read for years to come.

• Language: English
• Publisher: National Geographic
• Release date: Nov 6, 2012
• ISBN: 9781426210051

Book preview

Author

Introduction

There are scholars, hundreds of them over the last century and a half, who have spent their lives pondering Abraham Lincoln. Yet few, if any, have felt they grasped the full measure of the man.

Without question, Lincoln belongs, as his colleague proclaimed at his death, to the ages. But in life, Lincoln was a shut-mouthed man whose true character remained out of reach, even to his closest friends. He could be a folksy charmer who reveled in telling an off-color tale, or the inspired genius who conceived the Gettysburg Address. And he was a brawler, physically in his youth, politically in his manhood, and spiritually in his Presidency. Had he not persisted in the face of continual military defeat and a rancorous clamor to end the war, the United States would have been ripped in two.

This book begins at the beginning, with Lincoln’s tough early years and the influences that shaped his young mind then, and it follows him through his middle years, when that very mind began, in some ways, to influence a nation.

Lincoln had learned early in life not to yield to the burdens of convention, the expectations of others. If he had yielded, he would no doubt have ended his days the hardscrabble farmer his father had been. But from the earliest memories of Abe, his friends and relatives describe a boy whose independence of mind could be called radical. Lincoln thought, and did it well, and the kind of thinking he did moved him into realms far beyond the frontier culture of his boyhood. In a world of hunters, he gave up hunting and even wrote a childhood composition championing animal rights (this at a time when his family was barely subsisting); in a world of overt religiosity, he was a skeptic and deist; in a roughhewn male milieu, he didn’t smoke, chew, cuss, gamble, or drink; and in a family where his father abhorred his bookishness, he was a Constant and … Stubborn reader.

As he pondered and considered and weighed what he read, young Abraham arrived at his own conclusions about the world. Those conclusions were often a vast departure from those of his friends and colleagues, but they held the merit of a high logic and what one scholar has called a purposive mind.

Later in life, Lincoln used his power of purposive thinking to give voice to the great dissonance eating at America’s historic experiment in democracy: that if slavery is not wrong, nothing is wrong. When war resulted from his simple logic, he gave the briefest and most exact summation of all that was at risk—the very idea of a nation conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal. That idea had been the radical proposition of a group of rebels fomenting revolution four score and seven years before