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Informationen zum Autor Jon Meacham is a Pulitzer Prize–winning biographer. The Rogers Chair in the American Presidency at Vanderbilt University, he is the author of the New York Times bestsellers His Truth Is Marching On: John Lewis and the Power of Hope, Destiny and Power: The American Odyssey of George Herbert Walker Bush, Thomas Jefferson: The Art of Power, American Lion: Andrew Jackson in the White House, American Gospel, and Franklin and Winston . A fellow of the Society of American Historians, Meacham lives in Nashville. Klappentext "At once familiar and elusive, Lincoln tends to be seen in popular minds as the greatest of American presidents--a remote icon--or as a politician driven more by calculation than by conviction. This ... portrait gives us a very human Lincoln--an imperfect man whose moral antislavery commitment was essential to the story of justice in America. Here is the Lincoln who, as a boy, was steeped in the sermons of emancipation by Baptist preachers; who insisted that slavery was a moral evil; and who sought, as he put it, to do right as God gave him light to see the right. 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"-- Leseprobe Chapter One My Mind and Memory “The short and simple annals of the poor.” That’s my life, and that’s all you or anyone else can make out of it. —Abraham Lincoln, writing in 1860 Equal rights for all men: Emancipation! —The Reverend Adam Shoemaker, an influential Baptist in the world of Lincoln’s youth The roads were rough, the conversation unusual. In about his fortieth year, around 1850, Abraham Lincoln folded his long, angular frame into a one-horse buggy in Springfield, Illinois, for the nineteen-mile trip from the capital city to the courthouse in Petersburg, the seat of neighboring Menard County. He was riding with his law partner William Herndon, who recalled that the case they were to try “was one in which we were likely?.?.?.??to touch upon the subject of hereditary traits.” Pondering the subject, Lincoln spoke of his mother, the late Nancy Hanks Lincoln. It was a striking, introspective, and candid moment. “He said?.?.?.??that she was the illegitimate daughter of Lucey Hanks and a well-bred Virginia farmer or planter,” Herndon recalled, “and he argued that from this last source”—the Virginia grandfather—“came his power of analysis, his logic, his mental activity, his ambition.” Lincoln had thought much on the subject. “His theory?.?.?.??had been that?.?.?.??illegitimate children are oftentimes sturdier and brighter than those born in lawful wedlock,” Herndon said, “and in his case, he believed that his better nature and finer qualities came from this broad-minded, unknown Virginian.” The buggy bumped along. Lincoln was pensive. “The revelation—painful as it was—called up the recollection of his mother, and?.?.?.??he added ruefully, ‘God bless my mother; all that I am or ever hope to be I owe to her,’ and immediately lapsed into silence.” Lincoln’s quiet was more anguished than peaceful. “Burying himself in thought,” his companion recalled, “he drew round him a barrier which I feared to penetrate.” Herndon was struck by the details of the exchange and the depth of feeling evident in Lincoln’s tone. Aside from the date and location of his birth—Sunday, February 12, 1809, in Hardin County, Kentucky—Lincoln “usually had but little to say of himself, the lives of his parents, or the history of the family,” Herndon recalled. “There was something about his origin he never cared to dwell upon.” To a corresp...
