Abraham Lincoln: Redeemer President, 2nd ed. (Library of Religious Biography | LRB)
Digital Verbum Edition
Overview
The story of Abraham Lincoln’s faith and intellectual life—updated and revised with a new preface—from the three-time winner of the Lincoln Prize and best-selling Civil War–era historian Allen Guelzo.
Allen Guelzo’s peerless account of America’s most celebrated president explores the role of ideas in Lincoln’s life, treating him as a serious thinker deeply involved in the nineteenth-century debates over politics, religion, and culture. Through masterful and original scholarly work, Guelzo relates the outward events of Lincoln’s life to his inner spiritual struggles and sets them both against the intellectual backdrop of his age. The sixteenth president emerges as a creative yet profoundly paradoxical man—possessed of deep moral and religious character yet without adherence to organized religion.
Since its original publication in 1999, Abraham Lincoln: Redeemer President has garnered numerous accolades, not least the prestigious Lincoln Prize. After writing several other acclaimed studies of Lincoln and other aspects of Civil War–era history, Guelzo returns to update this important early work for a second edition. A new preface addresses the developments in Lincoln scholarship in the years since the book’s original publication and offers Guelzo’s fascinating retrospective look at the unusual path he took to becoming a Lincoln scholar.
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- Links life of Lincoln to the broader cultural contexts and religious issues that surrounded him
- Offers Guelzo’s fascinating retrospective look at the unusual path he took to becoming a Lincoln scholar
- Addresses the developments in Lincoln scholarship in the years since the book’s original publication
- Map of Abraham Lincoln’s Illinois
- Preface: Looking Back on Abraham Lincoln: Redeemer President
- Introduction: The Strife of Ideas
- 1. The American System
- 2. The Costs of Union
- 3. The Doctrine of Necessity
- 4. The Fuel of Interest
- 5. Moral Principle Is All That Unites Us
- 6. An Accidental President
- 7. War in a Conciliatory Style
- 8. Voice Out of the Whirlwind
- 9. Whig Jupiter
- 10. Malice Toward None
- Epilogue: The Redeemer President
- A Note on the Sources
It is a testament to the strength of Redeemer President that the matters it addresses resist easy summary. The value of the book itself, however, is easy enough to state: Out of the countless volumes written about our 16th president, it ranks quite simply among the best.
—The Wall Street Journal
Is there really a place for yet another work on Abraham Lincoln? Allen C. Guelzo has superbly demonstrated that there is. . . . Not only does the reader of this volume learn much about Lincoln but also about those intertwining economic, intellectual, political, and religious aspects of American life that so influenced the thought of Abraham Lincoln and others in the nineteenth century. This book deserves its rightful place among other exemplary Lincoln biographies.
—The Journal of Southern History
