The Great Myth-Maker

Abraham Lincoln is America’s most mythologized president. The log cabin. The honest nickname. The man who freed the slaves. All partly true, and all carefully constructed. Lincoln was a brilliant politician who understood the power of image as well as any modern spin doctor.

He did not enter office as an abolitionist. In 1862 he told newspaperman Horace Greeley: “If I could save the Union without freeing any slave I would do it.” The Emancipation Proclamation came months later, issued partly as a moral statement and partly as a war measure to weaken Confederate labor. Both things were true at once.