Here Meacham takes us to the heart of the president who shaped events at the existential hour. In doing so, he fortifies us to meet our own.' Henry Louis Gates, Jr. And There Was Light brilliantly interweaves the best of gripping narrative history with a deeper search for the complex interplay among morality, politics, and power in a life, in a democracy, and in an America ripped apart over slavery. 'In his captivating new book, Jon Meacham has given us the Lincoln for our time.

In a nation shaped by the courage of the enslaved of the era and by the brave witness of Black Americans, Lincolns story illustrates the ways and means of politics in a democracy, the roots and durability of racism, and the capacity of conscience to shape events. 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 in 1865: his rise, his self-education, his loves, his bouts of depression, his political failures, his deepening faith, and his persistent conviction that slavery must end. This illuminating new portrait gives us a very human Lincolnan imperfect man whose moral antislavery commitment, essential to the story of justice in America, began as he grew up in an antislavery Baptist community who insisted that slavery was a moral evil and who sought, as he put it, to do right as God gave him to see the right. In him we can see the possibilities of the presidency as well as its limitations.Īt once familiar and elusive, Lincoln tends to be seen as the greatest of American presidentsa remote iconor as a politician driven more by calculation than by conviction.

Hated and hailed, excoriated and revered, Abraham Lincoln was at the pinnacle of American power when implacable secessionists gave no quarter in a clash of visions bound up with money, race, identity, and faith. One of the Best Books of the Year: The Christian Science Monitor, Kirkus ReviewsĪ president who governed a divided country has much to teach us in a twenty-first-century moment of polarization and political crisis.Longlisted for the Biographers International Plutarch Award.Winner of the Gilder Lehrman Lincoln Prize 'Meacham has given us the Lincoln for our time.'Henry Louis Gates, Jr. Pulitzer Prizewinning biographer Jon Meacham chronicles the life of Abraham Lincoln, charting howand whyhe confronted secession, threats to democracy, and the tragedy of slavery to expand the possibilities of America.

And There Was Light by Jon Meacham