The last best hope of earth

"Mark R. Neely, Jr., provides for the general reader the first compact biography of Abraham Lincoln based on new scholarship. There is no comparable, succinct work on this nation's greatest president." "The Last Best Hope of Earth vividly recaptures the central place of politics in Lincoln's life. In Illinois, Lincoln was an established and prosperous lawyer, married to a refined and educated southern belle, and the father of four boys. Throughout his life, however, politics remained his first love. In Neely's depiction of Lincoln, power was never sought for its own sake. Having triumphed over the hardscrabble circumstances of his youth in Kentucky and Indiana, Lincoln, early in his political career, tied his ambition to the search for solutions to the economic underdevelopment of the American West. And in the last eleven years of his life, Lincoln's political ambitions became yoked to a fierce nationalism and a keen moral purpose - the preservation of the Union and the demise of slavery. Lincoln could not remember a time when he did not hate slavery, or revere the federal system. He made his position clear in the decade leading up to his presidential election campaign, and a civil