Life Of Abraham Lincoln

Abraham Lincoln arrived in WashingtonDC a rail-splitter from Illinois, a lawyer who had lost every major election he ever fought. By the time he took the oath of office, he had buried a son, weathered a career of spectacular failures, and carried a darkness that few ever saw. This is the Lincoln before the monument: the man who taught himself law by reading by firelight, who told stories to strangers on circuit rides, who wept openly at the deaths of animals and quietly at the weight of a nation tearing itself apart.Ward Hill Lamon knew this Lincoln. As his law partner and friend, Lamon saw the president-elect in his shirtsleeves, nursing whiskey and melancholy in equal measure, scribbling speeches in margins of law briefs. This biography draws on firsthand memories and materials from Lincoln's inner circle to paint a portrait that feels startlingly human. Here is no marble god but a contradictions: ambitious and riven by self-doubt, brilliant and often uncertain, private yet desperate to be understood. Lamon traces Lincoln from the log cabins of Kentucky through the battlefields of Illinois politics to that first inauguration, capturing the unlikely alchemy of a man who became the fulcrum on which American democracy pivoted.