President Lincoln: The Duty of a Statesman

Following his Lincoln's Virtues, in which he explored Abraham Lincoln's intellectual and moral development, William Lee Miller here completes his "ethical biography" of the 16th president. He shows how an amiable if inexperienced backcountry politician was transformed by his new position as an oath-bound head of state, confronted at the outset by crises of the utmost gravity and by the deep moral contradiction built into the country by its founders: universal ideals of equality and liberty and the unconscionable institution of human slavery