And There Was Light: Abraham Lincoln and the American Struggle
By Jon Meacham
Random House, 2022, $40
Jon Meacham is one of the nation’s most engaged, and engaging, public intellectuals. A Pulitzer Prize–winning presidential biographer, he possesses a rare ability to relate the American past to current circumstances in the service of informed, yet gentle advocacy.
Having already written major works on, among others, Thomas Jefferson and Andrew Jackson, Meacham’s turn to Abraham Lincoln seems like a welcome inevitability. His And There Was Light: Abraham Lincoln and the American Struggle is an elegantly argued life of our 16th president tailor-made for the contemporary moment.
While it may seem counterintuitive to suggest that a narrative of 421 pages is lean, that description suits And There Was Light. This is not a biography to turn to when delving into the machinations of Lincoln’s Cabinet, the intimacies of the Lincoln household, or his search for a trustworthy military leader. Meacham has obviously made the calculation that others have covered these and other related topics in exhaustive detail.
Instead, his book “charts Lincoln’s struggle to do right as he defined it within the political universe he and his country inhabited.” A “morally imperfect” man, Lincoln nevertheless possessed “a pragmatic vision with a moral component” that provided a guide star for his public life. Undeniably ambitious, the future president struck a political balance that lent him legitimate
