On this episode of Nuts World, Abraham Lincoln is with the single exception of George Washington,

the most important president in American history. Without Lincoln, the Civil War would have

ended with the South leaving the Union with America broken. Without Lincoln, the moral basis

of freedom would never have been quite as articulate. Without Lincoln, so many things that we

take for granted would never have become true. I'm going to try to share with you the essence

of Lincoln, a man who is the most complex and probably the smartest person ever to occupy

the White House. What are the lessons of Lincoln? What is it about Lincoln that made him so

unusual, so effective, and so important? I've written four novels about the Civil War. I've

spent years studying Lincoln. I think that he is at the center of defining America.

Abraham Lincoln's rise to greatness is really the classic American story. The proof that you could

really have almost nothing. If you had ambition and determination and were willing to work really

hard, amazing things could happen. In 1809, Lincoln is born in Harden County, Kentucky, and he is

in a family that's very poor. They ultimately relocate to the frontier of Indiana, looking for

better land, looking for greater opportunity, but they're still very poor. When he's nine years

old, his mother, Nancy Hanks Lincoln dies of sickness. Year later, his father, Thomas Lincoln,

remarried to the widow, Sarah Bush, Johnston. That long stretch of being extremely poor, so poor,

that I think it's literally true, that Lincoln learned how to read by the fireplace because most

of the time wouldn't use candles, which are expensive. Famous historic pictures of Lincoln laying

in front of the fireplace, looking at books when he was very, very young, it's probable that in that

period, he'd never got more than about three years of formal education, but it was also a period

where people often didn't get much education. Often did not do a lot of reading. For his whole

life, he'll read. In fact, stories of Lincoln, when he was on the circuit, had his horse trained

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