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Simon & Schuster
April 2015
On Sale: April 7, 2015
ISBN: 147677725X
EAN: 9781476777252
Kindle: B00LD1ONOE
Hardcover / e-Book
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Non-Fiction History
The first of a three-volume history of Lincoln as a
political genius—from his obscure beginnings to his
presidency, assassination, and the overthrow of his
post-Civil War dreams of Reconstruction. This first volume
traces Lincoln from his painful youth, describing himself as
“a slave,” to his emergence as the man we recognize as
Abraham Lincoln. From his youth as a “newsboy,” a voracious newspaper reader,
Lincoln became a free thinker, reading Tom Paine, as well as
Shakespeare and the Bible, and studying Euclid to sharpen
his arguments as a lawyer. Lincoln’s anti-slavery thinking began in his childhood
amidst the Primitive Baptist antislavery dissidents in
backwoods Kentucky and Indiana, the roots of his repudiation
of Southern Christian pro-slavery theology. Intensely
ambitious, he held political aspirations from his earliest
years. Obsessed with Stephen Douglas, his political rival,
he battled him for decades. Successful as a circuit lawyer,
Lincoln built his team of loyalists. Blumenthal reveals how
Douglas and Jefferson Davis acting together made possible
Lincoln’s rise. Blumenthal describes a socially awkward suitor who had a
nervous breakdown over his inability to deal with the
opposite sex. His marriage to the upper class Mary Todd was
crucial to his social aspirations and his political career.
Blumenthal portrays Mary as an asset to her husband, a rare
woman of her day with strong political opinions. He
discloses the impact on Lincoln’s anti-slavery convictions
when handling his wife’s legal case to recover her father’s
fortune in which he discovered her cousin was a slave. Blumenthal’s robust portrayal is based on prodigious
research of Lincoln’s record and of the period and its main
players. It reflects both Lincoln’s time and the struggle
that consumes our own political debate.
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