Download Six Encounters with Lincoln: A President Confronts Democracy and Its Demons AudioBook Free
From an award-winning historian, an engrossing look at how Abraham Lincoln grappled with the difficulties of leadership in an unruly democracy. An uncomfortable first meeting with US Army officials, on the eve of the Civil War. A talk on the White House portico with a cavalry sergeant who was a fiercely dedicated abolitionist. A anxious exchange on the navy dispatch with a Confederate editor and businessman. With this eye-opening booklet, Elizabeth Brown Pryor examines six interesting, mostly undiscovered encounters that Abraham Lincoln acquired along with his constituents. Taken alongside one another, they show his personality and thoughts in surprising ways, illustrating his complications in owning a republic and developing a presidency. Pryor probes both political demons that Lincoln battled in his ambitious exercise of power and the demons that arose from the dynamics of democracy itself: the clamorous diversity of the populace, using its outspoken needs. She explores the difficulty Lincoln sometimes acquired in communicating and in juggling the multiple concerns that define being a political innovator; how conflicted he was over the situation of emancipation; and the misperceptions Lincoln and the South kept about one another. Pryor also offers a fascinating debate of Lincoln's fondness for storytelling and how he used his skills as a raconteur to enhance both his personal and political power. Predicated on scrupulous research that pulls on hundreds of eyewitness letters, diaries, and publication excerpts, Six Encounters with Lincoln offers a brand new portrait of Lincoln as the beleaguered politician who was not especially popular with individuals he needed to govern with, and who acquired to cope with the many critics, naysayers, and dilemmas he encountered without always knowing the right answer. What it shows most plainly is the fact that greatness had not been simply laid on Lincoln's shoulders just like a mantle, but was acquired in suits and starts.
