On November 6, 1860, Abraham Lincoln sat in a Springfield telegraph office waiting for returns from the East. When Ohio came in, he walked home, lay down on a sofa, and looked at his reflection across the room. He saw two faces: one clear, one ghostly. Mary interpreted the double image as a sign he would win a second term but not survive it. It is the kind of story that attaches to Lincoln because it captures something real.

This Abraham Lincoln biography traces the full arc of a life so compressed and consequential that Americans have never stopped arguing about what it means. Historian Theodore Bentham Ross follows Lincoln from the log cabin on Nolin Creek in Hardin County, Kentucky, through the Illinois frontier self-education, the Eighth Judicial Circuit, the Lincoln-Douglas debates, the Civil War presidency, the Gettysburg Address, and Ford's Theatre on Good Friday 1865 — including the contested racial legacy and the honest reckoning with Lincoln's unfinished work.

Inside this Abraham Lincoln biography:

• Frontier origins — the cabin at Sinking Spring, Nancy Hanks Lincoln's death from milk sickness in 1818, and the boy who calculated his schooling at less than one year and read Blackstone from the bottom of a barrel (Chapters 1-4)
• The Lincoln-Douglas debates — the Kansas-Nebraska Act that "aroused him as he had never been before," the 17,000-word Peoria speech, and the seven debates the country watched (Chapters 7-8)
• War president and the Emancipation Proclamation — the Team of Rivals cabinet, Lincoln's struggle through McClellan to Grant and Sherman, and the calculations behind January 1, 1863 (Chapters 13-15)
• The Gettysburg Address and the Second Inaugural — the 272-word speech that redefined the republic's founding commitment, and "With Malice Toward None" as a theology of national reckoning (Chapters 17, 20)
• Legacy and the long reckoning — Herndon's contested portrait, Marian Anderson at the Lincoln Memorial in 1939, King's 1963 invocation, and Lerone Bennett's challenge to the emancipation mythology (Chapters 22-24)

Lincoln was born in a dirt-floored Kentucky cabin and died in a borrowed bed across from Ford's Theatre. This Abraham Lincoln biography asks what he actually did, what it cost, and what the unfinished work he named at Gettysburg still requires of the republic he saved.

For readers of Doris Kearns Goodwin's TEAM OF RIVALS and David Herbert Donald's LINCOLN.