The President who `freed' the slaves and held the Union together in the face of the slaveholding South's bid to create a separate Confederacy. The teller of ribald stories, and the author of the most sublime speeches in the English language. A clever, complex, secretive man who rose from frontier obscurity to become the central figure at the moment when the United States of America came close to disintegration. Was Lincoln the `Great Emancipator', whose wartime leadership helped free four million enslaved people? Or was he a nationalist who jumped late on the antislavery bandwagon? Was his intransigence the cause of much bloodshed? Or was he a pragmatist whose leadership minimised the destruction of the war?. This concise biography situates Lincoln in his time and place. A very human figure who, after his assassination by a leading Shakespearean actor, was turned into an icon.