Chapter One

A cold drizzle of rain was falling February 11 when Lincoln and his party of fifteen were to leave Springfield on the eight o'clock at the Great Western Railway Station. Chilly gray mist hung on the circle of the prairie horizon. A short locomotive with a flat-topped smokestack stood puffing with the baggage car and special passenger car coupled on; a railroad president and superintendent were on board. A thousand people crowded in and around the brick station, inside of which Lincoln was standing. One by one came hundreds of old friends, shaking hands, wishing him luck and Godspeed, all faces solemn. Even huge Judge Davis, wearing a new white silk hat, was a somber figure."

On that dreary Illinois winter day in 1861, President-elect Abraham Lincoln began his journey to Washington, D.C., where he hoped to be inaugurated as President on March 4. "Hoped to" because there were already rumors afloat that secessionist sympathizers would somehow prevent his inauguration from taking place. In the November presidential election, Lincoln had prevailed over three opponents, receiving 180 electoral votes. The incumbent Vice President, John Breckenridge, the candidate of the South, received 72; John Bell, the candidate of the Constitutional Union Party, 39; and Lincoln's longtime Democratic opponent Stephen Douglas, only 12. But the electoral vote did not tell the whole story of this bitterly contested election. Lincoln received a minority of the popular vote, slightly less than 1.9 million votes out of a total of some 4.7 million. In ten states of the South, he did not get a single popular vote. Indeed, he was not even on the ballot in some states. He was elected by the near