A brilliant and novel examination of
how Abraham Lincoln mastered the art of leadership
“Abraham Lincoln had less schooling than all but a couple of other presidents, and more wisdom than every one of them. In this original, insightful book, Michael Gerhardt explains how this came to be." –H.W. Brands,
Wall Street Journal
In 1849, when Abraham Lincoln
returned to Springfield, Illinois, after two seemingly uninspiring years in the
U.S. House of Representatives, his political career appeared all but finished.
His sense of failure was so great that friends worried about his sanity. Yet
within a decade, Lincoln would reenter politics, become a leader of the
Republican Party, win the 1860 presidential election, and keep America together
during its most perilous period. What accounted for the turnaround?
As Michael J. Gerhardt
reveals, Lincoln’s reemergence followed the same path he had taken before, in
which he read voraciously and learned from the successes, failures, oratory,
and political maneuvering of a surprisingly diverse handful of men, some of
whom he had never met but others of whom he knew intimately—Henry Clay, Andrew
Jackson, Zachary Taylor, John Todd Stuart, and Orville Browning. From their
experiences and his own, Lincoln learned valuable lessons on leadership,
mastering party politics, campaigning, conventions, understanding and using
executive power, managing a cabinet, speechwriting and oratory, and—what would
become his most enduring legacy—developing policies and rhetoric to match a
constitutional vision that spoke to the monumental challenges of his time.
Without these mentors,
Abraham Lincoln would likely have remained a small-town lawyer—and without
Lincoln, the United States as we know it may not have survived. This book tells
the unique story of how Lincoln emerged from obscurity and learned how to lead.