Why do you think Americans have such a continuing interest in Lincoln?

Allen C. Guelzo: For one thing, he was the president through the republic's single greatest crisis, the Civil War. That alone would make him a subject of interest, whether laudatory or just second-guessing, no matter whether he was successful as president or not. But he was, in fact, successful, and that is the second part of his continuing appeal, since his presidency was so plainly key to saving the Union and bringing the war to a victorious conclusion. People would like to fathom more of what led to his success, as something of a guide to dealing with their own crises. But the third—and by no means least—factor in this unflagging attention is the end of slavery. Lincoln's successes as a president and a wartime leader were political ones. Ending slavery was a tremendous moral gesture that destroyed what many Americans felt was a blot on the promise and reputation of freedom in America. Slavery "soiled our republican robe" and made us seem less in reality than what we promised, as a nation, in words. It was that moral gesture, and the grand romantic sweep of giving liberty to slaves and captives, which has really held Lincoln in the popular imagination.

Don't we already know everything about Abraham Lincoln? What new things did you learn in your research for this book?

Allen C. Guelzo: Among the cloud of myths which surround Lincoln, none of them is more peculiar than the one which insists that there is no cloud, that so many books and articles have been written about him that nothing, under all that weight, could possibly be left unflattened. This, of course, is not true. The greatest percentage of Lincoln publications—easily 8000 books, for starters—are actually second-hand accounts or retellings from the same basic sources that so many other Lincoln books are told from. They often ignored a large variety of little-used or unused Lincoln sources which only required a small tweak of the imagination to recover. The Lincoln Legal Papers project, which has just concluded with the publication of a three-CD-ROM edition of Lincoln's law practice, would never have been begun if people had accepted the common cobwebbed wisdom that most of Lincoln's legal practice was buried in county courthouse basements that would require a lifetime of patience to sift through, and perhaps might not even be there anymore, thanks to overzealous janitors. The LLP project, headed by Cullom Davis and Daniel Stowell, organized an exhaustive search of Illinois courthouses, and found that the documents were not only still there, but surprisingly accessible with modern data collection techniques. Similarly, it occurred to Michael Burlingame early in the 1990s that the early Lincoln biographers, like Ida Tarbell, probably worked like all other authors: they accumulated vast amounts of research material, but actually used only a fraction of it in their books. Where did the unused research material go? Burlingame tracked down Tarbell's papers to her alma mater, Allegheny College, and found a Captain-Kidd's-treasure of interviews Tarbell had conducted with Lincoln acquaintances and associates, but never worked into her turn-of-the-century biography. And again, since the close of the "Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln" project in 1953, enough new documents in Lincoln's own hand have been found to fill two supplementary volumes.

My most important discoveries were interpretive. Most Lincoln biographers begin as political or military historians of the Civil War era, and they tend to recognize only material pertinent to those concerns. I began reading Lincoln as an intellectual historian, and suddenly I came upon things in Lincoln which I recognized as pieces of intellectual puzzles; but they were items which no political or military historian would be likely to recognize as such. For instance, when William Herndon itemized the reading list current in the Lincoln-Herndon law office to include Francis Wayland, J.S. Mill, Victor Cousin, Ludwig Feuerbach, and many others, few political-military historians would react with more than the passing thought, "Who were they?" But as an intellectual historian, I knew I was looking at a constellation of 19th-century authors who suggested a powerful intellectual pattern to Lincoln's mental world.

What is the biggest misconception people have about Lincoln? Does your book explode any myths about Lincoln?

Allen C. Guelzo: The biggest single myth must surely be that Lincoln was a simple, honest, backwoods lawyer who somehow mysteriously was chosen president by accident or divine intervention. Lincoln was a lawyer, and actually well-renowned for his honesty and candor; but by the 1850s, he was also a highly successful railroad lawyer making a fairly hefty income from representing corporate interests in the development of central Illinois. He was, even more, politically ambitious. Anyone, said Herndon, who thought that Lincoln gathered his robes around him and awaited the choice of the people did not know Lincoln. "His ambition was a little engine that knew no rest," Herndon commented, and Lincoln thirsted after political success and prominence even more than financial success as a lawyer.

One myth I certainly hope to have exploded in Abraham Lincoln: Redeemer President is that Lincoln was an under-educated and naturally shrewd pragmatist. Actually, his education was not terribly bad by comparison with what was generally available across the Appalachians in the 1820s; what he really meant when he called his education "defective" was that he had lacked the means to attend college. And yet, he was an omnivorous reader, and more than made up for a collegiate education with a strenuous program of self-reading in everything from Euclid to political economy. Those who knew him well remarked on how Lincoln possessed a "metaphysical" and philosophical turn of mind; he and Herndon used to argue philosophy in their law office, arguments which Herndon usually lost.

The one thing Lincoln is most identified with is freeing the slaves. Did Lincoln really free the slaves? What role did his religious belief play in his attitude toward slavery?

Allen C. Guelzo: Lincoln really did free the slaves; it is, after all, his signature at the foot of the Emancipation Proclamation, not someone else's. Of course, his freeing of the slaves was hedged about with legal and political technicalities, which he was obliged by the Constitution and the political realities of the Civil War to recognize. But there can be no real doubt, as he often claimed, that "I have always hated slavery." And there can be no doubt, either, that the Emancipation proclamation had a real and devastating effect on the institution of slavery. Although the Proclamation technically freed only slaves in the Southern Confederacy on the day it was issued, which meant, since those states were in rebellion, that none of them were going to obey the Proclamation. It nevertheless promised freedom to any slave in any part of the Confederacy which thereafter fell into Union hands, which it all did by 1865. Eighteen months after its issuance, the Proclamation and the Union Army had freed 1.4 million slaves. Oddly, though, for all his hatred of slavery, Lincoln did not join with radical religious leaders in calling for immediate abolition of slavery. But, as he told his cabinet on September 22, 1862—the day he issued the preliminary Emancipation Proclamation—his final decision to go ahead and emancipate the slaves by presidential decree was the result of a "vow" he had made to God: that if God gave the Union Army victory, he would issue the proclamation. The battle of Antietam on September 17, 1862, was just enough of a victory for the Union, and five days later Lincoln delivered on his vow.

Explain the significance of the subtitle "Redeemer President."

Allen C. Guelzo: The phrase is actually borrowed from an editorial Walt Whitman wrote for the Brooklyn Daily Eagle in 1856, when Whitman was bemoaning the disastrous lack of character in the presidential candidates of that year. He hoped for a "redeemer President." And four years later, of course, Whitman got him, in Abraham Lincoln. But beyond the association with Whitman, the phrase "Redeemer President" also underscores that Lincoln turned out to be much more a redeemer than Whitman could have dreamt in 1856: Lincoln redeemed the republic from slavery and disunion, and allowed it once more to stand up as the champion of human freedom. But there is this ironic twist: this "redeemer President" himself had no faith in a Redeemer, and thought of God more in terms of a Judge than a Reconciler.

The role of religion in politics—and the religious beliefs of candidates and their openness in expressing them—is still very much a hot topic in America today. How does this compare with the situation in Lincoln's day?

Allen C. Guelzo: Somewhat similar to today's tensions over religion in the public square, the presidency in Lincoln's time had been dominated by the Jeffersonian conviction that religion needed to be walled off from public policy-making. Lincoln, however, was a Republican and a one-time Whig. The Whigs were the party of the middle-class and middle-class virtue, and this brought the Whigs (and Lincoln) into political alliance with large stretches of Protestant evangelicalism. Thus, the Whigs were far less shy of promoting religious causes and using religious rhetoric than their Jeffersonian Democrat opponents. When he becomes president in 1861, Lincoln carries this attitude into his own public stance, and sanctions the issuance of proclamations for public fasts and thanksgivings, has Congress re-write the laws on the military chaplaincy, and even hosts gatherings of religious leaders in the White House. And of course, no president has ever deployed religious language in state papers and speeches the way Lincoln did. However, he pulled shy of allowing religious leaders to have a controlling hand on policy. That, like so much else, he reserved for himself alone.

Lincoln is often named as a role model by today's politicians. Who were Lincoln's heroes and role models?

Allen C. Guelzo: Lincoln identified Henry Clay, the long-time leader of the Whig party, as his "beau ideal of a statesman," and even as a republican and a president, he often spoke of himself as "an old Henry Clay Whig." He also devoutly admired Washington and the Founding Fathers, and spoke of them as his inspirations. He had a more complicated admiration for Thomas Jefferson. He admired the Jefferson who wrote the Declaration of Independence, and once described his entire political ideology as being bound up in the words of the declaration. At the same time, he felt revulsion for Jefferson's private life—his slaveholding and especially his liaison with Sally Hemings.

How was the presidency of Lincoln's day different from the presidency today?

Allen C. Guelzo: Surely the most obvious difference was the sheer size. Lincoln ran his presidency with a staff composed of one official secretary, and three others who were actually on other government payrolls; the White House itself actually had a larger staff than Lincoln's presidential office. He used a vast network of friends and personal acquaintances across the North as private political listening posts, but he had no executive employees anywhere outside Washington. This is one reason why Lincoln's wartime photographs so often depict a haggard and exhausted man. As a life-long workaholic who struggled to run the machinery of a government at war with only a skeleton crew, he was literally working himself to death. A number of his cabinet departments also had better staff resources than he did. The secretary of the Treasury held in his hand direct appointments to several thousand customs and revenue positions, a number of them quite lucrative; the Postmaster General appointed fifteen thousand postmasters. Lincoln actually had influence over the size of his government only indirectly, through cabinet patronage.

Indirect influence, however, can often be very close to direct influence. He was not shy about ordering cabinet officers to make appointments. And he used his own White House staff as intermediaries and emissaries in pressuring members of Congress to vote his way or in researching policy problems in the field.

Are there useful lessons about leadership and politics we can learn from Lincoln for today?

Allen C. Guelzo: One major leadership lesson Lincoln shows us is resiliency; the man demonstrated an astounding capacity for absorbing political punishment. Also, he had a bull-dog's grip on his goals. He wanted to do one thing: save the Union. Having that in view allowed him to step back, step aside, and step around; it allowed him, above all, to consider what most politicians considered unthinkable, which was emancipation. A leader with eyes glued only on the immediate situation has no room for maneuver, only for confrontation.

Lincoln has been the subject of many biographies over the years. What sets yours apart from the rest?

Allen C. Guelzo: Mark Neely, a great Lincoln biographer in his own right, has written that there are two great traditions in Lincoln biography. One concentrates on the public, political man; the other on the private, psychological man. My book is about Lincoln as a man of ideas, a man much more familiar and committed to the great intellectual controversies of the 19th century than we have supposed. Although Lincoln was not an intellectual in the way we usually speak of intellectuals, as people who read, analyze and debate books; nevertheless, he found resources, consolation and hope in his reading, and (as Thomas Powers said recently about Robert Kennedy) "let them speak for him when he was overwhelmed by the imponderables of life." In that way, Lincoln's ideas bridge the gap Neely described: they arise from the private man, but they guide the public one.