Paraphrase Practice

"Lincoln believed slavery was immoral, but he also considered the 13th Amendment a masterstroke in cutting away the financial foundations of the Confederacy. I've rarely been more aware than during Steven Spielberg's "Lincoln" that Abraham Lincoln was a plain-spoken, practical, down-to-earth man from the farmlands of Kentucky, Indiana and Illinois. He had less than a year of formal education and taught himself through his hungry reading of great books."- Lincoln Review, Roger Ebert

My paraphrase of this selected passage:
Although Lincoln did not consider slavery virtuous, he thought up a very clever way to remove funding from the Confederacy, and this came in the form of the 13th Amendment. Steven Spielberg's "Lincoln" does a fantastic job of showing that Abraham Lincoln was a regular, level-headed farm-boy from Kentucky, Indiana, and Illinois, a fact which I had never thought much of until watching this film. Abraham Lincoln was only knowledgeable by choice, as he only had months of traditional schooling, but he learned about the world through his own desire to read many books.