Abraham Lincoln, Storyteller-in-Chief

Abraham Lincoln was the greatest storyteller to occupy the White House. From the frontier judicial circuit to the debate platform, stories formed the bedrock of Lincoln’s approach to life, law, and politics. History records hundreds of his anecdotes, parables, and allegories, but until now no one has connected the dots to show how Lincoln used stories to achieve his moral and political goals, how storytelling shaped the man and his worldview, and how he relied on his innate understanding of stories to craft history’s greatest speeches and ultimately to shape a grand narrative of his own about the Civil War. Abraham Lincoln, Storyteller-in-Chief is a revelatory look at the foundations of Lincoln’s leadership.

Lincoln grew up surrounded by stories and storytellers. He avidly read the Bible, Aesop, Shakespeare, and more. People in Lincoln’s frontier world came from all over the country—traveling preachers, peddlers, boatmen, traders, and other characters—and mingled, talked, negotiated, joked, and argued, and Lincoln absorbed the tales of this rich oral culture. Thanks to his reading and his listening, Lincoln was carefully attuned to the rhythms of American speech and the patterns of effective stories, possessed a vast stockpile of tales for any situation, and learned the value of a good story for making friends, winning arguments, teaching lessons, and defusing fraught situations.

This education in storytelling served Lincoln well in the courtroom and campaign trail, where he won legal cases and earned his neighbors’ votes with astutely delivered anecdotes at least as much as with abstract arguments. For Lincoln, stories became a means of civic engagement and political persuasion, but through them he also honed his own skills: how to pace a story and time its climax, how to read a person and adjust his tone, how to match story with situation.

By the time he gained the White House, and as the country descended deeper into the abyss of war, Lincoln continued to use stories in his daily interactions with friend and foe alike, but now the president came into his own as a master storyteller on a grand scale— and the stakes could not have been higher. Informed by a lifetime of hearing and telling stories, Lincoln turned the Civil War into an eloquent narrative about the battle for the American soul, a story that began with the Founding “four score and seven years ago” and spanned battlefield and home front, a generous, empathetic, and deeply moral vision that aimed to make suffering intelligible, transform loss and grief into purpose, sustain the will to fight, and elevate justice and mercy in the midst of war. Lincoln’s great speeches narrated this American moral epic. It was the masterpiece of a storyteller at the peak of his powers.

Abraham Lincoln, Storyteller-in-Chief digs deep into what made Lincoln Lincoln and reveals how he became a master practitioner of storytelling across a lifetime of reading, listening, and telling. His craft peaked during the Civil War as he constructed a narrative that gave meaning to four years of conflict and strife. With Lincoln’s assassination, the story he so carefully shaped was left unfinished, but as this book shows, he left guideposts for future generations to pick up the tale.