Abraham Lincoln: Redeemer President by Allen C. Guelzo

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More has been written about Abraham Lincoln than about any other American. Yet very little of this literature sees Lincoln as he was in his times—as a man of ideas, as a man of deep intellectual curiosity About the raging political and economic debates in nineteenth-century America, and as a textbook Victorian “doubter” who could not believe as an orthodox Christian yet could not be easy in his unbelief. This truly fresh look at the nation's sixteenth president offers the first “intellectual biography” of a man whose grasp of the powerful currents of religion, philosophy, and political economy shaped not only the outcome of a great civil war but also the outlines of American national development for the following generations.

Allen C. Guelzo's unique intellectual portrait explores the role of ideas in Lincoln's life, treating him for the first time in any Lincoln biography as a serious thinker deeply involved in the struggles of nineteenth-century ideas, including those of classical liberalism, the Lockean Enlightenment, Victorian unbelief, and Calvinist spirituality. Lincoln emerges here as a creative yet profoundly paradoxical man — possessing deep moral and religious character yet not adhering to any organized form of religion, the Great Emancipator yet a man who believed that all human decisions were fixed by responses to self-interest, a classical nineteenth-century liberal who yet came to realize that the liberal state could not survive without an appeal to natural law and natural theology.

More than a masterful biography of a great American figure, this volume makes a major contribution to American intellectual and religious history. Based on primary materials from a wide variety of archives and on the newest materials collected and analyzed by Lincoln researchers, Guelzo's insightful work sheds light on the intellectual conflicts that once led Americans to civil war — and that still influence today's “cultural wars.”

Written with passion and dramatic impact for everyone interested in Lincoln and the Lincoln legacy today, Guelzo's Abraham Lincoln: Redeemer President is sure to take its place alongside the Thomas, Oates, and Donald biographies as one of the few truly great single-volume Lincoln biographies ever written.