As part of a family immersed in Lincoln, I grew up surrounded by the haunting image of his face. My own first study of the sixteenth President came when I was a graduate student in theology. Strangely moved by his words, I came to see Lincoln as a secular prophet, an almost spiritual figure moving over the American landscape.

Later I became aware of Lincoln the wily pragmalist, far more ambiguous than his mythic image. But I remain fascinated by the moral dimension of Lincoln’s leadership, by his political imagination, and by his extraordinary, sometimes even revelatory, use of words.