A brilliant and novel examination of how Abraham Lincoln mastered the art of leadership, revealing how five men mentored an obscure lawyer with no executive experience to become American's greatest president.

"Gerhardt has devised an ingenious solution for demystifying America's most enigmatic president: examining the key people who influenced Lincoln as he developed his own unique skills and leadership style." (Russell L. Riley, UVA's Miller Center)

In 1849, when Abraham Lincoln returned to Springfield, Illinois, after two seemingly uninspiring years in the US House of Representatives, his political career appeared all but finished. His sense of failure was so great that friends worried about his sanity.

Yet within a decade, Lincoln would reenter politics, become a leader of the Republican Party, win the 1860 presidential election, and keep America together during its most perilous period. What accounted for the turnaround? As Michael Gerhardt reveals, Lincoln's reemergence followed the same path he had followed before, in which he read voraciously and learned from the successes, failures, oratory, and political maneuvering of a surprisingly diverse handful of men, some of whom he had never met but others of whom he knew intimately - Henry Clay, Andrew Jackson, Zachary Taylor, John Todd Stuart, and Orville Browning. From both their experiences and his, Lincoln learned valuable lessons on leadership, mastering party politics, campaigning, conventions, understanding and using executive power, managing a cabinet, speechwriting and oratory, and - what would become his most enduring legacy - developing policies and rhetoric to match a constitutional vision that spoke to the monumental challenges of his time.

Without these mentors, Abraham Lincoln would likely have remained a small-town lawyer - and without Lincoln, the United States as we know it may not have survived. This book tells the unique story of how Lincoln emerged from obscurity and learned how to lead.