![]() “Yes, for the present,” Lincoln responded. The Gettysburg Address was so short-272 words-that a reporter nearby asked Lincoln afterward if he had finished.A neighbor said that his mother, the wife of Thomas Lincoln, was “loose.” The rumor in rural Kentucky where Lincoln grew up was that he was an illegitimate child.While expounding on these themes, he offers fascinating bits of information about Lincoln: “A president who led a divided country in which an implacable minority gave no quarter in a clash over power, race, identity, money, and faith has much to teach us in a twenty-first-century moment of polarization, passionate disagreement, and differing understandings of reality,” Meacham writes. A different version of that struggle continues today. In Lincoln’s time, the struggle between freedom and slavery, darkness and light, good and evil divided the nation. ![]() ![]() ![]() … The fiat of the Almighty, ‘Let there be Light,’ has not yet spent its force.” The title, And There Was Light: Abraham Lincoln and the American Struggle, refers to a quote from Black abolitionist Frederick Douglass: “I do not despair of this country. ![]() Jon Meacham, the Pulitzer Prize-winning historian, has written a biography of Abraham Lincoln that offers not only a compelling portrait of his spiritual journey on the road to emancipation but also enduring lessons for our divided country today. ![]()
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