INTRODUCTION
Lincoln Lives

ALFRED EISENSTAEDT/THE LIFE PICTURE COLLECTION/GETTY

Two Brownies look up at the marble statue of Abraham Lincoln in the Rotunda of the Capitol in Washington, D.C., in a picture made for LIFE in 1945 by Alfred Eisenstaedt, one of the magazine’s four original photographers.

A QUESTION THAT WILL be asked more than once in these pages: When you look at Abraham Lincoln, what do you see?

Sometimes the answer is, “It’s not what I see, it’s what I hear.” The immaculate, short phrases ring in the ear, and they uplift. We aspire to answer to—or be—our better angels.

Sometimes: “I don’t see him. I see a thing, or an idea, I see . . .”

Freedom? America? Democracy?

He was killed 150 years ago. Our nation was one thing before he was born and quite another after he died. It is a general assumption that we could not have gotten from there—before—to here, today, without him. That general assumption is certainly true.

As the sometimes complex but, we hope, lucidly presented narratives in the pages that follow try to explain, Lincoln was both an accident and not. His heritage, education and early political career could never have given rise to a great President—or leader. Not a chance, not even in America.

Yet his heritage, education, experience, ambition, luck and occasionally blessed political career did give rise to one great leader. Just one essential one. Abraham Lincoln arrived at his place by dint of his personal strength and self-assurance, and, saints be praised, he arrived at the place where the United States needed him to be.

It is natural that LIFE Books looks at Lincoln 150 years on. Our magazine was founded more than 75 years ago with the mission to tell strong narrative stories in words and photographs. Lincoln arrived on the American and world scenes concurrent with the advent of photography. There are probably more than 130 known pictures of Lincoln today, but certainly there are a couple in an anonymous American attic somewhere, waiting to be discovered. A great many of the 130 are in this book, prompting each of us to ask: When I look at Lincoln, what do I see?

Beyond the photos, there are the words. Allen C. Guelzo is the Henry R. Luce III Professor of the Civil War Era at Gettysburg College in Pennsylvania and last year was awarded the inaugural Guggenheim-Lehrman Prize in Military History for his book Gettysburg: The Last Invasion, which was not his first full-length look at either Lincoln or the Civil War. Guelzo’s riveting and insightful biography of Lincoln winds throughout our book. Henry Louis Gates Jr. has written widely on Lincoln, slavery and the African American experience and has discussed these subjects often on television, and his foreword leads us in.

To help us navigate this most important of American stories, there is a timeline, presented beginning on page 16, of Lincoln’s life and continued legacy.

All of it amounts to something that, as Professor Gates will begin to explain on the pages immediately following, remains vitally important to us all 150 years after Lincoln’s death.

His was an impossible story.

And our story is impossible without him.