Founders' Son: A Life of Abraham Lincoln

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As the biographer of James Madison, Alexander Hamilton, and George Washington, Richard Brookhiser brings to this unique Abraham Lincoln biography a razor-sharp sense of what the Great Emancipator would find in the works of our Founding Fathers. And find them he did. In fact, Brookhiser shows that Lincoln's deep commitment to those mentors' teaching shaped his character, his politics, and his conduct as president. Only as the carnage as the Civil War mounted did our commander in chief face a crisis that shook his convictions. (P.S. There have been more than 16,000 books about Lincoln published, but Founders' Son earns its place on the presidential bookshelf.)

Publishers Weekly

From the Publisher

Publishers Weekly
“Brookhiser excels in describing Lincoln’s political fights over government banks and in parsing his presidency in wartime – specifically, his detailed account of the complex evolution of the president’s views on slavery.”

Kirkus
“Brookhiser’s discussion of the second inaugural is genuinely moving and instructive. The narrative always smoothly returns, though, to the Founders and Lincoln’s unceasing attempt to divine their intentions and to examine the institutions they built and the opportunity they created for someone like him to thrive. For years now, Brookhiser has helped bring the Founders back to life, precisely Lincoln’s purpose as the president contemplated for his country a new birth of freedom, ‘the old freedom’ they envisioned in 1776 but couldn’t quite perfect.”

Library Journal
“Lincoln knew that history was both past and prologue, and he sought to appropriate the earlier age properly to guide the nation successfully through the Civil War. This highly accessible read will appeal most to readers who desire to learn more about Lincoln and especially the ideas, dogmas, and dreams that moved him to his public career and life in the White House.”

Alexander Rose, author of Washington’s Spies: The Story of America’s First Spy Ring
“Lincoln was not a conventional politician, and neither is Richard Brookhiser a conventional historian, nor, fittingly, is Founders’ Son a conventional biography. For the sixteenth president, as Brookhiser dazzlingly argues, ideas mattered—but never so much as when translated into action. Throughout Lincoln's life, the Founders served as his touchstones, their ideals his lodestars, and he dedicated himself to completing the task they had left unfinished; the destruction of slavery, that Damoclean Sword menacing the Republic since its creation, would be both his monument and his tomb. Founders’ Son is an ingenious intellectual biography, a work of the highest order written by one of our most creative historians about the most brilliant of our presidents.”

Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Alphonse Fletcher University Professor, Harvard University
“In his first inaugural, Abraham Lincoln spoke of the ‘mystic chords of memory’ that bound those about to fight a civil war over the meaning of union and liberty to those who had built a system of government on them during and after the Revolution. Distinguished historian Richard Brookhiser strikes those chords in Founders’ Son. In doing so, he reveals Lincoln to be not only a student of the past, but a leader with the mind and courage to redeem America’s first ‘birth of freedom’ with a new one, sealed in blood.”

John Boehner, Speaker of the House
“Abraham Lincoln is the most written-about man in American history, yet Richard Brookhiser, a historian and writer of extraordinary talent, has written an analysis that is lively, incisive, novel—and brilliant. This book reminds us of Lincoln’s reverence for the Founders, his ‘stubborn concern for first principles’ and—ultimately—the often-overlooked reverence for the Almighty God that guided him in America’s darkest hours.”

Allen Guelzo, author of Gettysburg: The Last Invasion
“In this sharply-etched portrait of Abraham Lincoln as the true heir of the Founders and their principles, Richard Brookhiser disposes of the reams of nonsense which have portrayed Lincoln as a sly provocateur who twisted the course of American government into a wholly different course. Just as Lincoln vindicated the Founders, Brookhiser vindicates Lincoln and offers us a statesman, not a politician, and one eminently worth imitating in today's politics.”

H. W. Brands, author of The Man Who Saved the Union: Ulysses Grant in War and Peace
“With the clarity and insight his readers have come to expect, Richard Brookhiser gives us the greatest American of the nineteenth century grappling with the greatest Americans of the eighteenth. A powerful, persuasive biography of the mind of Abraham Lincoln.”

Andrew Ferguson, author of Land of Lincoln: Adventures in Abe’s America
“It seems impossible, but it's true: no one has ever looked at Lincoln in quite this way before—and certainly not with Richard Brookhiser's graceful touch, sly wit, and deep historical knowledge. The Founders' foremost biographer has turned his eye to their greatest pupil, and everyone who cares about Lincoln (which should be everyone) will be grateful for it.”

George F. Will
“With characteristic elegance and economy, Richard Brookhiser demonstrates that Lincoln assured America a future by reconnecting the nation with its past. With, that is, the world-shaking egalitarianism of the Founders' natural-rights doctrine. Hence this book is—whether Brookhiser meant so or not—a primer on the great topic of present-day politics, the relevance of the Declaration of Independence as a manifesto for limited government.”

Library Journal

Kirkus Reviews