“his meteoric rise from prairie lawyer to chief executive “
The first lie is that Lincoln was just a humble man born in a log cabin. He was far from it. He was known as perhaps the top lawyer in the Midwest and had argued before the US Supreme Court and the Illinois Supreme Court many times. He was a tough negotiator and no one of the time thought of him as some backward ass humble county bumpkin.
He was in bed with the railroads which were the big startup companies of the day. Far from humble.
Illinois Supreme Court, yes. U.S. Supreme Court, never. Lincoln was a successful lawyer in Illinois, but few would have called him 'the top lawyer in the Midwest'. Especially rivals like Chase or Bates or Stanton. Stanton in particular had no respect for Lincoln or his abilities, until he worked for him as Secretary of War.