Abraham Lincoln

William Eleroy Curtis's portrait of Abraham Lincoln is less a conventional biography than an attempt to capture the living soul of American democracy. Written in the early twentieth century, when the Civil War still lived in living memory, Curtis approaches his subject with the reverence of a man documenting something sacred: the story of a rail-splitter who became thepresident who held a fractured nation together. The book traces Lincoln's journey from the log cabins of Kentucky through the rough frontier of Indiana and Illinois, illuminating the formative influences of his mother and stepmother, his relentless self-education, and the political wisdom that emerged from defeat and deliberation. Curtis insists that Lincoln's life contains no real scandals, no mysteries of character only revealable in dark corners; his virtue, the author argues, was visible to friend and foe alike. This is the Lincoln of myth and memory, rendered with earnest admiration and a historian's sense of stakes. For readers who want to understand not just what Lincoln did, but how Americans once understood who he was, Curtis's biography offers an invaluable window into the making of a national saint.