In AND THERE WAS LIGHT, Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer Jon Meacham turns his attention to a man who in many ways embodied the American dream and rose to the highest office in the land: Abraham Lincoln. Meacham depicts Lincoln as a whole person, who was given a fateful role in history and carried it through in a way that few could have imagined or accomplished.

Lincoln lives in American memory with good reason. He rose from a childhood in a tiny log cabin in the backwoods of Kentucky to a self-trained legal profession, to demonstrating notable skills as a political debater, to a position as a state legislator, and then, in 1860, to the US Presidency. The attack on Fort Sumter just weeks after he took office forced his hand on a number of questions, but primary among them was the need to save the Union --- that is, to keep the country whole.

"AND THERE WAS LIGHT will surely stand as one of the finest tributes to Abraham Lincoln. Thorough, open-minded and sound, it invites a new generation to explore the enduring spirit that inspires the monuments."

Woven into this was the thorny issue of slavery. Though Lincoln had declared early on that slavery was wrong, he believed that the office he held compelled him to support the principle that preservation of the Union was the paramount goal. He devised plans to deport freed slaves to Africa and Haiti, and initially evoked harsh criticism from such leaders as Frederick Douglass and Horace Greeley. But as the matter became more pressing, Lincoln promoted and willingly signed the Emancipation Proclamation. Though limited in scope, it was a foretaste of a more comprehensive measure whose necessity Lincoln would support: the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution.

Behind the scenes of warfare, political divisiveness, and the enormous issues of slavery and secession that faced the President, Meacham --- who holds the Rogers Chair in the American Presidency at Vanderbilt University --- also paints a portrait of Lincoln as a devoted father whose grief over the death of his son, Willie, had to be suppressed since “there was so much to do” for the country. Drawing from hundreds of source materials, Meacham is able to offer perspectives from Lincoln’s detractors, his admirers, and those who, like Douglass, gradually moved from one position to the other as the President’s willingness to side with the anti-slavery, pro-Black movements rose more clearly into view.

Meacham also provides background regarding the madman who eventually would put an end to Lincoln’s life. In a stirring Epilogue, he quotes W. E. B. Du Bois with a simple yet profound summation of the Lincoln legend: “I love him not because he was perfect but because he was not and yet triumphed.”

AND THERE WAS LIGHT will surely stand as one of the finest tributes to Abraham Lincoln. Thorough, open-minded and sound, it invites a new generation to explore the enduring spirit that inspires the monuments.