Without the Light, a person will be doomed to eternal darkness, pain, and separation from God forever. Though he’d lost his Senate race in Illinois against Stephen Douglas, the Republican political world had taken note of him. There is no need to walk in the darkness of sin and death; in Christ, we “will never walk in darkness, but will have the light of life” (John 8:12). He described his grandmother Lucey, whom a grand jury once charged with fornication, as “a halfway prostitute. In the poignant words of Jon Meacham: "The fate of the Union, the possibilities of democracy, and the future of slavery, then, were the stake of a war that Abraham Lincoln chose to wage to total victory--or to defeat.

Lincoln’s life shows us that progress can be made by fallible and fallen presidents and peoples—which, in a fallible and fallen world, should give us hope. In the material world, nothing is done by leaps, all by gradual advance,” the New England abolitionist Theodore Parker observed. Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal. Pulitzer Prize–winning historian Meacham follows Lincoln from his rural Kentucky roots to his assassination in 1865, paying close attention to the many influences on his ideas and values. This was a president who led a divided country where the slaveholding South believed that it had God and history on its side.All human beings, whether believers or unbelievers, need to turn away from any practice of trying to manipulate situations or speak things into beings.

The Hon Abraham Lincoln…was as brave [a] man that ever live[d] on the face of earth,” Shiner wrote, “and all that he done he done it with clear [conscience] before his creator. The evolution of the cosmos was accomplished by a series of Divine formative works which extended over a period of six successive days. Lincoln’s shadow hovered over Meacham’s childhood, long before he became a Pulitzer Prize-winning historian and biographer.The author also traces Lincoln’s evolution from bookish farm boy to trial lawyer to politician, a progression aided by the rise of the new Republican Party, whose views largely matched his own.

Abraham Linoln's story began in the forested interior of the nation in Kentucky in the first years of the nineteenth century on the American frontier. Meacham sets Lincoln’s development against the growing crisis of the slave states’ determination to maintain and expand the scope of slavery, a fight culminating in Lincoln’s election and the Civil War. And for decades, scholars and pundits have been pulling out quotes of his to support their own political arguments.With his latest work, Pulitzer Prize—winning biographer Meacham (the Rogers Chair in the American Presidency at Vanderbilt Univ. And There Was Light: Abraham Lincoln and the American Struggle was such an engaging book by one of my favorite historians, Jon Meacham. Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.

His numerous New York Times best-selling books include His Truth Is Marching On, The Soul of America, Thomas Jefferson, and Destiny and Power. Charting how and why Lincoln confronted secession, threats to democracy and the tragedy of slavery to expand the possibilities of America, this book is unlike any previous Lincoln biography. In life, Lincoln’s motives were moral as well as political – a reminder that our finest presidents are those committed to bringing a flawed nation closer to the light, a mission that requires an understanding that politics divorced from conscience is fatal to the American experiment in liberty under law.There was, in fact, much to Lincoln—and the best parts of him, he believed, came not from those forebears whom he knew, but from those he did not: the mysterious Virginia gentleman grandfather and long-dead Lincolns. Light is often used as a metaphor in the Bible, and the word illumination (“divine enlightenment of the human heart with truth”) has to do with bringing things into the light. On April 14, 1865, at Ford’s Theater in Washington, DC, President Lincoln was attending a showing of the farce Our American Cousin. In this Blink to Jon Meacham’s And There Was Light, you’ll find that the reality is much more nuanced.