And There Was Light: Abraham Lincoln and the American Struggle

“For many Americans, to see Lincoln whole is to glimpse ourselves in part—our hours of triumph and of grace, and our centuries of failures and of derelictions. This is why his story is neither too old nor too familiar. For so long as we are buffeted by the demands of democracy, for so long as we struggle to become what we say we already are—the world’s last, best hope, in Lincoln’s phrase—we will fall short of the ideal more often than we meet the mark. It is a fact of American history that we are not always good, but that goodness is possible. Not universal, not ubiquitous, not inevitable—but possible.”

In the prologue, Jon Meacham sets up his depiction of Lincoln as a poignant reflection of America’s sense of itself. For Meacham, although the country, like the man, often fails to reach its aspirational moral targets, it is fundamentally good, aspiring to an ideal of liberty and equality. Despite innumerable setbacks and transgressions, for Meacham the United States, like Lincoln, is essentially good, and bends toward justice over time. For Meacham, the value of Lincoln’s story is that it serves as a paradigmatic example of a shared American vision.

“The short and simple annals of the poor. That’s my life, and that’s all you or anyone else can make out of it.”

This short passage is Lincoln’s pithy, disinterested reflection on his own childhood. Lincoln, Meacham frequently reminds us, was not particularly interested in his past. He did not self-consciously seek the portrayal of himself as the mythical “self-made man,” a legend of American industriousness. Though Lincoln’s story is now often employed to show the possibility of the American Dream (he rose from a log cabin to become the president), Lincoln, in fact, seems to generally dismiss engagement with his own past and a painful childhood.

“The fate of mortals was to marshal reason, experience, and faith in order to realize the ideal of loving one’s neighbor as oneself. ‘When I do good I feel good, when I do bad I feel bad, and that’s my religion,’ an old man in Indiana had once said in Lincoln’s hearing. Lincoln quoted these words to describe his own religious views.”

One of the core themes of Meacham’s biography deals with Lincoln’s views on religion, how these views evolved, and how they influenced his politics. In essence, Lincoln’s deepest religious convictions were based on the appeals of conscience.