Abraham Lincoln — The Statesman

By his own reckoning Lincoln had about twelve months of formal schooling in his life, gathered a few weeks at a time in frontier Indiana. Everything else he taught himself: he read Euclid in his thirties to train his own reasoning, worked through Shakespeare and the King James Bible until their rhythms became his, and learned to write sentences that a farmer and a senator would both understand on first hearing.

It shows in how he argued. Where his contemporaries produced two-hour classical orations, Lincoln built a case the way a country lawyer builds one for a jury — plain words, short clauses, an image you cannot forget. A house divided against itself cannot stand. With malice toward none.

The statesman in the full-length portraits is a deliberate construction. He was six foot four in an age when that was extraordinary, awkward about it, and had spent his career being described in the press as a gorilla and a rail-splitter. Standing him upright beside a draped table in a dark suit was the visual argument that the frontier lawyer was a head of state.