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I see Abraham Lincoln as a literary genius, one of the great American prose stylists and certainly the greatest ever to occupy the Presidency. He could have written a Greek tragedy. Instead, he starred in one; and his abilities as a writer were accessories to his acts in office. They also gave his hagiographers ample material from which to build the myth of the patient, tolerant, humble Lincoln. That man is Lincoln's great fictional triumph; a character as enduring as Huck Finn and about as authentic. Herndon is the antidote, the man who knew him like a brother and described the struggles for self-control, the ambition, the intellectual arrogance, the bouts of rage and depression. The Lincoln worshippers in the History Departments were embarrassed by Herndon and tried to bury him in footnotes. Those lulled by the music of Lincoln's words tend to miss the facts and the deeds. Perhaps it's not a coincidence that my deaf fiancee, who has no ear for the music of Lincoln's prose, finds him despicable. All the better to see the rocks that his siren words disguised.

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Abraham Lincoln (February 12, 1809 - April 15, 1865) was the 16th President of the United States, serving from March 1861 until his assassination in April 1865. He successfully led his country through its greatest constitutional, military and moral crisis - the American Civil War - preserving the Union while ending slavery, and promoting economic and financial modernization. Reared in a poor family on the western frontier, Lincoln was mostly self-educated. He became a country lawyer, a Whig Party leader, Illinois state legislator in the 1830s, and a one-term member of the United States House of Representatives in the 1840s. After a series of debates in 1858 that gave national visibility to his opposition to the expansion of slavery, Lincoln lost a Senate race to his arch-rival Stephen A. Douglas. Lincoln, a moderate from a swing state, secured the Republican Party nomination. With almost no support in the South he swept the North and was elected president in 1860. His election was the signal for seven southern slave states to declare their secession from the Union and form the Confederate States of America. The departure of the Southerners gave Lincoln's party firm control of Congress, but no formula for compromise or reconciliation was found, and the war came.

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