Book Chat: The Road was Full of Thorns

One of the central mysteries of Abraham Lincoln's presidency is his motivation for "freeing the slaves." Was he a great man of history who pursued justice above all? Or was he a politician bowing to pressure from abolitionists? And is it true that the Emancipation Proclamation didn't free anyone at all? In the new book, The Road Was Full of Thorns, author Tom Zoellner makes a new argument about this critical moment in Civil War history.
About the author: Tom Zoellner, PhD, teaches at Chapman University and serves as an editor at large for The Los Angeles Review of Books.