Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.

Lincoln has assumed so many aspects in memory that it is hard to recall first impressions. Growing up in a historian’s household at a time when Civil War veterans were still marching in Memorial Day parades, I suppose I saw him early on as the President who won the war and freed the slaves. Later I came to see him as a man from the bleakest of backgrounds who rose to heights of intellectual and moral grandeur, thereby wonderfully embodying the potentialities of the American Republic and the potentialities of democracy—and that is the way I see him today.