"More has been written about Abraham Lincoln than about any other American. Yet very little of this literature sees Lincoln as he was in his times - as a man of ideas, as a man of deep intellectual curiosity about the raging political and economic debates in nineteenth-century America, and as a textbook Victorian "doubter" who could not believe as an orthodox Christian yet could not be easy in his unbelief. This truly fresh look at the nation's sixteenth president offers the first "intellectual biography" of a man whose grasp of the powerful currents of religion, philosophy, and political economy shaped not only the outcome of a great civil war but also the outlines of American national development for the following generation."--Jacket.