Life of Abraham Lincoln, Volume 2

Ida Tarbell brought her investigative genius to this monumental biography, producing a portrait of Lincoln that reads like history rendered by a master reporter. This second volume picks up at his first inauguration and follows him through the Civil War, the Emancipation Proclamation, the bloody grind of battles both political and military, and ends with his assassination and funeral. Tarbell had access to letters, telegrams, and speeches that had never been published, and she used them to render Lincoln not as marble monument but as a living, struggling man wrestling with questions of power, morality, and whether a nation could survive its own contradictions. The result is intimate and devastating. Here is Lincoln the strategist, the poet, the grieving father, the commander-in-chief who held the Union together through sheer force of will. Tarbell's biography was originally published in McClure's Magazine to rapturous acclaim, and it remains essential reading for anyone who wants to understand how America nearly died and was saved by one complicated man.