Abraham Lincoln is one of my great heroes.  Today on his birthday, I pleased to share new things I learned about him this year.

When Albert Kaplan bought this daguerreotype, Portrait of a Young Man in 1977, it reminded him of Lincoln somehow.    Years later, he appears to have proved that it is a portrait of a young Lincoln with authentication both scholarly and authoritative available at Lincolnportrait.com

As a young man, Lincoln was not particularly religious.  He never joined a church, was never baptized and never made any profession of belief.    Yet, something happened to change his mind.  In President Lincoln’s Secret, Professor Allen Guelzo writes

Lincoln’s election to the presidency, just in time to see the country fall into civil war, presented him with a different set of challenges to his meager stock of religious belief. Lincoln expected a quick and direct restoration of the Union. But in battle after battle, the Union armies were handed humiliating defeats. The president could make no logical sense of this apparent contradiction of progress. After a year-and-a-half of seemingly fruitless bloodshed, he concluded that God had taken a direct hand in events to stymie the war’s progress so long as it was waged for purely political purposes, and to force Lincoln to recognize that the war must be turned in a moral direction that spoke directly to the crime of slavery.

This insight is what eventually drove Lincoln to depart from the policy direction with which he had begun the war, and to issue the Emancipation Proclamation. To the astonishment of his Cabinet, Lincoln explained that his decision to issue the Proclamation was a “vow” he had made “to myself, and…to my Maker.”