Lincoln on Leadership is one of the most powerful books on leadership that I have read. The most interesting part to me was that Lincoln was a true leader as President and not just an individual who sat back and let others do all the necessary work while he made the pubic appearances. In my studies of history, I have never analyzed any president as a real leader, probably because before this class I assumed that they all were leaders. Now I know they are not. Every point that is made in the book to support Lincoln as a real leader is something that either we discussed in class or something that is covered in our text. The best part about this book, though, was its readability. Once you got past the introduction, it was hard to put it down. It is unfortunate that the simple things that Lincoln did which made him so great are too much for some mangers today. For example, creating relationships with your employees. The first part of Lincoln on Leadership deals with the people, the employees. In Lincoln's case, the employees were the troops. in the late nineteenth century, American spiritualists maintained that Abraham Lincoln had been a spiritualist too. Whenever they drew up lists of prominent believers, Lincoln was foremost among the reformers, judges, governors, senators, and scientists whose stature lent credence to their movement. In this paper, I look at letters written to President Lincoln by spiritualists or about spiritualism, but it is not my aim to determine whether or not Lincoln was a spiritualist. Instead, I use these letters to reflect on spiritualism as a cultural phenomena. It captured the imaginations of many Americans in the years leading up to the Civil War, drawing them to séance rooms, to mediums, or to their family parlors to commune with the dead. The letters to Lincoln reveal how spiritualism evolved from older cultural traditions and what it came to mean for spiritualists.