Abstract
Abraham Lincoln is one of the most famous Americans world-wide. What has made him so well known? For Americans, in the years after his death, he was famous as the Great Emancipator of slaves, but this was tainted for subsequent generations by the fate of the Negroes that Lincoln freed: they became re-bound under an era of legitimate apartheid. The Introduction looks at Lincoln's legacy and the man as he really was. The challenge of seeing the real Lincoln is compounded by the fact that he was an intensely private man who did not keep a dairy of any sort. He was a man of ideas and behind this shield of privacy his ideas can at least be glimpsed.
