Lincoln: An Account of His Personal Life, Especially of Its Springs of Action as

Nathaniel Wright StephensonProject Gutenberg · United StatesDec 2019

Rating 3.5
Word count
742K words
Chapters
75

Tags

English Originals Political and Military Leaders Personal CharismaPortrait GalleryPolitical FigurePower GameHuman NatureBiographical NarrativeAmerican NarrativeSocial ObservationModern ChinaOrdinary Perspective

Summary

Project Gutenberg was the first provider of free electronic books, or eBooks. Michael Hart, founder of Project Gutenberg, invented eBooks in 1971 and his memory continues to inspire the creation of eBooks and related technologies today.Lincoln; An Account of his Personal Life, Especially of its Springs of Action asAuthor: Stephenson, Nathaniel W. (Nathaniel Wright), 1867-1935,Language: English, Class: E456: History: America: Civil War period (1861-1865), Release Date: Feb 22, 2006

Editor's review

This is Nathaniel W. Stephenson's biography of Lincoln's personal life, focusing on the inner thread of his motives and character formation rather than a general chronicle of major life events. The author concentrates on the "springs of action," attempting to explain the psychological and moral driving forces behind Lincoln's key decisions, so it reads more like a study of character and motive than a chronological account. As a public-domain ebook, it preserves the narrative style and value judgments of early twentieth-century biography, and is also useful for understanding how the image of Lincoln was shaped in the English-speaking world. It works well as supplementary reading for Lincoln studies; read alongside more recent scholarly biographies, it reveals how different eras understood the same figure. Readers should keep in mind the author's period limitations and rhetorical tendencies, and should not treat the book's judgments as definitive.

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Reading tips

  1. Start with a concise general history of Lincoln to establish a timeline, then move into this book's analysis of motives
  2. Mark the author's value judgments as you read and compare them with contemporary biographies
  3. Read selectively by theme rather than chapter order, focusing on passages about character and decision-making

About the publisher

Project Gutenberg United States · Founded in 1971

Project Gutenberg is a digital publishing project focused on public-domain ebooks. Its publishing direction centers on classic literary works whose copyright has expired, covering genres such as poetry, drama, fiction, and epic. Representative books include Lyrical Ballads by Wordsworth and Coleridge, Proust's Du côté de chez Swann, Shakespeare's Macbeth and The Complete Works of William Shakespeare, Homer's The Iliad, Dante's La Divina Comèdia: Purgatòri, Cervantes's The History of Don Quixote, Volume 2, and Grahame's The Wind in the Willows. Its author resources consist mainly of classic Western writers such as Wordsworth, Proust, Shakespeare, Homer, Dante, Cervantes, Grahame, and Tolstoy. Its publishing feature is the provision of freely accessible ebooks in EPUB and Kindle formats; it is not a traditional publisher, and publicly available information is limited.

Contents

  1. 1
  2. 2
  3. 3
  4. 4
  5. 5
  6. 6
  7. 7
  8. 8
  9. 9
  10. 10
  11. 11
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  15. 15
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  18. 18
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  24. 24
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  27. 27
  28. 28
  29. 29
  30. 30
  31. 31
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  33. 33
  34. 34
  35. 35
  36. 36
  37. 37
  38. 38
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  40. 40
  41. 41
  42. 42
  43. 43
  44. 44
  45. 45
  46. 46
  47. 47
  48. 48
  49. 49
  50. 50
  51. 51
  52. 52
  53. 53
  54. 54
  55. 55
  56. 56
  57. 57
  58. 58
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  60. 60
  61. 61
  62. 62
  63. 63
  64. 64
  65. 65
  66. 66
  67. 67
  68. 68
  69. 69
  70. 70
  71. 71
  72. 72
  73. 73
  74. 74
  75. 75

FAQ

How is this book different from common Lincoln biographies? It does not aim to cover the events of Lincoln's life in full; instead it focuses on the character and moral motives behind his actions. It carries the narrative style and judgments of early twentieth-century biography, making it better as supplementary reading than as an introductory general history.
How difficult is the original English edition? The text is early twentieth-century English biographical writing, with long sentences and considerable rhetoric; the vocabulary is not obscure, but the feel is old-fashioned. Readers with university-level English can get through it with a dictionary; beginners should start with an abridged version or a guide.
What should I know about the public-domain ebook edition? This book comes from Project Gutenberg and is a free public-domain electronic text. It generally reproduces the original text without modern editorial notes or an index. Readers need to supply historical background themselves and should keep in mind the intellectual limitations of the author's era.

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About the author

Nathaniel Wright Stephenson Author · American · 1867–1935

Nathaniel Wright Stephenson (1867–1935) was an American historian and biographer. Born in Cincinnati, Ohio, he served as professor of history and economics at Charleston College. He devoted much of his writing to the life of Abraham Lincoln and the American Civil War, and his principal works include Abraham Lincoln and the Union, The Day of the Confederacy, and the biography Lincoln. Three of his works are included in this collection. Aimed at general readers, his writing is marked by clear narrative and attention to personal motives and the wider context of the era, giving him a representative place in the popular history writing of early twentieth-century America; public information about the details of his life remains limited.