Meet Abraham Lincoln: A House Divided

Educated by borrowed books

Lincoln's formal schooling amounted to about a year, in scraps. Everything else he taught himself — grammar, surveying, Euclid, and finally law, read on his own until he was admitted to the Illinois bar in 1836. He was a working country lawyer for a quarter of a century before he was anything else.

It shows in the prose. A man who learned to write by copying out sentences he admired ends up with a plain, load-bearing style: short words doing heavy work, almost no ornament. The Gettysburg Address is 271 words and takes about two minutes to deliver.

The speech that made him

He said that in Springfield on 16 June 1858, accepting the Republican nomination for the Senate. He lost that race. But the campaign put him on a stage against Stephen Douglas in seven debates, and the argument he made there — that the country could not go on indefinitely half slave and half free — carried him to the presidency in 1860.

Seven states left before he was even inaugurated. The war began weeks after.

Malice toward none

What is genuinely hard to imitate is the tone at the end. By March 1865 the Union was winning and the temptation to gloat was enormous. His Second Inaugural instead spends its length on how both sides read the same Bible and prayed to the same God, and closes by asking for the work to be finished with malice toward none, with charity for all.

He was killed six weeks later. The magnanimity was not a rhetorical flourish he could afford in peace — it was the plan, offered while it still cost something.

Why they belong at your table

Seat him when you have won an argument and have to decide what to do with the winning. He is the rare leader who is better on mercy than on victory, and he will ask what you actually want the other side to become.