16th president of the United States, Abraham Lincoln led the Union during the Civil War. Despite the fact that Lincoln was an articulate, eloquent writer, and an intelligent thinker, most American history textbooks give almost no account of his ideas or philosophy. Loewen argues that Lincoln, in spite of some racist views, grappled with his own racism throughout his life, so that by the time he began his second term as president he had largely “transcended” his own racism, and fought to free the slaves for moral as well as practical reasons. Loewen offers Lincoln as a prime example for the way that textbooks tend to ignore ideas and focus instead on people and events.