In his acclaimed book Lincoln’s Virtues, William Lee Miller explored Abraham Lincoln’s intellectual and moral development. Now he completes his “ethical biography,” showing how the amiable and inexperienced backcountry politician was transformed by constitutional alchemy into an oath-bound head of state. Faced with a radical moral contradiction left by the nation’s Founders, Lincoln struggled to find a balance between the universal ideals of Equality and Liberty and the monstrous injustice of human slavery.

With wit and penetrating sensitivity, Miller brings together the great themes that have become Lincoln’s legacy–preserving the United States of America while ending the odious institution that corrupted the nation’s meaning–and illuminates his remarkable presidential combination: indomitable resolve and supreme magnanimity.