He is both ubiquitous and enigmatic. He is as familiar as the penny and the five-dollar bill: at once instantly recognizable—yet he is elusive as a chimera. The historical Lincoln, the literary Lincoln, even the cinematic Lincoln, have all proved both fascinating and irresistible. Though some sixteen thousand books have been written about him and more than a dozen major motion pictures (including one depicting him as a vampire hunter) have been released, there is always more to say, new aspects of his life to consider, new facets of his persona to explore.

The Lincoln Forum, a national organization...

May 18, 1860, was one of the longest days in the life of Abraham Lincoln. On that day, Lincoln waited at Springfield for telegraphic reports from Chicago, where delegates to the national Republican convention would be nominating the party’s candidate for president in the fall election. William H. Seward was the frontrunner for the nomination, but Lincoln and his friends at the Chicago convention understood that the New York senator’s reputation for radicalism on the slavery issue and his public opposition to the Know Nothings (or Nativists) had made him vulnerable. Illinois Republicans, as well as many Republicans elsewhere, believed...

After more than a century and a half, the question remains: was the Baltimore Plot real or not? As most people familiar with Lincoln lore know, the Baltimore Plot was a suspected conspiracy to assassinate president-elect Abraham Lincoln in Baltimore as he traveled through that city on his way to Washington in February 1861. To avoid the threat, Lincoln famously wore a disguise and took a night train from Philadelphia, snuck through Baltimore around 3 AM, and arrived unannounced in Washington around 6 AM on February 23, 1861.

As a lawyer, I have always wondered whether there was sufficient evidence...

When the Civil War erupted at Fort Sumter in April 1861, Americans could hardly believe what was happening. Though conflict had been in the air for a decade, many Northerners thought the South was bluffing, and the South thought, as one Southerner put it, that “You may slap a Yankee in the face, and he’ll go off and sue you, but he won’t fight.”¹ The startling outbreak of war took place in a country that had changed dramatically in only ten years. The cascading crises of bleeding Kansas, Dred Scott, and John Brown were accompanied by changes almost as dramatic...

William Henry Seward lived a long and eventful life: he was a leading lawyer, a state legislator, the governor of New York, federal senator for twelve years, secretary of state for eight years. This chapter, however, will focus on Seward’s relationship with Abraham Lincoln.

Seward met Lincoln for the first time on Friday, September 22, 1848, at a political rally in the Tremont Temple in Boston. Seward was at this time one of the nation’s best-known Whigs: former governor, likely to become U.S. senator, often mentioned as a future presidential candidate. Physically, Seward was a small, slight, unimpressive man with...

When she entered the Executive Mansion, her new home, it was with a great deal of trepidation. Her husband’s elevation to the presidency had followed years of struggle but was a well-deserved triumph, which she savored. She had served him as a political sounding board, promoted his best speeches and his career in government, and stood by her man—despite family conflicts that gave the couple a bumpy start to their marriage. The conflict between in-laws was but one of many obstacles to the couple’s marital happiness, as they had also lost a child, a young son, but the wound...

In considering the genius of Abraham Lincoln, the context in which we might use the word “genius” is what theOxford English Dictionarylists as the fourth meaning of that word: “A natural ability or tendency which fits a person for a particular activity.” The first meaning of the word, by the way, is “the attendant spirit in classical pagan belief allotted to every person at birth,” a definition that makes all of us geniuses. But Lincoln’s particular genius, the particular activity for which he was fit, was the ability to see the whole clearly and, more importantly, to manage...

The epithet “traitor,” when applied to anyone who sided with the Confederacy, can get a speaker or writer in big trouble, fast. As sensitive as it was to the men of the Confederacy themselves, it seems to be even more inflammatory among the self-appointed defenders of Confederate heritage and memory today. Article III, Section 3, of the Constitution is succinct and explicit in its definition: “Treason against the United States, shall consist only in levying War against them.” Speaking critically of the government does not constitute treason. By this definition, even attempting to secede is not in itself a treasonous...

“The Battle Hymn of the Republic” is America’s un official anthem. You all know the song, but what you might not know is that the “Battle Hymn” is far more popular today than it was during the Civil War, beloved by Northerners and Southerners, conservatives and radicals, whites and blacks. About the only thing that Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh have in common with Al Sharpton and Jeremiah Wright is that the “Battle Hymn of the Republic” is one of their very favorite songs.¹

The origins of the “Battle Hymn” have long been shrouded in obscurity. The tune is often...

Abraham Lincoln is the most iconic figure in American history. He exerts a unique hold on our historical imagination as an embodiment of core American ideals and myths—the self-made man, the frontier hero, the liberator of the slaves. Thousands of works have been written about Lincoln, and almost any Lincoln you want can be found somewhere in the literature. Lincoln has been portrayed as a shrewd political operator driven by ambition, a moralist for whom emancipation was the logical conclusion of a lifetime hatred of slavery, and a racist who actually defended and tried to protect slavery. Politicians from...

For a very long time, Americans have thought about Abraham Lincoln as a patriot above all else. Many see him as a quintessential “moderate”—a man who rescued our polity and saved our most precious institutions.

And there is surely much truth in this portrait. But there is quite a lot of truth left out of it. For Lincoln was more than just a patriotic Unionist, as most of his pre-presidential speeches and pronouncements (including his speeches in the Lincoln-Douglas debates and his “House Divided” speech) make abundantly clear. And his apparent moderation in the Civil War years was in...

It is well known how much controversy surrounded President Lincoln’s Preliminary Emancipation Proclamation after the battle of Antietam. Who can forget the words of John Hughes, archbishop of New York, who warned: “We Catholics . . . have not the slightest idea of carrying on a war that costs so much blood and treasure just to gratify a clique of Abolitionists in the North.”

But less well known or understood is the controversy that the proclamation attracted abroad. Both Union and Confederate supporters in Britain tried to use it as a propaganda tool, and in the beginning at least, it...

The volcanic force and fury of the riots that erupted in New York City on July 13–17, 1863, can be explained only in part by the first federal conscription law in U.S. history, signed by President Abraham Lincoln on March 5—a law that exempted any man who could pay $300 or present a substitute. Equally threatening in the minds of white workingmen was the Emancipation Proclamation of January 1, which Lincoln’s opponents warned would send a flood of freed slaves to compete for low-wage jobs in Northern cities. While poor men died in battle and their families starved,...

Throughout his presidency, Abraham Lincoln had a complex and curiously conflicted relationship with the nation’s largest city and its largest state. Lincoln, of course, was an essentially western man—from Illinois by way of Kentucky and Indiana—but that accounts for only part of the complexity of his relationship with New York State. That relationship began well enough with the triumph of his famous Cooper Union address in February 1860, which, along with the Mathew Brady photograph taken of him at the same time, did much to make him president.¹

Lincoln knew that New York was crucial to his election,...

George B. McClellan was a charming man, a brilliant man, a courageous soldier, a military comet. However, as scores of historians have delighted in pointing out, he bore a fatal flaw, and that was his unbridled hubris. McClellan was what the British nineteenth-century radical John Blight called a self-made man who worshipped his creator.¹

McClellan was encouraged in his enormous self-regard by an early life unmarked by failure or disappointment of any kind. Born to a renowned surgeon and raised in Philadelphia society, he enjoyed the most privileged of classical educations before marching off to the beat of the military...

While scholars, historians, and students have analyzed nearly every aspect of our sixteenth president’s life, including his childhood, his years as a lawyer, his too-short term as president and commander-in-chief, and, of course, his assassination, relatively little attention has been paid to the type of judge Lincoln would have been and how well he would have served as a member of the judiciary.

Despite that, the very attributes that have made Lincoln a global icon—his character, leadership, sense of justice, and his commitment to excellence—suggest that he would have made not only a good judge but a great...

In August 1875, after having lived at Bellevue Place Sanitarium for more than two months, placed there by her oldest son, Robert, and declared insane by a Chicago jury, Mary Lincoln wrote to her friend Myra Bradwell,

It does not appear that God is good, to have placed me here. I endeavor to read my bible and offer up my petitions three times a day. But my afflicted heart fails me and my voice often falters in prayer. I have worshipped my son and no unpleasant word ever passed between us, yet I cannot understand why I should have been...