Introduction

Abstract

As president-elect Abraham Lincoln stood on the platform that February day in 1861, preparing to board the train that would take him east to Washington, he faced a future so uncertain that even a man of his towering ambition and sturdy self-confidence found it daunting. Not only was his trip to assume the duties of the presidency fraught with threats of assassination or kidnapping, but the republic itself was disintegrating. The friends of states’ rights and slavery, those who were committed, as he had put it on more than one occasion, to “blowing out the moral lights around us,” had begun their move to dissolve the Union and to form their own confederation where their “peculiar institution” would be safe. And now it fell to this largely unseasoned and relatively unknown western politician to do something about it. Little wonder he took his leave from Springfield by imploring the people gathered there to pray for God’s guidance as he prepared to lead the nation through its “fiery trial.”