jon meacham book tour 2022

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April 26, 2023

Presidential historian and Pulitzer Prize-winning author Jon Meacham is one of America’s most prominent public intellectuals. A contributor to TIME and The New York Times Book Review, Meacham is a highly sought-after commentator, regularly appearing on the televised news. Known as a skilled orator with a depth of knowledge about politics, religion, and current affairs, Meacham brings historical context to the issues and events impacting our daily lives.

Would you like to extend the Yakima Town Hall experience?  A little bubbly, a brunch, and a little more time with Maria Shriver and then Jon Meacham at the 4 th Street Theatre immediately following these two speaker events.   Upgrade by adding “Backstage Pass” for $299 which includes both events when you purchase your series tickets  – more info about the exclusive benefits of Backstage Pass Events can be found at  www.yakimatownhall.com  or by calling the Capitol Theatre now to purchase series tickets and Backstage Pass!  

Please call the Capitol Theatre box office at 509-853-ARTS(2787). Tickets are only available as a season set - even if speaker dates have passed.

For specific Yakima Town Hall questions, please refer to their web page:  https://www.yakimatownhall.com/index.html

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Author Interviews

Lincoln prioritized democracy over his political future. a new biography explains why.

Rachel Treisman

Abraham Lincoln signed the preliminary Emancipation Proclamation in September 1862. He issued the formal Emancipation Proclamation the following January. Lincoln was under tremendous pressure to withdraw emancipation as a precondition for peace talks with the Confederacy. Hulton Archive/Getty Images hide caption

Abraham Lincoln signed the preliminary Emancipation Proclamation in September 1862. He issued the formal Emancipation Proclamation the following January. Lincoln was under tremendous pressure to withdraw emancipation as a precondition for peace talks with the Confederacy.

A politician is up for reelection, holding firm to their moral convictions — however politically unpopular — in the pursuit of preserving an endangered democracy. Sound familiar?

A new biography by historian Jon Meacham examines the oft-discussed life and legacy of former President Abraham Lincoln through a very specific lens. American presidents continue to lionize Lincoln as a role model, Meacham says — and he would know, as a biographer of George H.W. Bush and occasional speechwriter for President Biden.

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In And There Was Light: Abraham Lincoln and the American Struggle, Meacham wasn't just interested in looking at what Lincoln did — he wanted to know why he did it. He focused especially on the president's pivotal decision to prioritize emancipation measures above his own political future in the lead-up to the 1864 election.

Lincoln couldn't have known that summer that he — or the Union — would emerge victorious, as Meacham tells Morning Edition co-host Steve Inskeep. In fact, his party had done badly in the midterm elections, and he had even written a private note forecasting his own defeat. But he followed his anti-slavery convictions nonetheless.

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"Lincoln was a politician, but he was a politician who ultimately was driven by conscience," Meacham says. "This is my entire argument in the book. If he had solely been a cynical political creature, he would have made radically different decisions at critical points."

For example, Lincoln could have decided not to vocally oppose a compromise in the winter of 1860 that would have preserved slavery, arguably for decades, Meacham says. He could have chosen not to fortify and fight over Fort Sumter .

And, as the 1864 election loomed, he could have given in to demands to withdraw emancipation as a precondition for peace talks with the Confederacy. Henry Raymond, the chairman of the Republican National Committee, came to the White House in August to urge Lincoln to change his stance to improve his odds of reelection. (The only emancipatory measure in the country at the time was the Emancipation Proclamation, a wartime measure that had not yet been codified in the Constitution).

Historian Jon Meacham, pictured during a discussion on Capitol Hill on the anniversary of the Jan. 6 attack, has authored a new book about the life and legacy of President Abraham Lincoln. Al Drago/Pool/AFP via Getty Images hide caption

Historian Jon Meacham, pictured during a discussion on Capitol Hill on the anniversary of the Jan. 6 attack, has authored a new book about the life and legacy of President Abraham Lincoln.

"He was under immense political pressure to say, 'We'll settle all that in due course,'" Meacham explains. "Well, guess what that meant: If the Confederacy came back, it would all be set and settled and slavery likely would have endured again. And Lincoln said no, that he had made his position clear. Ultimately, we would get the 13th Amendment a few months later, but he was willing to go down politically for that principle."

Lincoln's Evolving Thoughts On Slavery, And Freedom

Meacham adds that the lesson of Lincoln "is that if you send someone to the pinnacle of American power who has no conscience, who has no moral compass, then American democracy and the cause of liberty will suffer and possibly die."

Lincoln went on to win a second term (in an election that Meacham also notes included the first widespread use of absentee ballots). The Union soldiers stood with him, and the military tide turned. The following year saw the 13th Amendment — abolishing slavery — and, months later, Lincoln's assassination.

In an interview with Morning Edition , Meacham offers insights from the book and their relevance to readers today, more than a century after Lincoln's lifetime.

This conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.

Meacham, who won the Pulitzer Prize for his biography of Andrew Jackson, has turned his attention to Lincoln in a new book. Random House hide caption

Meacham, who won the Pulitzer Prize for his biography of Andrew Jackson, has turned his attention to Lincoln in a new book.

Interview highlights

On how Lincoln approached the summer of 1864:

He believed that slavery was wrong. He believed that he was right. He fundamentally understood that politics could not simply be about the amassing and keeping of power: It was about the amassing, keeping and utilization of power ... And I think the utility of it for us is not that he's perfect, but that here's a frail human being who didn't always get everything right, who in that critical hour transcended his limitations, transcended his ambitions, transcended his appetites, to do the right thing. And fortunately, it was rewarded by events. But he didn't know that.

Democracy, are you OK? What recent history tells us about the state of politics

On how people mixed religion and politics then:

The religious imagery and points of reference suffused the American experience then in a way that was so striking that in the second inaugural [address ] ... one of the great pieces of writing ever in the history of the English language, what does Lincoln say? Lincoln says that the Civil War came because of slavery and because slavery was a sin, and that God himself seemed to be adjudicating the weight of that sin in real time. It's a remarkable thing for an American president to say.

So religion was both a rallying cry — it provided a predicate for the north, for the anti-slavery forces — and let us be very clear, and this is resonant today: It also provided an intellectual prop to slave owners who wanted to believe that slavery was divinely ordained.

On how that compares with the role of religion in American politics now:

What is perennially frightening is that in American politics, in American culture ... people do claim divine sanction for what they want to do. And if you claim divine sanction for what you want to do, that makes compromise very difficult. If you believe you are doing God's work ... unless you do it with an immense amount of humility, that becomes a stumbling block within a democratic context in a way that is very, very troubling. At the same time, religion has been one of the great forces for reform and liberty in the country.

Is America a democracy or a republic? Yes, it is

My view of this, which I think is also the way Lincoln articulated, was that religion is going to be part of the human experience, in the same way economics are always a part, or geography. And so the question is how do you manage and marshal religious feeling, not try to remove it.

It requires this, this interesting balance. ... And that's why I think it's so important to follow that Lincoln example of a humble recognition that no human being has a monopoly on truth, but that there is a moral intuition, there is a conscience and you want to do everything you can to be in accord with this universal law of treating others as you would be treated. And that may sound simplistic, but I firmly believe and I argue this, that that was Lincoln's moral vision. And it also has the virtue of being a durable political vision.

On whether Meacham thinks another U.S. civil war is imminent:

Tragically, I think we will see more of civil chaos. I think we are going to see it with violence. I do not believe we're going to see the massing of great armies in the way we did in the 19th century. But we are at greater risk of that kind of civil conflict far more, I believe, than we were even in the early 1930s during the Depression, when there was such a lack of confidence in our institutions.

The NPR Politics Podcast

Is another civil war brewing in america.

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And part of it is that there is a passionate minority that is putting its own interests ahead of those of the nation. ... And without the capacity to both vote perhaps against your short-term interest, without the capacity to recognize that there is a larger force that requires your support of the Constitution over your narrow partisan interests, without that, then we will continue to descend into ever greater chaos.

But I'm fundamentally hopeful in this sense: We have stared into the abyss before, and just enough of us have decided to do the right thing. That doesn't mean that's going to happen again. And as Lincoln said about our better angels , those better angels won't prevail unless we enlist ourselves in the cause, too.

This interview was conducted by Steve Inskeep, produced by Lilly Quiroz and edited by Jacob Conrad.

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Literary Arts

Jon meacham: in-person & online.

Past Event: Sunday, October 30, 2022

At Town Hall Seattle—The Great Hall

In Person & Online

Meacham’s Lincoln is no prophet or saint, but no prophet or saint could have accomplished what he did.

Jon Meacham has given us a Lincoln for our perilous times, a story where slavery and racism are not an afterthought but are critical to understanding the man, the moment, and the contradictions at the heart of this fragile Republic.

An unflinching portrait of a not always admirable democrat but a pivotal president, written with an agile prose that brings the Jackson saga to life.

Although this event has passed, you can still buy a digital pass to watch the recording through Sunday, November 6 at 7:30 p.m. (PT). Pulitzer Prize–winning biographer Jon Meacham chronicles the life of Abraham Lincoln in And There Was Light , charting how—and why—he confronted secession, threats to democracy, and the tragedy of slavery to expand the possibilities of America. “Written with wisdom and grace, his story of Lincoln’s complex moral journey to Emancipation mirrors America’s long and troubled quest to live up to its founding ideals,” writes Doris Kearns Goodwin. Q&A with Margaret O’Mara, Professor of History at the University of Washington. Literary Arts Series subscriptions include a copy of And There Was Light , mailed to the subscriber’s door. Please note: complimentary subscriptions and single tickets do not include the book.

And There Was Light  tells the story of Lincoln from his birth on the Kentucky frontier in 1809 to his leadership during the Civil War to his tragic assassination in 1865: his rise, his self-education, his loves, his bouts of depression, his political failures, his deepening faith, and his persistent conviction that slavery must end. In a nation shaped by the courage of the enslaved of the era and by the brave witness of Black Americans, Lincoln’s story illustrates the ways and means of politics in a democracy, the roots and durability of racism, and the capacity of conscience to shape events.

A president who governed a divided country has much to teach us in a twenty-first-century moment of polarization and political crisis. Hated and hailed, excoriated and revered, Abraham Lincoln was at the pinnacle of American power when implacable secessionists gave no quarter in a clash of visions bound up with money, race, identity, and faith. In him we can see the possibilities of the presidency as well as its limitations.

Meacham is also the best-selling author of Thomas Jefferson: The Art of Power, American Lion: Andrew Jackson in the White House, Franklin and Winston, Destiny and Power: The American Odyssey of George Herbert Walker Bush, His Truth Is Marching On: John Lewis and the Power of Hope, as well as The Soul of America: The Battle for Our Better Angels .

In addition to his work as a prolific biographer, Meacham is a distinguished visiting professor at Vanderbilt University, a contributing writer for The New York Times Book Review , and a fellow of the Society of American Historians. Meacham lives in Nashville with his wife and children.

Margaret O’Mara is the Howard & Frances Keller Endowed Professor of History at the University of Washington. She writes and teaches about the growth of the high-tech economy, the history of U.S. politics, and the connections between the two. O’Mara is a leading historian of Silicon Valley and the author of two acclaimed books about the modern American technology industry: The Code: Silicon Valley and the Remaking of America  (Penguin Press, 2019) and  Cities of Knowledge: Cold War Science and the Search For The Next Silicon Valley   (Princeton, 2005). She also is a historian of the American presidency and author of  Pivotal Tuesdays: Four Elections that Shaped the Twentieth Century  (Penn Press, 2015). She is a coauthor, with David Kennedy and Lizabeth Cohen, of the widely used United States history college textbook,  The American Pageant (Cengage). O’Mara’s historical perspective on current events also has been seen and heard on a range of major broadcast television and radio outlets, including CNN, MSNBC, PBS, BBC, CBC, and NPR. Prior to her academic career, she served in the Clinton Administration, working on economic and social policy in the White House and in the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. She lives outside Seattle with her husband Jeff, two teenage daughters, and world’s best dog.

Jon Meacham on The Daily Show with Trevor Noah

Jon Meacham on TODAY , discussing his documentary “The Soul of America”

Jon Meacham on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert

Event Details

Town hall seattle—the great hall.

1119 8th Ave Seattle, WA 98101

View directions.

Know Before You Go

COVID-19 Policies

The safety of our patrons, artists, community partners, staff, and volunteers continues to be important to us. At this time, facial masks are encouraged but not required for entry, and proof of vaccination or negative COVID-19 test is no longer required.  However, health and safety protocols are subject to change. Before attending events, please check your pre-event email for the most up-to-date information.

Can't find your tickets?

All tickets have been emailed for this event, so be sure to check your inbox for an email from [email protected] . Call us at 206-621-2230 x10 if you can’t find them.

For in-person attendance: Your e-tickets come attached in a PDF with your ticket order confirmation email.Present on your mobile device or bring your printed ticket to the venue the night of the event. Check your pre-event email for details on COVID safety precautions.

For online attendance: If you purchased a digital pass, SAL will send a pre-event reminder email with instructions to log in and access the online stream two days before the event. The night of your event, return to lectures.org/event/jon-meacham  and enter the password where prompted. The program begins at 7:30 p.m. (PT) and will be available for viewing for a week after the event.

SAL will also send an email the day of the event, containing the same information. If you have opted out of receiving SAL emails, you will miss this important information—please email us at  [email protected]  and we will assist you.

Have a question for the speaker?

Want to ask the author something? Send your question to SAL at [email protected] —it might be asked onstage!

Literary Arts Series, Create Your Own Series, & Super SAL subscriptions include a copy of And There Was Light , mailed to the subscriber’s door. Please note: complimentary subscriptions and single tickets do not include the book.

Our partner bookstore, University Book Store , will have books available for purchase at their table in the lobby and on their website.

Patrons & Grand Patrons, Have a Drink on SAL!

Patron & Grand Patron seating includes a pre-event drink ticket! Check your pre-event email for details.

Transportation & Parking

Town Hall Seattle is centrally located at 1119 8th Ave, on the corner of 8th and Seneca. Their venue is served by frequent bus routes, is near access to light rail stations, and close to a number of parking options nearby. Please see their website for more details.

Accessibility

Open Captioning is an option for people who have hearing losses, where a captioning screen displaying the words that are spoken or sung is placed on stage. To make a request for open captioning, please contact us at [email protected] or 206.621.2230×10. Please note: for in-person events at Town Hall Seattle, we appreciate a two-week advance notice to allow us time to secure captioning services. 

Closed Captioning is an option for people who have hearing loss, where captioning displays the words that are spoken or sung at the bottom of the video for online events. Captioning is available for all online events; click the “CC” button to view captions during the event.

Assistive Listening Devices (ALDs) are devices that people with hearing loss use in conjunction with their hearing device (hearing aids or cochlear implants). Town Hall Seattle has a hearing loop system, so you can switch your T-coil hearing aid to telecoil to have the stage’s microphones transmitted directly to your hearing aids. To pick up a headset, check in with any Town Hall usher when you arrive.

Sign Language Interpretation is available upon request for Deaf, DeafBlind, and hard of hearing individuals. To make a request for interpretation, please contact us at [email protected] or 206.621.2230×10, or select “Sign Language Interpretation” from the Accessibility section during your ticket checkout process and we will contact you to confirm details. Please note: we appreciate a two-week advance notice to allow us time to secure interpretation.

Wheelchair Accessible Seating and Accessible Restrooms are available in all sections at Town Hall Seattle, which is fully accessible to ticket holders with physical mobility concerns. Town Hall Seattle recommends that visitors use the 8th Avenue Entrance for events in the Great Hall, and elevators with Braille signage go to all levels within the Hall. The venue has all-gender, ADA-accessible restrooms on the lobby and Forum level. To reserve seating for a specific mobility concern, please contact us at [email protected] or 206.621.2230×10, or select “Wheelchair Accessible or Alternative Seating Options” during ticket checkout, and we will contact you to confirm details. For more details on accessibility features at Town Hall, click here .

Guide and service dogs are welcome.

All-gender restrooms are available.

We are pleased to offer these accessibility services at our venues, and they are provided at no additional cost to ticket holders.  Please contact us with any questions and feedback about how we can be more accessible and inclusive. Our Patron Services Manager is available at  [email protected] , or Monday-Friday from 10:00am – 5:00pm at 206.621.2230×10.

For more accessibility information, please head to  lectures.org/accessibility.  If you would like to make  accessibility arrangements you do not see listed here,  please contact our box office or select “Other Accommodations” from the Accessibility section during your ticket checkout process, and we will contact you to confirm details.

Literary Arts Series Sponsor

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Jon Meacham

Jon Meacham holds the Carolyn T. and Robert M. Rogers Chair in the American Presidency at Vanderbilt University, where he is also a distinguished visiting professor and co-chairs the Vanderbilt Project on Unity & Democracy. A biographer and contributing editor at Time , he lectures widely in the United States on history, politics, and religious faith, and is the Canon Historian of Washington National Cathedral. In 2020, Meacham was a visiting lecturer at American Baptist College in Nashville, Tennessee.

He is the author of numerous New York Times bestsellers, including His Truth Is Marching On: John Lewis and the Power of Hope ; The Soul of America: The Battle for Our Better Angels ; The Hope of Glory: Reflections on the Last Words of Jesus from the Cross ; Songs of America: Patriotism, Protest, and the Music That Made a Nation (with Tim McGraw); Destiny and Power: The American Odyssey of George Herbert Walker Bush ; Thomas Jefferson: The Art of Power ; American Gospel: God, the Founding Fathers, and the Making of a Nation ; Franklin and Winston: An Intimate Portrait of an Epic Friendship . He is the editor of two volumes: Voices in Our Blood: America’s Best on the Civil Rights Movement and In the Hands of the People , an anthology of Thomas Jefferson’s writings.

Meacham’s   And There Was Light: Abraham Lincoln and the American Struggle  was published in October 2022. It spent 16 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list and has been honored with the Richard Nelson Current Award of the Lincoln Forum; the Gilder Lehrman Lincoln Prize (a co-winner with Jonathan W. White’s A House Built by Slaves ); the Barondess/Lincoln Award of the Civil War Roundtable of New York; the Annual Award of Achievement of the Lincoln Group of New York; and the 2023 Abraham Lincoln Institute Book Award.

Meacham’s American Lion: Andrew Jackson in the White House was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for biography in 2009; the book was cited as an “unlikely portrait of a not always admirable democrat, but a pivotal president, written with an agile prose that brings the Jackson saga to life.” 

A member of the Council on Foreign Relations and of the Society of American Historians, Meacham has written for  The New York Times ,  The Washington Post ,  Vanity Fair , and  Garden & Gun . Meacham is also a regular guest on “Morning Joe” and other broadcasts.

Meacham’s biography of President Bush was named one of the ten best books of the year by  The Washington Post  and one of the best books of the year by  The New York Times Book Review ,  Time , National Public Radio, and the  St. Louis Post-Dispatch. Destiny and Power was also honored for excellence in “Politics and Leadership” in 2015 by the Plutarch Committee of BIO, the Biographers International Organization.

Thomas Jefferson: The Art of Power received the 2013 Fraunces Tavern Museum Book Award from the Fraunces Tavern Museum and the Sons of the American Revolution in the State of New York, a prize that “recognizes books of exceptional merit written on the Revolutionary War era.”  Franklin and Winston  was honored with the Colby Award of the William E. Colby Military Writers’ Symposium at Norwich University. Meacham was also honored with the 2015 Nashville Public Library Literary Award; other winners include John Lewis, Robert K. Massie, Margaret Atwood, John McPhee, Billy Collins, Doris Kearns Goodwin, John Irving, Ann Patchett, John Updike, David McCullough, and David Halberstam.

A former executive editor at Random House, he published the letters of Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., and books by, among others, Al Gore, John Danforth, Mary Soames, and Charles Peters. After serving as Managing Editor of  Newsweek  for eight years, Meacham was the Editor of the magazine from 2006 to 2010. He is a former editor of  The Washington Monthly and began his career at  The Chattanooga Times .

Born in Chattanooga in 1969, Meacham was educated at St. Nicholas School, The McCallie School, and graduated in 1991 from The University of the South in Sewanee, Tennessee, with a degree  summa cum laude  in English Literature; he was salutatorian and elected to Phi Beta Kappa.

He has served as a trustee of the Thomas Jefferson Foundation, whose board he chaired, of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History, of The New-York Historical Society, of The McCallie School, and of The Harpeth Hall School. Meacham chaired the National Advisory Council of the John C. Danforth Center on Religion and Politics at Washington University. He has served on the vestries of St. Thomas Church Fifth Avenue and of Trinity Church Wall Street as well as the Board of Trustees and the Board of Regents of The University of the South. The Anti-Defamation League awarded Meacham its Hubert H. Humphrey First Amendment Prize. In 2013 the Historical Society of Pennsylvania presented him with its Founder’s Award; in 2016 he was honored with the Sandra Day O’Connor Institute’s Spirit of Democracy Award; in 2017 he was made a Churchill Fellow of Westminster College, Fulton, Missouri, in services at the Church of St. Mary the Virgin. In 2021, the National Archives awarded Meacham its Records of Achievement Award; in 2022, he was honored, with Annette Gordon-Reed, with the Aspen Institute’s Public Service Award. Meacham also received an honorary Doctor of Humane Letters degree from the Berkeley Divinity School at Yale University in 2005 and holds honorary doctorates from Williams College, Middlebury College, Wake Forest University, the University of Tennessee, Dickinson College, Sewanee, Loyola New Orleans, Loyola Baltimore, Millsaps College, and several other institutions.

He lives in Nashville and in Sewanee with his wife and children.

Jon Meacham & David Blight in Conversation

About this Event

Jon Meacham discusses his new book And There Was Light: Abraham Lincoln and the American Struggle with fellow author and historian David Blight. This program was part of the Kentucky Book Festival on October 29.

Author + Speaker Lineup

Jon Meacham is a Pulitzer Prize–winning biographer. The Rogers Chair in the American Presidency at Vanderbilt University, he is the author of the New York Times bestsellers His Truth Is Marching On: John Lewis and the Power of Hope, Destiny and Power: The American Odyssey of George Herbert Walker Bush, Thomas Jefferson: The Art of Power, American Lion: Andrew Jackson in the White House, American Gospel, and Franklin and Winston.

And There Was Light: Abraham Lincoln and the American Struggle

David W. Blight is a teacher, scholar and award-winning public historian. He is Sterling Professor of History at Yale University and Director of the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition.

Professor Blight’s most recent book, Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom, won nine book awards, including the Pulitzer Prize. Blight previously taught at Amherst College for thirteen years. In 2013-14 he was the William Pitt Professor of American History at Cambridge University. David works in many capacities in the world of public history, including on boards of museums and historical societies, and as an advisor to the 9/11 Memorial and Museum team of curators. In 2012, he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom

Thanks so much to all who attended this year’s festival! Please provide feedback about your experience by submitting a survey. 

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An Evening with Jon Meacham Set for April 21, 2022

Knoxville, Tennessee, April 1, 2022

By: Emily McGee

Lincoln Memorial University Duncan School of Law (LMU Law) and the East Tennessee Historical Society (ETHS) will host “An Evening with Jon Meacham” on Thursday, April 21, 2022, in the Bijou Theatre.

Tickets already purchased for the event will be honored. Please contact the Bijou Theatre box office for more information. This event is sold out and tickets are no longer available for purchase.

Presidential historian and Pulitzer Prize-winning author Jon Meacham is one of America's most prominent public intellectuals. A contributor to  TIME  and  The New York Times Book Review , Meacham is a highly sought-after commentator, regularly appearing on CNN and other news outlets. A skilled orator with a depth of knowledge about politics, religion, and current affairs, Meacham has the unique ability to bring history to life and offer historical context to current events and issues impacting our daily lives - whether we realize it or not - to audiences of all backgrounds and levels of understanding.

A contributing editor at  TIME , Meacham writes for the magazine’s "Ideas" section. He also pens “The Long View” column in  The New York Times Book Review  in which he “looks back at books that speak to our current historical and cultural moment.” He served as  Newsweek 's managing editor from 1998 to 2006 and editor from 2006 to 2010.  The New York Times  called him “one of the most influential editors in the news magazine business.”  

In 2020, Meacham released two podcasts with the History Channel: Hope Through History and It Was Said. Narrated and written by Meacham, season two of the critically acclaimed Hope Through History podcast explores some of the most historic and trying times in American History, how the nation dealt with the impact of these moments, and how we came through these moments a more unified nation. It Was Said, tells the stories of those crucial words, taking listeners back to inflection points ranging from the McCarthy era to our present time through the real-time rhetoric that shaped and suffused America as the country struggled through storm and strife. It Was Said captures the nation we've been, and points ahead to the nation we hope to become.

Meacham is the author of multiple  New York Times  bestsellers including,  Songs of America , which is a celebration of the music that helped shape a nation. Co-written by musician Tim McGraw,  Songs of America  was praised as “a glorious celebration of our diversity” by Quincy Jones and an “unusually well-written and moving story” by Ken Burns. Another #1  New York Times  bestseller,  The Soul of America: The Battle for Our Better Angels , examines the present moment in American politics and life by looking back at critical times in U.S. history when hope overcame division and fear. In 2020, he released,  His Truth Is Marching On: John Lewis and the Power of Hope  - an intimate and revealing portrait of civil rights icon and longtime U.S. congressman John Lewis and quickly gained bestseller status. 

Meacham's Presidential biography of George H. W. Bush,  Destiny and Power: The American Odyssey of George Herbert Walker Bush , debuted at #1 on the  New York Times  bestsellers list. According to the  Times , “ Destiny and Power  reflect the qualities of both subject and biographer: judicious, balanced, deliberative, with a deep appreciation of history and the personalities who shape it.” He is a co-author of  Impeachment: An American History,  which reveals the complicated motives behind the three impeachments in U.S. history. A #1  New York Times  bestseller,  Thomas Jefferson: The Art of Power  was hailed as "masterful and intimate" by  Fortune  magazine. Meacham's other national bestsellers include  Franklin and Winston ,  American Gospel , and  American Lion: Andrew Jackson in the White House , which won the Pulitzer Prize in 2009.

Meacham is a frequent guest on  Morning Joe ;  Real Time with Bill Maher; The 11th Hour, and was featured in Ken Burns’ documentary series  The Roosevelts: An Intimate History . In 2015, Fox News  produced an hour-long special about Meacham’s  Destiny and Power .

Named a “Global Leader for Tomorrow” by the World Economic Forum, he is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and a fellow of the Society of American Historians. Meacham is a distinguished visiting professor at Vanderbilt University where he holds the Rogers Chair in the American Presidency. His latest book, And There Was Light: Abraham Lincoln and the American Experiment, will be published in the fall of 2022.

Patrons including KaTom, Ihop, Haslam Family Foundation, Lawler Wood, Bill and Crissy Haslam and DeRoyal make the presentation possible.

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And There Was Light

Abraham Lincoln and the American Struggle

By Jon Meacham

By jon meacham read by jon meacham, category: political figure biographies & memoirs | 19th century u.s. history | civil war history, category: political figure biographies & memoirs | 19th century u.s. history | civil war history | audiobooks.

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About And There Was Light

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • Pulitzer Prize–winning biographer Jon Meacham chronicles the life of Abraham Lincoln, charting how—and why—he confronted secession, threats to democracy, and the tragedy of slavery to expand the possibilities of America. “Meacham has given us the Lincoln for our time.”—Henry Louis Gates, Jr. Winner of the Gilder Lehrman Lincoln Prize • Longlisted for the Biographers International Plutarch Award • One of the Best Books of the Year: The Christian Science Monitor, Kirkus Reviews A president who governed a divided country has much to teach us in a twenty-first-century moment of polarization and political crisis. Hated and hailed, excoriated and revered, Abraham Lincoln was at the pinnacle of American power when implacable secessionists gave no quarter in a clash of visions bound up with money, race, identity, and faith. In him we can see the possibilities of the presidency as well as its limitations. At once familiar and elusive, Lincoln tends to be seen as the greatest of American presidents—a remote icon—or as a politician driven more by calculation than by conviction. This illuminating new portrait gives us a very human Lincoln—an imperfect man whose moral antislavery commitment, essential to the story of justice in America, began as he grew up in an antislavery Baptist community; who insisted that slavery was a moral evil; and who sought, as he put it, to do right as God gave him to see the right. This book tells the story of Lincoln from his birth on the Kentucky frontier in 1809 to his leadership during the Civil War to his tragic assassination in 1865: his rise, his self-education, his loves, his bouts of depression, his political failures, his deepening faith, and his persistent conviction that slavery must end. In a nation shaped by the courage of the enslaved of the era and by the brave witness of Black Americans, Lincoln’s story illustrates the ways and means of politics in a democracy, the roots and durability of racism, and the capacity of conscience to shape events.

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About Jon Meacham

Jon Meacham is a Pulitzer Prize–winning biographer. The author of the New York Times bestsellers Thomas Jefferson: The Art of Power, American Lion: Andrew Jackson in the White House, Franklin and Winston, Destiny and Power: The American Odyssey of George Herbert Walker Bush, and The Soul of… More about Jon Meacham

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Category: political figure biographies & memoirs | 19th century u.s. history | civil war history, category: political figure biographies & memoirs | 19th century u.s. history | civil war history | audiobooks, you may also like.

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“In his captivating new book, Jon Meacham has given us the Lincoln for our time. And There Was Light brilliantly interweaves the best of gripping narrative history with a deeper search for the complex interplay among morality, politics, and power in a life, in a democracy, and in an America ripped apart over slavery. Here Meacham takes us to the heart of the president who shaped events at ‘the existential hour.’ In doing so, he fortifies us to meet our own.” —Henry Louis Gates, Jr. “Biography at its best, the great historian Barbara Tuchman wrote, paints an intimate portrait of an individual which simultaneously provides a sweeping view of history. With this deep, compelling work, Jon Meacham has achieved this gold standard. Written with wisdom and grace, his story of Lincoln’s complex moral journey to Emancipation mirrors America’s long quest to live up to its founding ideals.” —Doris Kearns Goodwin “With his singular gift for compelling narrative and groundbreaking analysis, Jon Meacham illuminates not only Lincoln and his times but, just as much, the troubled society that we live in today.” —Michael Beschloss “Jon Meacham has given us a Lincoln for our perilous times, a story in which slavery and racism are not an afterthought. You will not find any recourse to myth or legend in these pages. With the elegance of his pen and the power of story, Meacham draws a portrait of a complex man who answered the call of history.” —Eddie S. Glaude, Jr. “Jon Meacham’s acute understanding of American politics yields a singularly illuminating portrait of the greatest political leader in our history. Meacham’s Lincoln is no prophet or saint, but no prophet or saint could have accomplished what he did.” —Sean Wilentz “A masterful, highly readable biography . . . In an era when autocracy is on the march, this timely book sheds a bright light on Lincoln’s role as a paladin and vindicator of democracy.” —Michael Burlingame “So much more than another account of Abraham Lincoln’s life, Jon Meacham’s profound new biography dives into Lincoln’s very soul, and the result is one of the most compelling and absorbing portraits ever crafted. This book instantly takes its place at the forefront of the Lincoln literature.” —Harold Holzer “An essential, eminently readable volume for anyone interested in Lincoln and his era.” — Kirkus Reviews (starred review) “Pulitzer winner Meacham more than justifies yet another Lincoln biography. . . . Nuanced and captivating . . . drawing sharp parallels to Lincoln’s battles against ‘an implacable minority’ . . . and today’s moment of polarization . . . For Meacham, Lincoln is above all ‘an example of how even the most imperfect of peoples . . . can bend the arc of the universe toward justice. . . . Richly detailed and gracefully written.” —Publishers Weekly

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In Jon Meacham’s biography, Lincoln is a guiding light for our times

Every generation gets its own Abraham Lincoln biography. But if time seems to move faster these days, then perhaps it is altogether fitting and proper that our generation should have so many. The latest — Pulitzer Prize winner Jon Meacham’s “ And There Was Light: Abraham Lincoln and the American Struggle ” — offers an account of the life of the United States’ 16th president that is worldly and spiritual, and carefully tailored to suit our conflict-ridden times.

Meacham bids to be the redeemer in chief of the narrative of American exceptionalism: the venerable if now-shopworn story in which the United States has a providential and world-historic role as a nation distinctively dedicated to human liberty. He is almost certainly the most well-connected presidential biographer of the moment. His 2008 biography of Andrew Jackson, “ American Lion ,” won a Pulitzer Prize for balancing Jackson’s many faults, including his relentless efforts to destroy Native American Indian tribes, with his success in holding together a country whose “ protections and promises ,” as Meacham asserted, eventually extended to all. Meacham’s 2015 biography of George H.W. Bush, “ Destiny and Power ,” maintained a respectable critical distance while treating his subject with sufficient dignity that the Bush family asked him to deliver the eulogy at the National Cathedral . His 2018 book “ The Soul of America ,” a spirited defense of the promise of America for the Trump years, captured the attention of Joe Biden, who used the title as a catch phrase in his 2020 presidential campaign while relying on Meacham for speechwriting counsel. Biden gave Meacham a coveted four-minute slot on the final evening of the Democratic National Convention. Since Biden’s election, Meacham has been something of an insider historian for the White House, helping to organize occasional dinners with historians at which the president seeks to take stock of the historical moment.

Meacham’s new Lincoln is not just a text; it is an event. The book aims to recraft a usable mythology of Lincoln for political leaders in the 21st century, when dissension and loose talk of civil war have returned. It is thoroughly researched and highly readable, written with all the artful craftsmanship of a veteran writer and editor. The book is not especially long for a contemporary biography; it clocks in at just over 400 pages of text. But it boasts more than 200 additional pages of endnotes and bibliography in support of an interpretation of Lincoln that focuses on the moral life of the politician and statesman. Lincoln’s hardscrabble log-cabin childhood and his marriage to the oft-troubled Mary Todd appear. So do scars from the childhood deaths of two of their four sons. But in Meacham’s treatment, such personal details function as supporting pieces in a story designed around high-stakes campaign speeches, the constitutive ritual of inaugurations and grave moments of statesmanship.

Two big ideas about Lincoln and politics animate the book. The first is that statecraft, when practiced as Lincoln practiced it, is a noble art. For all the sordid pettiness of modern partisanship, and for all the venal corruptions of political life, Meacham’s account of the life of Lincoln aims to persuade us that leadership in a democracy is a distinctive and indispensable moral enterprise — a kind of high-wire act of pragmatic compromise on the one hand and moral principle on the other. The practice redeems itself, Meacham contends, when the moral calculus nets out positive.

Consider the famous Lincoln-Douglas debates, in which Lincoln, as the anti-slavery Republican candidate for an Illinois seat in the U.S. Senate in 1858, challenged the incumbent Democrat, Stephen Douglas, to a series of seven debates. Douglas, who would soon be the Democratic Party’s nominee for the presidency, disparaged Black people as inferior and treated them as mere property rather than people. He insisted that new Western states should be open to slavery if White voters in those states so chose, a view he called “popular sovereignty.”

Lincoln, by contrast, was implacable in his resistance to the spread of slavery into Western territories. He insisted that Black people were “entitled to all the natural rights” of the Declaration of Independence. But as Meacham painstakingly describes, Lincoln was “not a full-time reformer but an office-seeker,” not “a preacher but a politician.” What that meant in practice was that he leavened his moral commitments with the prejudices of those he hoped to represent. On speaker’s platforms in Illinois, Lincoln renounced the idea of “political and social equality between the white and the black races.” When he described slavery’s wrongfulness, he focused on its threat to White voters and their families. “It is far easier to convince the multitude that Slavery is a baleful evil to them,” he later explained, “than to possess them with the idea that it is a cruel wrong to the enslaved.”

From early in his life, to be sure, Lincoln believed that slavery was wrong. “ If slavery is not wrong, nothing is wrong ,” he wrote in 1864, adding, “I can not remember when I did not so think, and feel.” But Lincoln disappointed abolitionists time and again. He deferred emancipation until the third year of the war, and even then he relied on military necessity rather than the justice of the thing as the basis for his decision. Lincoln doubted that White and Black communities could live together; he endorsed what he called “separation of the races.” He pursued cruel and desperate colonization schemes to send the country’s Black population to Liberia, the West Indies or South America. In December 1862, Lincoln even proposed a settlement of the Civil War that would have guaranteed slavery’s persistence in the South until the 20th century.

Lincoln’s compromises with evil were so grave that prominent abolitionists — the Black leader Frederick Douglass, women’s movement advocate Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Massachusetts orator Wendell Phillips among them — endorsed John Fremont as a rival presidential candidate in the 1864 election. Meacham is impatient with such radicals. Lincoln, he contends, could not both lead sinners to a better world and live apart from them.

The second theme of Meacham’s biography is the vitality of religious faith as a guiding force in politics, even and perhaps especially in moments of acute pressure. Many a past biographer has observed that Lincoln understood himself as an actor in a providential drama. Meacham agrees. Douglass’s searing 1852 address on the contradictory legacies of the Declaration of Independence for Black America invoked the Book of Genesis. Douglass resolved that God’s edict “Let there be Light” had “not yet spent its force.” In Meacham’s telling, “It fell to Abraham Lincoln to shed that light in the darkest of hours.”

Meacham’s lucid account nicely captures the religious framework with which Lincoln approached the most difficult decisions of his presidency. Deciding on emancipation in the summer of 1862, Lincoln resolved that he would do “whatever shall appear to be God’s will.” But how to discern the will of God? “These are not … the days of miracles,” he told two pastors from Chicago. Religious leaders, he pointed out, urged him down divergent paths. Some insisted that Christianity’s ethic of love required the immediate abolition of slavery. Others cited the Bible’s story of original sin and observed that Christianity had coexisted with slavery for 2,000 years. Ultimately, Lincoln found worldly evidence of God’s plan on the battlefield at Antietam in Maryland. The president, recalled Secretary of the Navy Gideon Welles, “made a vow — a covenant — that if God gave us the victory in the approaching battle, he would consider it an indication of Divine will.” When Union forces repelled Robert E. Lee’s invasion of the North, in a battle that killed or wounded 23,000 men in a single day, Lincoln read the grim victory as a sign. His Emancipation Proclamation, issued five days later, decisively turned the war for the Union into a war against slavery.

But Meacham is not content to rest at a description of Lincoln’s psychology. He takes the point a step further. “To Lincoln,” he writes, “God whispered His will through conscience, calling humankind to live in accord with the laws of love.” There is no endnote for this, no bibliographical support, because how could there be? Meacham offers us a Lincoln who is a modern Moses, a prophet carrying out in mysterious ways the inscrutable will of God and leading a New Testament Israel through the wilderness to rescue an “experiment in liberty under law.” Meacham is a man of faith as much as his subject.

The belief that God has chosen a nation to carry forward the plan of history has been a dangerous tenet for millennia. The Old Testament’s genocides illustrate the point, as do those of the New World (in which Lincoln himself played a modest part), not to mention the many religiously inflected crises of violence around the world today. The conceit of “manifest destiny” helped produce an American empire whose structure remains today at odds with basic ideals of liberty and equality. Meacham’s contention nonetheless is that in the right dose, and with the appropriately humble human agents, faith supplies a moral framework adequate to our gravest moments. At the very least, faith offered Lincoln a language for communicating seriousness of purpose. It’s fair to say that it offers Meacham the same.

In the end, Meacham makes a good case for Lincoln’s calculus of noble compromise. Capitulation would have either preserved slavery in the United States for decades, or created a new and aggressive slaveholding empire in the Americas. After his death, even his erstwhile abolitionist critics came around: “I see now the wisdom of his course,” said Stanton. He was “the black man’s President,” decided Douglass. W.E.B. Du Bois would later call him the “greatest figure of the nineteenth century.”

Meacham’s pitch is that Lincoln’s politics of compromise and faith would serve us well today. As a biographer, he is exquisitely attuned to the resonances between 21st-century polarization and the life of “a president who led a divided country” a century and a half ago. He dwells on Vice President John Breckinridge’s courageous decision to carry out the electoral college count faithfully in February 1861, just as Vice President Mike Pence did in January 2021. With an eye toward the Trumpian “big lie” about the 2020 election results, Meacham observes that Lincoln pledged publicly to respect the outcome in 1864 even though success for Democrat George McClellan would have reversed emancipation. The entire book is about rebellion by a White national minority chafing against the Declaration of Independence’s commitment to equality for all people. Lincoln’s experience reverberates into our own era of anxious White voters and new threats of insurrection.

Ultimately, “And There Was Light” stands for the claim that the demigods of American historical mythology, Lincoln foremost among them, can help us carve paths through our forbidding 21st-century wilderness. But can Lincoln do the work Meacham sets for him? Can a man who took part in the final genocidal clash of White settlers with Indians east of the Mississippi rally a multiethnic democracy to the flag? Can a man who opposed Black citizenship until the end of his life mobilize a diverse coalition of voters? What, moreover, does Lincoln’s moral North Star — the Declaration’s ringing promise of equality for all — mean today? Does it mean higher progressive tax rates for the 1 percent, or perhaps more student debt relief? Does it mean an end to race-based government action, or a rededication of the nation to the principle that Black lives matter? Is the next Lincoln a teenager who wants action on climate change — but is prepared to make compromises in bringing the world closer to carbon neutrality?

Faced with such challenges, we owe it to one another to pray we do our best. And that is Meacham’s deadly serious point.

John Fabian Witt teaches law and history at Yale and is the author, most recently, of “ American Contagions: Epidemics and the Law From Smallpox to Covid-19 .” He won the Bancroft Prize for “ Lincoln’s Code: The Laws of War in American History .”

And There Was Light

Abraham Lincoln and the American Struggle

By Jon Meacham

Random House. 676 pp. $40

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