“When I go to church, I like to hear the gospel,” he said. Yet after Lincoln became president, he attended New York Avenue Presbyterian Church in Washington. “Lincoln was not an orthodox Christian,” Meacham writes. His philosophical and religious views drew from the King James Bible, the Declaration of Independence, and New England Transcendentalists Theodore Parker and Ralph Waldo Emerson. Lincoln had only about a year of formal education. There are a thousand ways of getting at a man if it is desirable that he should be killed.” “If I wore a shirt of mail, and kept to myself surrounded by a body-guard, it would be all the same.

“I long ago made up my mind that if anybody wants to kill me, he will do it,” he said later. Lincoln began receiving assassination threats soon after he was nominated for president in 1860.“I am struggling to maintain government, not to overthrow it,” he said. Democrats spread rumors that Lincoln might not vacate the White House if he failed to win reelection.Johnson became the first president to be impeached in 1868. Delegates to the Republican National Convention made the choice, as was the custom in those days, and it proved to be disastrous. Lincoln did not select Andrew Johnson to be his running mate in 1864.

“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.

Jon meacham and there was light