Lincoln's Sword: The Presidency and the Power of Words
by Douglas L Wilson
Buy on AmazonWidely considered in his own time as a genial but provincial lightweight who was out of place in the presidency, Abraham Lincoln astonished his allies and confounded his adversaries by producing a series of speeches and public letters so provocative that they helped revolutionize public opinion on such critical issues as civil liberties, the use of black soldiers, and the emancipation of slaves. This is a brilliant and unprecedented examination of how Lincoln used the power of words to not only build his political career but to keep the country united during the Civil War.
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"Douglas Wilson is a superb Lincoln scholar, based at Knox College in Illinois. He’s an extremely close reader of Lincoln. Lincoln’s words are very important because they are kind of scripture for Americans. Sometimes the words are hard to pin down because three or four people hearing a Lincoln speech might each write them down differently. Douglas Wilson meticulously verifies every word spoken and helps us to understand Lincoln’s writing process. With all of the most famous Lincoln speeches, Wilson tells us why the speech needed to be given, the process of writing the speech, and the various iterations of the speech. His intense literary focus is exciting. Every time I read Douglas Wilson’s work, I feel re-energized by Lincoln’s words. It reveals a lawyer’s logic. There is a remarkable clarity to Lincoln’s arguments that builds from paragraph to paragraph. That is Lincoln the lawyer who was very used to persuading juries in Illinois. But poetical inspiration is also evident in Lincoln’s word choices. His writing shows that Lincoln was a deep reader, especially of Shakespeare and the King James Bible . We wouldn’t love Lincoln if he just made clear arguments. Lincoln got to us emotionally with the beauty of his words. Wilson breaks down, sentence by sentence, how Lincoln moved public opinion with specific words."
Abraham Lincoln · fivebooks.com