The following is the foreword that I have written for the outstanding new piece of Lincoln scholarship, Lincoln as He Really Was, by Charles T. Pace.
Despite the fact that there are well over 10,000 books in print about Abraham Lincoln it is almost impossible for the average American – or anyone else – to know the truth about the real Lincoln. Having given hundreds of public presentations, appeared on dozens of radio talk shows (including the Rush Limbaugh Radio Show), and participated in numerous debates on the subject of Lincoln, I have learned that the average American knows nothing at all about the man except for the few slogans and platitudes that we are all taught in elementary school (and then repeated endlessly in the popular culture).
As an elementary school student in the Pennsylvania public schools I was taught that Lincoln was so honest that he once walked six miles to return a penny to a merchant who had mistakenly undercharged him. Decades later, when I debated Harry Jaffa who, like the man he called “Father Abraham,” was a student of rhetoric (but not of American history), Jaffa assured the Oakland, California audience of several hundred that Lincoln’s political speeches were in fact “the words of God.” (This presumably did not include his dirty jokes, for which was famous).
Lincoln As He Really Was
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Abraham Lincoln is the only American president that has literally been deified like a Roman emperor (Like Julius Caesar, his image is the first to be placed on his country’s coinage). Lincoln’s deification eventually spread to the presidency, and then to the entire federal government. The Lincoln myth is thus the ideological cornerstone of the global…