‘Founders Son: A Life of Abraham Lincoln’ Book Forum with Richard Brookhiser

Reminder to please join Hillsdale College for a Book Forum on the ‘Founders Son: A Life of Abraham Lincoln’ with author Richard Brookhiser. Reception and book signing to follow. Wednesday, October 29, 2014

Hillsdale, MI –-(Ammoland.com)- For Abraham Lincoln, the road to the future always began in the past—America’s, and his.

As a boy, he admired George Washington as a champion of liberty. As a young man, he found in Thomas Paine lessons about religion, which he ultimately abandoned, and about how to win arguments, which he retained for the rest of his life. At the height of his career, he embraced Thomas Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence as a statement of principle (an “apple of gold,” he called it, quoting the Bible), and the Preamble to the Constitution, which named the people as beneficiaries and guardians of freedom. Other books on Lincoln have noted his interest in the founding fathers and how he looked back to them, but here for the first time a historian of the founding looks ahead to Lincoln.

Richard Brookhiser is a senior editor of National Review and the author of over a dozen books, including James Madison, George Washington on Leadership, and What Would the Founders Do? He wrote and hosted the PBS documentaries Rediscovering George Washington and Rediscovering Alexander Hamilton, and he appears frequently on the History Channel and the Colbert Report. He is a columnist for American History. Brookhiser lives in New York City.

More on the book Founders Son: A Life of Abraham Lincoln

Abraham Lincoln grew up in the long shadow of the Founding Fathers. Seeking an intellectual and emotional replacement for his own taciturn father, Lincoln turned to the great men of the founding—Washington, Paine, Jefferson—and their great documents—the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution—for knowledge, guidance, inspiration, and purpose. Out of the power vacuum created by their passing, Lincoln emerged from among his peers as the true inheritor of the Founders’ mantle, bringing their vision to bear on the Civil War and the question of slavery.

In Founders’ Son, celebrated historian Richard Brookhiser presents a compelling new biography of Abraham Lincoln that highlights his lifelong struggle to carry on the work of the Founding Fathers. Following Lincoln from his humble origins in Kentucky to his assassination in Washington, D.C., Brookhiser shows us every side of the man: laborer, lawyer, congressman, president; storyteller, wit, lover of ribald jokes; depressive, poet, friend, visionary. And he shows that despite his many roles and his varied life, Lincoln returned time and time again to the Founders. They were rhetorical and political touchstones, the basis of his interest in politics, and the lodestars guiding him as he navigated first Illinois politics and then the national scene.

But their legacy with not sufficient. As the Civil War lengthened and the casualties mounted Lincoln wrestled with one more paternal figure—God the Father—to explain to himself, and to the nation, why ending slavery had come at such a terrible price.

Bridging the rich and tumultuous period from the founding of the United States to the Civil War, Founders’ Son is unlike any Lincoln biography to date. Penetrating in its insight, elegant in its prose, and gripping in its vivid recreation of Lincoln’s roving mind at work, this book allows us to think anew about the first hundred years of American history, and shows how we can, like Lincoln, apply the legacy of the Founding Fathers to our times.

Please register to attend in person or watch online.