Murder on the Mississippi: The Shocking Crimes That Shaped Abraham Lincoln

This trenchant study from historian Ambar (Stars and Shadows) revisits episodes of racially motivated brutality that inspired the speech that catapulted 28-year-old Abraham Lincoln to national prominence. In his 1838 address to the Young Men’s Lyceum in Springfield, Ill., Lincoln cited recent acts of mob violence: the lynching of six white gamblers in Mississippi accused of plotting a slave rebellion; the murder of Francis McIntosh, a free Black man in St. Louis who stabbed a white deputy sheriff and was then slowly burned alive; and the slaying of white Illinois publisher Elijah P. Lovejoy, who wrote editorials condemning McIntosh’s murder. From these killings, Lincoln’s Lyceum Address drew the lesson that slavery promoted a culture of lawless vigilantism that imperiled the liberties of all Americans. This vision of slavery, and by extension racism, as incompatible with democracy is one Lincoln would return to throughout his career, and Ambar analyzes it for the undercurrents of abolitionist and, later, anti-racist sentiment that would come to prevail in Lincoln’s own thinking and in the republic he defended. Ambar threads together a vivid psychological profile of a young Lincoln (at the time, depressed and grieving the death of his fiancée Ann Rutledge), the harrowing stories of the victims, and parallels to present-day politics. It makes for an invigorating reconsideration of the anti-racist intellectual roots of America’s Second Founding. (Oct.)