Abraham Lincoln, 2nd Edition: Redeemer President

By Allen C. Guelzo

The story of Abraham Lincoln’s faith and intellectual life—updated and revised with a new preface—from the three-time winner of the Lincoln Prize and best-selling Civil War–era historian Allen Guelzo. 

Allen Guelzo’s peerless account of America’s most celebrated president explores the role of ideas in Lincoln’s life, treating him as a serious thinker deeply involved in the nineteenth-century debates over politics, religion, and culture. Through masterful and original scholarly work, Guelzo relates the outward events of Lincoln’s life to his inner spiritual struggles and sets them both against the intellectual backdrop of his age. The sixteenth president emerges as a creative yet profoundly paradoxical man—possessed of deep moral and religious character yet without adherence to organized religion.

Since its original publication in 1999, Abraham Lincoln: Redeemer President has garnered numerous accolades, not least the prestigious Lincoln Prize. After writing several other acclaimed studies of Lincoln and other aspects of Civil War–era history, Guelzo returns to update this important early work for a second edition. A new preface addresses the developments in Lincoln scholarship in the years since the book’s original publication and offers Guelzo’s fascinating retrospective look at the unusual path he took to becoming a Lincoln scholar.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Eerdmans
• Release date: Nov 8, 2022
• ISBN: 9781467465229

Allen C. Guelzo

Allen C. Guelzo is the Henry R. Luce Professor of the Civil War Era at Gettysburg College, where he also directs the Civil War Era Studies Program and The Gettysburg Semester. He is the author of Abraham Lincoln: Redeemer President (1999) and Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation: The End of Slavery in America (2004), both of which won the Lincoln Prize. He has written essays and reviews for The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, Time, the Journal of American History, and many other publications.

Book preview

1

THE AMERICAN SYSTEM

THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION was a revolt against restraint. And one of the first restraints to collapse was the one that had been imposed by British imperial authorities, in the decade before the Revolution, on new colonial settlements beyond the Appalachian Mountains. Once the stiff hand of British confinement was removed, curious American adventurers began pushing through the mountain gaps to spill out into the vast Ohio River valley, unlicensed land companies sprang up to sell title to tracts of land they had hardly bothered to investigate themselves, and, in 1780, a Shenandoah Valley farmer named Abraham Lincoln sold off the 210 acres of valley farmland he owned in Virginia and bought 1,200 new acres in the wilderness of what was already known as Kentucky.

The Lincoln family had actually been on the move ever since the first of the Lincolns arrived in Hingham, Massachusetts, in the 1630s, as part of the out-migration of disaffected Puritans fleeing an English church and an English government they had lost all hope of purifying. One of these Lincolns, Samuel, set up as a weaver in Hingham and died there in 1690. One of his sons, Mordecai, promptly began moving again, first to Hull, then to Cohasset; and then his sons, Abraham and another Mordecai, left New England entirely for northern New Jersey in the 1720s and Berks County in eastern Pennsylvania in 1730. This second Mordecai died prematurely in 1735, leaving land amounting to over a thousand acres in both New Jersey and Pennsylvania to be divided among his four sons, John Lincoln (from a first marriage in New Jersey), Thomas, and the by-now-predictable Mordecai and Abraham. As the oldest son, John Lincoln had been singled out in his father’s will to inherit the family’s 300-acre tract in New Jersey. But the Lincolns seem to have had a notorious reluctance to backtrack from ground they had already covered, and so John Lincoln remained in Pennsylvania, and then in 1758 followed a new stream of Pennsylvania emigrants south to Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley, where he bought a 600-acre tract north of Harrisonburg, in the valley’s center.

For all their rootlessness, the Lincoln clan had not done badly. The Lincolns who were left behind in Hingham prospered, and one of them, Levi Lincoln (a distant cousin of Virginia John), helped write Massachusetts’s revolutionary constitution and served as Thomas Jefferson’s attorney general. John Lincoln’s youngest brother, Abraham, married into the family of Daniel Boone, and John’s father had actually held a number of minor public offices before his death. John’s 600 acres in the Shenandoah was land enough to boost him into the ranks of the Virginia squireage. When the Revolution came, one of his sons went into the Revolutionary army as an officer, while another, Abraham, married into one of the premiere families of the county and served in the Virginia militia as an ensign during Lord Dunmore’s War (1774) and as a captain in the 1778 expedition to Ft. Laurens. Still, even 600 acres was not a great deal when it would come to be divided after John’s death among his five sons. And so, even though John deeded a tract of 210 acres to his son Abraham in 1773, this newest Abraham took the first opportunity the Revolution presented, and in 1780 bolted over the Appalachians into Kentucky.

No Lincoln move looked less likely than this one. In the absence of British control during the Revolution, Virginia claimed Kentucky as its western province, and it was from Virginia’s hastily contrived land offices that Abraham Lincoln bought his Kentucky domain. Virginia was still fighting the Revolution, and so Abraham Lincoln entered into what was, for the most part, an almost uncleared forest where many of the main routes of travel were controlled by British-allied Indians. It was a raiding party of one of these Indian tribes which caught Abraham in the open in 1786 while he was clearing ground with his three sons, and killed him. They might have killed the boys, too, and it appears that one of the raiders picked up the youngest, eight-year-old Thomas, to carry him off as a captive. But the oldest, Mordecai, snatched up a rifle and shot the raider dead, leaving his dazed younger brother miraculously safe.

The death of Abraham Lincoln was, remarkably, the first violent blow the Lincolns had received in their long march from Massachusetts. Its greatest weight was felt by young Thomas, since his father had died without a will, and control of the family’s property seems to have fallen to his oldest brother Mordecai. I have often said that Uncle Mord ran off with all the talents of the family, his presidential nephew said ruefully, and Mordecai Lincoln was often admired in later years as a man of great good Common sense and Entitled to genius. But Mordecai was evidently not quite that selfish with either the talents or the family property. Mordecai Lincoln was quite a story-teller … and, to the last degree charitable and benevolent. Although Thomas Lincoln left for Tennessee to work as a wandering laboring boy for an uncle in 1798 and was then apprenticed as a cabinetmaker and carpenter in Elizabethtown, Kentucky, he came up with enough money in 1803 to buy 238 acres of land just north of Elizabethtown on Mill Creek and two forty-dollar lots in Elizabethtown. It is likely that the money came from his older brother.

Three years later, at age twenty-six, Thomas Lincoln married Nancy Hanks, a relative (possibly a niece) of the Elizabethtown carpenter from whom he had learned his trade. They lived briefly in Elizabethtown, where their first child, Sarah, was born in February 1807, and then in 1808, they moved to a 300-acre farm on Nolin Creek, in Hardin County, Kentucky. There, on February 12, 1809, yet another Lincoln was born to the name of Abraham.

ABRAHAM LINCOLN REMEMBERED NOTHING of the place of his birth. The tillage was meager, and, what was worse, Thomas Lincoln’s title to the property proved embarrassingly defective. To Thomas Lincoln’s surprise, the farm turned out to have a lien against it from an earlier owner, and in 1813 that owner sued the subsequent owners (including Thomas Lincoln) for recovery of the property. A year later, Lincoln was forced to sell his other property on Mill Creek at a loss because, once again, there were problems with the title. Neither of these losses was entirely Thomas Lincoln’s fault. Having been first settled under Virginia law, Kentucky land boundaries were laid out under the old English system of metes and bounds, which reckoned boundaries from prominent landmarks and physical features. But in Kentucky, where an uncleared forest had yet to be leveled and where careful mapping of the ground was still unfinished, what was a prominent physical feature one day might disappear by the next. In the case of the Mill Creek property, the original survey line would not close (would not create a continuous boundary), and so Thomas Lincoln lost 38 acres and a good deal of money.

Giving up on both the Nolin Creek and Mill Creek farms, Thomas Lincoln purchased a new farm of only 30 acres on Knob Creek, still in Hardin County. This farm was the stuff of Abraham Lincoln’s earliest recollection, although what he remembered in 1864 was not particularly encouraging: it lay in a valley surrounded by high hills and deep gorges where flash floods coming down through the gorges washed ground, corn, pumpkin seeds and all clear off the field. It could not have been much sunnier for Thomas or Nancy Lincoln, either. A third child was born to them there, named Thomas, but the infant did not live three days. And then, in September 1815, Kentucky’s unstable land titles struck again. Mr. Thomas Lincoln, tenant in possession, was sued by the heirs of a wealthy land speculator, Thomas Middleton, whose 10,000-acre tract was suddenly discovered to include the Lincolns’ 30 acres.

It would take until 1818 for this suit to be resolved, and Lincoln would actually win this one. But even before that point, Thomas Lincoln had decided he was sick of the uncertainties of Kentucky land titles, and uprooted his family yet again, this time to cross the Ohio River into the Indiana Territory. Crossing the Ohio brought the Lincolns into what amounted to a new world. The Indiana Territory had been established, not by state authorities in Virginia, but under the aegis of the new national government as part of the great land ordinances of 1785 and 1787. Starting in Ohio and working westward by 1804 to Illinois, the federal government had undertaken a comprehensive land survey, which divided the geography of the Northwest into neat one-square-mile sections of 640 acres, with the price of these government lands pegged by the federal Land Law of 1800 at two dollars an acre.

Because Congress regarded land sales as a revenue device, initial sales were limited to the 640-acre sections, which meant that only the wealthiest speculators could hope to buy them. But in 1804 public pressure forced Congress gradually to reduce the minimum acreage to quarter-sections of 160 acres, and then to 80 acres. Even then, cashless squatters often took up occupation on their own, and it proved so difficult to evict them that Congress finally granted pre-emption to longtime squatters who had improved their lands and could pay the original Congress price.

The genius of the system from the point of view of settlers like Thomas Lincoln was that the federal government guaranteed both clean surveys and indisputable title. What was more, territorial governor William Henry Harrison had successfully cleared Indiana of the dangerous Tecumseh Indian confederation in 1811, and the great chief Tecumseh himself had been killed in Canada at the battle of the Thames in 1813. Neither the Indians who had killed his father nor the speculators who had subverted his titles need threaten Thomas Lincoln in Indiana, and so in December 1816—just as Indiana was being admitted as a full-fledged state in the Federal Union—Thomas Lincoln crossed over into southern Indiana and led his family to a site Thomas had selected on Little Pigeon Creek, in what was then Perry County, near what became the crossroads hamlet of Gentryville. This contry at that time was a perfect wilderness with out roads or bridges, remembered one neighbor of the Lincolns, so that Thomas Lincoln and his little family had to cut a road throu heavy forrests of timber. Within a year he had made his first payment of sixteen dollars on a quarter-section of 160 acres of land.

But even in Indiana, Thomas Lincoln could not find shelter from one more dreadful reckoning. In the autumn of 1817, Nancy Lincoln’s aunt and uncle, Elizabeth and Thomas Sparrow, arrived on Pigeon Creek, trailing Nancy’s illegitimate cousin, Dennis Hanks, with them. Thomas Lincoln hospitably put them up in a small cabin on his property until spring came when they could set about clearing their own land. But the following summer, southern Indiana broke out with what was known simply as the milk sickness, which the settlers understood dimly as a poison that contaminated cows’ milk. Actually, it came from the poisonous white snakeroot plant, which cows often grazed upon; but it was passed through the cows’ milk to whoever drank it, and the results were a slow paralysis, nausea, and death. The Sparrows came down with the milk sickness first, and both died of it; Nancy Lincoln, who may have drunk the Sparrows’ cows’ milk while nursing them in their death throes, collapsed and then died on October 5, 1818. Thomas Lincoln buried her less than a mile from their cabin, leaving him with two motherless children of his own and the now-twice-abandoned Dennis Hanks.

There seems to have been a streak of dogged persistence in Thomas Lincoln, because rather than reeling under these setbacks, Lincoln waited only until the next year’s crop was in before he returned to Kentucky and proposed marriage to Sarah Bush Johnston, the widow of Daniel Johnston, another Hardin County farmer who had died in 1816. Thomas Lincoln was not a man of subtleties: he briskly proposed marriage right off, and after paying several of Sally Johnston’s debts, married her before a local Methodist minister on December 2, 1819. He then crated up Sally’s belongings—a bureau, a table, a clothes chest, a spinning wheel, 2 Beds & Bedding & other articles—and along with her three Johnston children (Elizabeth, John, and Matilda), brought her back over the Ohio River and the rutted roads that led to Little Pigeon Creek.

The arrival of Sarah Lincoln was a watershed in young Abraham Lincoln’s life. Mr. Lincoln had erected a good log cabin, tolerably comfortable, but subsistence agriculture was deeply committed to a rigidly patriarchal division of labor between men and women, and with the death of his wife, Thomas Lincoln evidently had no idea of how to fill the vacuum of womens work left by Nancy Hanks. Sally Bush Lincoln was astonished to find that there was no floor or Door to the House of her Husband, no furniture of any Kind, no Beds or Bedding, while the Lincoln children were Sufring greatly for clothes, young Abraham and Dennis Hanks being Dressed mostly in Buck Skins. She at once had a floor Laid in the House, Doors & Windows put in, and Dressed the children up out of the Large supply she had brought with her.

But more than simply making things snug and comfortable, Sally Bush Lincoln Knew exactly how to Manage children, and brought genuine maternal affection into young Abraham’s life. Lincoln, almost from the first, reciprocated her kindness with an affection he never extended to another woman. She had been his best friend in the world, he later told one of the Johnston children. No man could have loved a mother more than he loved her. After his father’s death, Abraham stepped in to protect her financial interests from his opportunistic step relatives, and his last personal visit before leaving Illinois forever in 1861 would be to Sarah Bush Lincoln. Abe was a good boy, she told William Henry Herndon after Lincoln’s death, and I can say what scarcely one woman—a mother—can say in a thousand: Abe never gave me a cross word or look, and never refused, in fact or appearance, to do anything I requested him…. His mind and mine—what little I had—seemed to run together.

This inverts the Grimm-fairy-tale version of what stepmother relationships were expected to be, but it parallels an even greater inversion of the relationship that ought to have prevailed between Abraham and his father, Thomas. Some of this was clearly Thomas’s fault. Thos. Lincoln never showed by his actions that he thought much of his son Abraham when a Boy, recalled one Lincoln relative in 1865. He treated him rather unkindly than otherwise, always appeared to think much more of his stepson John D. Johnston than he did of his own son, Abraham. Thickset and low-slung, Thomas was touchy and uncomfortable ruling over a Boy who was already showing signs of uncommon natural Talents, and he treated him with habitual cruelty. Thomas liked to think of himself as a jokester, but neighbors remembered how easily irritated—and sometimes physically abusive—Thomas became when his son began displaying the same gift for mimicry, and trying it out in public. When strangers would ride along & up to his fathers fence, recalled Dennis Hanks, Abe always, through pride & to tease his father, would be sure to ask the stranger the first question. Enraged by this rude and forward challenge to his own status as patriarch of the family, Thomas would sometimes knock him a rod or lay on with a whip.

This eventually became more than a simple clash of personalities. Although Thomas Lincoln was hardly the ne’er-do-well or poor white trash that Lincoln’s first biographers painted the father as being in order to greater magnify his son’s achievements, what is true is that he was a classic subsistence farmer who was, on the model of Jefferson’s ideal husbandman, a piddler who was ambitious mostly to produce by himself no more than what his household required. One of his neighbors remarked simply that Thomas Lincoln "was satisfied to live in the good old fashioned way; his shack kept out the rain; there was plenty of wood to burn … the old ways were good enough for him. He was happy—lived Easy—& contented and had but few wants and Supplied these … Easily. The Lincoln farm was well Stocked with Hogs, Horses & cattle, and once Sally Bush Lincoln had taken charge of the homestead, Thomas raised a fine crop of Wheat, corn & vegetables. The Lincolns even taned there own Leather, and young Dennis Hanks made them Shoes out of their rude Leather. Even the clothing was all made at home … from cotton & Flax of there own raising. From a small store in Gentryville they obtained many necessaries in life, but even then the Legal tender was really only barter—Hogs and Venison hams … and Coon skins all so. Overall, Thomas Lincoln Jest Raised a Nuf for his own use and Did Not Send any produce to any other place Mor than Bought his Shugar and Coffee and Such Like."

Thomas Lincoln saw no reason why his son would not follow him in these classic agrarian patterns. I was raised to farm work, Lincoln remembered in 1859, which meant (as he explained to John Locke Scripps a year later) that A. though very young … had an axe put into his hands at once; and from that till within his twentythird year, he was almost constantly handling that most useful instrument—less, of course, in plowing and harvesting seasons. It also meant that as Lincoln grew into adolescence, Thomas loaned his son out to neighboring farmers as part of the incessant borrowing-and-swapping of rural subsistence networks of exchange, and kept for family use whatever goods and kind were offered as barter-style pay for the boy’s labor. At least as early as thirteen, Abraham was cutting and pitching hay, felling and splitting logs for fences and firewood, working at the Ohio River ferries, and mostly for pay … in Store goods.

Instead of inuring the boy to the traditional patterns of Jeffersonian yeoman agriculture, the experience only embittered young Abraham. Lincoln often remarked in later years that his father taught him to work but never learned him to love it—or at least not the kind of work his father intended for him. What he did cherish was a memory of a very different sort of work, of two men hurrying down to the ferry landing on the Ohio River where Lincoln kept a small cock-boat, dragooning him into rowing them out mid-stream to intercept an oncoming steamboat, and each rewarding him with a silver half-dollar which they threw … on the floor of [his] boat.

Gentleman, you may think it was a very little thing, and in these days it seems to me a trifle; but it was a most important incident in my life. I could scarcely credit that I, a poor boy, had earned a dollar in less than a day…. The world seemed wider and fairer before me.

Abraham Lincoln had met the cash economy.

The tensions he experienced with his father surfaced in other ways as Abraham Lincoln grew toward manhood. The demands of farm work left little time for schooling, and Lincoln never ceased to lament the fact that his own education was defective. He remembered that he and his sister had briefly attended some schools, so called, but he estimated in 1860 that the agregate of all his schooling did not amount to one year (which is echoed by one neighbor’s estimate that Lincoln went to school … about four winters). The blame for this has usually been bestowed upon Thomas Lincoln, whom his son disparagingly claimed never did more in the way of writing than to bunglingly sign his own name, and who had the reputation for being frankly contemptuous of eddication. (Sally Bush Lincoln agreed that Mr. Lincoln could read a little & could scarcely write his name….)

But Lincoln conceded to Leonard Swett in 1853: my father … determined at an early day that I should be well educated, and it is worth noticing that, since neither Kentucky nor Indiana had any publicly funded school systems while the Lincolns lived there, even the A.B.C. schools the Lincoln children attended had to be paid for by subscription, which was a sacrificial proposition for a less-than-wealthy farmer like Thomas Lincoln. And by all accounts, it was not a bad schooling either, to judge by the textbooks: Asa Rhoads’s An American Spelling Book, Designed for the Use of Our Common Schools (1802) and possibly Noah Webster’s The American Spelling Book (1783) for spelling; Nicholas Pike’s A New and Complete System of Arithmetic, Composed for the Use of the Citizens of the United States (1788) for arithmetic; William Grimshaw’s History of the United States (1820), David Ramsay’s Life of George Washington (1807), and the more famous Life of Washington (1800) by Parson Mason Weems for history; The Kentucky Preceptor, Containing a Number of Useful Lessons for Reading and Speaking (1812), The American Speaker (1811), and William Scott’s Lessons in Elocution, or a Selection of Pieces in Prose and Verse (1779) for Speeches & pieces to recite from Shakespeare, Alexander Pope, Milton, William Cowper, and Thomas Gray; along with Americanized reprints (and bowdlerizations) of Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress, Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, The Oriental Moralist (an American version of The Arabian Nights), and even Aesop’s Fables (although apparently No geography—nor grammar).

It was not so much on education itself that the two Lincolns differed as on what purpose education should serve. Thomas Lincoln’s idea of a thorough education, Abraham said, was to have me cipher through the rule of three. And much as he tried as a rule never to aske him to lay down his book, Thomas Lincoln was easily irritated when Abraham began to bestow on reading time that his father might have better wanted to see him spend on hire-out labor, his father having Sometimes to slash him for neglecting his work by reading. For Abraham, however, reading meant a catalyst for Improvement, for self-transformation, for joining the ranks of the revolutionary soldiers on the pages of Parson Weems or of Henry V’s bowmen at Agincourt (from Scott’s Elocution), both of which, he said, fixed themselves on my memory. He was not Energetic Except in one thing, remembered his stepsister, Matilda Johnston, but he was active & persistant in learning—read Everything he Could. Obstinately, he would rather work to obtain books than Store goods, and he was so attatched to reading that eventually his father allowed him to hire himself out in order to get copies of Caleb Bingham’s The American Preceptor (1794) and Columbian Orator (1797), which promised to improve youth and Others in the Ornamental and Useful Art of Eloquence.

Nor was it that Lincoln’s education was so bad that it could have easily been so much better, which fueled his later disappointment. Only fifty miles away to the west, Robert Owen opened the experimental colony of New Harmony, where a cadre of a thousand intellectuals, freethinkers, and education reformers—a boatload of knowledge—headed by William Maclure, Charles Lesueur, Marie Fretageot, and Joseph Neef planned to preside over the establishment of a new society of universal charity, benevolence, and kindness. Owen, the quondam industrialist and bankroller of New Harmony, bought the colony’s property from a hermitage of religious recluses in 1825, and then took Washington by storm with his blueprint for an avant-garde community where PRIVATE, OR INDIVIDUAL PROPERTY and ABSURD AND IRRATIONAL SYSTEMS OF RELIGION would be abolished. The project survived for only two years after Owen’s flatboat, the Philanthropist, dumped its collection of professors on the lower Wabash, as New Harmony broke up into the usual old disharmony over who was giving the orders. But the Lincolns could hardly have been ignorant of New Harmony—Thomas Lincoln, in fact, briefly owned a small parcel of land close to New Harmony—and Dennis Hanks years later claimed that Abraham Lincoln had wangled copies of New Harmony’s short-lived newspaper, the New Harmony Gazette, to study.

He certainly developed more in common with New Harmony’s religious skepticism than with his father’s religion; in fact, on no other point did Abraham Lincoln come closer to an outright repudiation of his father than on religion. Thomas and Nancy Lincoln had been members in Kentucky of the Little Mount Separate Baptist Church, a congregation linked to one of a plethora of rigidly predestinarian Calvinist Baptist congregations scattered throughout central Kentucky and Tennessee, and once in Indiana they associated with the Little Pigeon Creek Baptist Church, which was organized in 1816. Although these churches and their county-based associations found enough differences among themselves to split into Separate, Regular, and even Two-Seed-in-the-Spirit factions, they were all (according to James Ross) staunch Predestinarians, and gloried in the doctrine they preached.

Predestination, in this case, meant that long before the morning stars sang together, and the sons of God shouted for joy at the glories of the new creation, the Almighty looked down upon the ages yet unborn, as it were, in review before him, and selected one here and another there to enjoy eternal life and left the rest to the blackness of darkness forever. Hence, the condition of one not elected from the foundation of the world was as changeless and as hopeless as if he were already in the bottomless pit. This also meant, in practical terms, that if an individual were not of the elect, all the preaching in the world would do [him] no good, so far as salvation was concerned, since they believed Christ died for the elect only. Many of the Calvinist Baptist groups had no use for social reform movements, especially temperance and abolition. The Primitive Baptists in particular would, as the Primitive Baptist Gilbert Beebe declared in 1832, support no Mission Boards for converting the heathen, or for evangelizing the world; no Sunday Schools as nurseries to the church; no schools of any kind for teaching theology and divinity, or for preparing young men for the ministry.

The attraction this ultra-predestination had for Calvinist Baptists lay in the confidence it gave someone that, if he were of the elect, neither his wrong doings nor all the powers of darkness could prevent his salvation. James Ross remembered how one of the veteran ministers of the Bethel Association (in central Tennessee) would beam with delight and … say ‘Glorious day for my soul’ whenever another would preach one of their powerful discourses advocating predestination. On the other hand, Ross remembered, there was one dread thought that often brought these old Christians low even unto the dust.

Am I, after all, one of the elect? May I not after all, be mistaken? And if so, then all my hope is gone! The storm-tossed mariner, when his boat goes down, may find a plank or broken spar, and on it may reach the friendly shore; but for him who is not of the elect there is no plank or spar or friendly shore; he must sink in the deep, deep waters. There is ground for believing that by this dread apprehension the reason of many has been dethroned….

Predestination set the threshold of acceptability with God exceptionally high, and for those who could get over it, and be somehow certain that they were of the elect for whom Christ died, it gave the most exalted ideas, and no doubt many of them considered themselves as much superior, in these respects, to the surrounding Christian denominations as did the ancient Jews in comparing themselves with the heathen nations around them. But for those lacking the spiritual athleticism to vault over that bar, it could trigger a killing despair, gloomy apprehensions … that they would ultimately be lost after all their fond hopes to the contrary, and a deep-seated and persistent

Reviews for Abraham Lincoln, 2nd Edition

[twatson79 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Very engaging biography on Lincoln, detailing his philosophy, religiosity, and general thought life. Guelzo does well in showing Lincoln to be a man of deep convictions as well as showing how those convictions morphed over time. At different times in this nation's history since Lincoln, it seems nearly every group has wanted to claim him as their own. Guelzo shows that Lincoln doesn't neatly fit into anyone's box.