And There Was Light: Abraham Lincoln and the American Struggle

- Jon Meacham

A chairman who governed a disunited country has much to educate us in a twenty-first- century moment of polarization and political extremity. abominated and hailed, excoriated and deified, Abraham Lincoln was at the zenith of American power when unappeasable separatists gave no quarter in a clash of fancies bound up with plutocrat, race, identity, and faith. In him we can see the possibilities of the administration as well as its limitations. 

At formerly familiar and fugitive, Lincoln tends to be seen as the topmost of American chairpersons — a remote icon — or as a politician driven more by computation than by conviction. This illuminating new portrayal gives us a veritably mortal Lincoln — an amiss man whose moral antislavery commitment, essential to the story of justice in America, began as he grew up in an antislavery Baptist community; who claimed that slavery was a moral wrong; and who sought, as he put it, to do right as God gave him to see the right. 

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 woeful assassination in 1865 his rise, his tone- education, his loves, his bouts of depression, his political failures, his heightening faith, and his patient conviction that slavery must end. In a nation shaped by the courage of the enslaved of the period and by the stalwart substantiation of Black Americans, Lincoln’s story illustrates the ways and means of politics in a republic, the roots and continuity of racism, and the capacity of heart to shape events.

About the author

Jon Meacham is a Pulitzer Prize – winning chronicler. The Rogers Chair in the American Presidency at Vanderbilt University, he's the author of the New York Times bestsellers His verity Is Marching On John Lewis and the Power of Hope, fortune 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. A fellow of the Society of American chroniclers, Meacham lives in Nashville.