Abraham Lincoln enters the American story as a silhouette before he becomes a figure—long-limbed, awkward, moving through a world of stumps and distances, carrying books as if they were tools and ideas as if they were debts. He is born in a Kentucky cabin that later generations will remake into a shrine and, later still, into a contested metaphor; his childhood is a short ledger of hard labor, thin schooling, and a frontier that measured intelligence by the quality of a fence. The family walks—first to Indiana, then to Illinois—because poverty is not merely a condition, it is an address, and sometimes the only way to improve it is to change the map. He grows in that American way: borrowing other men’s books, arguing with himself, turning chores into calisthenics for endurance, and discovering that his mind prefers the architecture of sentences to ...