And There Was Light: Abraham Lincoln and the American Struggle (Random House Large Print)

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This was a president who led a divided country where the slaveholding South believed that it had God and history on its side. Jon Meacham’s acute understanding of American politics yields a singularly illuminating portrait of the greatest political leader in our history. The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield, and patriot grave, to every living heart and hearthstone, all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature. The Union wasn’t performing well in the war, and emancipation, Lincoln hoped, would encourage Black Americans to join them in the fight. The fate of the Union, the possibilities of democracy, and the future of slavery, then, were the stakes of a war that Abraham Lincoln chose to wage to total victory—or to defeat.

Several years ago we spent a delightful week just meandering through Abraham Lincoln's judicial circuit and all of the places he frequented, including his law offices with William Herndon and the Springfield Courthouse and the home that he and Mary and his children loved in Springfield, Illinois.One of their grandchildren, Mordecai, became a successful man in central Pennsylvania, marrying Hannah Saltar, a well-connected daughter of a New Jersey family that included lawmakers in the colonial assembly and an acting royal governor.

When answering the question of why God said, “Let there be light,” we have to acknowledge God’s power and creativity in creating the light.

Though a gifted, persuasive speaker, there was one subject about which Abraham Lincoln was less than loquacious: his background. Pulitzer Prize–winning historian Meacham follows Lincoln from his rural Kentucky roots to his assassination in 1865, paying close attention to the many influences on his ideas and values. The phrase let there be light could be confusing to some modern English speakers who are used to using the word let in the context of permission, as in “Let me out of this box” or “Let me have the last cookie.

How could there be light on the first day of Creation if the sun was not created until the fourth day? Lincoln agreed: “By no act or complicity of mine shall the Republican party become a mere sucked egg, all shell and no principle in it. In fact, it is impossible for anyone to manipulate situations to get exactly what they want all the time or to speak things into being. At once familiar and elusive, Lincoln tends to be seen as the greatest of American presidents-a remote icon-or as a politician driven more by calculation than by conviction. He was, we are told,” William Herndon wrote, “five feet ten inches high, weighed one hundred and ninety-five pounds, had a well-rounded face, dark hazel eyes, coarse black hair, and was slightly stoop-shouldered.

This was the world in which Lincoln yearned to make his mark –⁠ to transcend the limitations of his upbringing and prove himself legitimate. Read more about the condition New: A new, unread, unused book in perfect condition with no missing or damaged pages. Another son, Mordecai, “jumped over the fence—ran to the fort” and shot the Indian at a distance of about 160 paces. Abraham Lincoln was president when implacable secessionists gave no quarter in a clash of visions inextricably bound up with money, power, race, identity, and faith. He currently serves as the Canon Historian of the Washington National Cathedral and contributes to the New York Times Book Review as well as other publications.

I also listened to the audiobook (excellently narrated by the author), which ended at about the 41% point of the ebook. On the day of the funeral, the president, the First Lady, and Robert Lincoln asked for time alone with Willie. 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. The roots of his ambition to rise above his frontier birth may lie in his imaginative connection to ancestors, known and unknown, who had left a mark on the world. The author provides in-depth analysis of Lincoln’s career as president and on how his thoughts on the issues of slavery and the status of African Americans changed during the course of the war, right up to the Union victory.In these postbellum decades, discriminatory Jim Crow laws came to dominate the South, and the North was home to both de jure and de facto segregation. The family’s New World saga had begun with Samuel Lincoln, who had emigrated from Norwich, England, settling in Hingham, Massachusetts, about 1637. 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.