A wonderfully written account of the trip Lincoln took from Springfield, Illinois to Washington, DC, in February of 1861 to take the oath of office. Full of details and interesting side characters. It reads like a suspense novel, because we quickly come to understand the fraught times of the early 1860s, with a country beginning to separate and passions running high. Lincoln has received numerous death threats, and this trip involves a number of spies who go out and get a feel for the people, then report back their findings to Lincoln's party. Particularly treacherous is the trip through Baltimore, part of the Confederacy, where many are determined to keep him from Washington DC. Interestingly enough, the pro-Lincoln crowds were almost as dangerous, as they crowded around him relentlessly. Loved this book. ( )

Although tagged as a Biography, this very readable account of Lincoln only covers 13 days of his life. On February 11, 1861 Lincoln began his journey to the Presidency in Springfield, Illinois aboard a train they called "The Special".

The train traveled 1,900, as Lincoln attempted to gather support from the industrial North. These States were vital to the war that Lincoln knew would come.

Lincoln was following Buchannan into the Oval Office. Buchannan's time
as President, known as the worst in history, was filled with corruption and cronyism with the Southern plantations. It was an eye-opener to see how our current political strife parallels what was happening in 1861 :

...the most depressing problem was the one that struck countless Europeans as the central paradox of American democracy. The ideals of the Declaration were hardly self-evident..

...even if Southern militias did not surround the Capitol, there was another way Lincoln's election could be turned back, striking for simplicity. On February 13th two boxes would be taken into the House chambers where they would be opened and the votes counted. But anything could happen in a city that that had effectively ceased to play by any rules. Perhaps the certificates had not been signed and sealed properly? Lincoln's enemies might declare a miscount, throwing the election into the House. Or leading Southerner's might just ask the Vice-President to become an "acting president"...

Before Lincoln left for Washington, Allan Pinkerton (Pinkerton Security) was hired to root out any trouble. Pinkerton uncovered several assassination plots along the route. The South was determined that Lincoln would never reach Washington.

As you read and travel the route with Lincoln, you watch a meek, "homely" man become an orator, who begins to emphasize the world ALL. As in "All men are created equal". While Lincoln was shouting for unity, Jefferson Davis was sworn in as the new President of The Confederacy. Every delay in Lincoln's arrival, for his inauguration, brought the Union closer to dissolution and war. Those who supported Lincoln came in droves to watch his train pass. Democracy was fraying at the seams...Lincoln helped Americans to feel that they were taking back their country from a cabal that was destroying its very purpose.

An excellent look at history-highly recommended

I received this book as a GR's Give Away-Thank you goodreads and thank you Simon and Schuster ( )

Gave a flavor of the times as well as Lincoln. While I learned a lot from this book, it was very repetitive.
It also make what recently happened with Trump seem trivial in comparison, but it's not. ( )

I read this and Brad Meltzer and Josh Mensch's book, "The Lincoln Conspiracy: The Secret Plot to Kill America's 16th President⁠—and Why It Failed." Both cover the same period of time. The Meltzer and Mensch book has a narrower focus, and a broader target audience. I had low expectations for it. Surprisingly, the Meltzer and Mensch book is far better. This book, by Ted Widmer, is not very well written, and is incredibly repetitive. How many different ways can you describe a crowd of people cheering for the president-elect? Not nearly enough. Widmer tries to turn Lincoln's train journey to Washington into a geography lesson, telling at least one story about each town Lincoln visits. This is very interesting for the first 100-200 pages. Then it started to put me to sleep.

> In the first sixty-one years of the government, slaveholders held the presidency for fifty years, the Speaker of the House's chair for forty-one years, and the chairmanship of the House Ways and Means Committee for fifty-two years. Eighteen of thirty-one Supreme Court justices hailed from the South, even though four-fifths of the actual business of the court came from the North. No Northern president had been reelected.

> Floyd may have been the worst. As secretary of war, he had sworn to defend the United States against all enemies. Instead, he surreptitiously shipped arms from Northern arsenals to the South. (The Confederacy would later brag about his disloyalty.)

> For anyone trying to reach Washington from the northern states, Baltimore was a frustrating choke point. The two lines that came in from the north failed to connect with the lines heading south and west, with the result that much time was wasted moving passengers and goods at a snail's pace through the city's clogged streets

> Confederates continued to set up their government. In many ways, they were ahead of the United States, barely governed at all in the final weeks of the Buchanan administration.

> earliest memories stemmed from the Knob Creek farm where his parents had moved when he was two years old. But in all of Kentucky, he had won only 1,364 votes, or less than 1 percent

> Just before the train left, an unattended carpetbag was found in Lincoln's car. When it was opened, a "grenade of the most destructive character" was discovered inside, live, and "so arranged that within fifteen minutes it would have exploded, with a force sufficient to have demolished the car and destroyed the lives of all the persons in it." That remarkable story was reported in the Syracuse Journal but omitted from the daily coverage of the New York City and Chicago papers. Was Lincoln nearly blown up on the third day of his journey?

> Eight years later, on exactly this stretch of track, a young inventor, George Westinghouse, would perfect a new system of air brakes capable of stopping all the cars at the same time thanks to a system of compressed air running through the entire train. The breakthrough would allow trains to grow longer, faster, and safer. Westinghouse would go on to invent a long roster of rail improvements before turning to electricity, alternating current, and the power grids

> It was said that "men kiss each other's wives in Pittsburgh," simply because it was so difficult to see, and that mothers wrote out messages to shopkeepers on the faces of their children.

> Lincoln had just entered the Western Reserve, another statelet within a state. At the time of independence, this section of northern Ohio was still a part of Connecticut—nearly as large as the original, with 3.3 million acres of prime real estate. The parcel had been included in Connecticut's royal charter of 1662 and, as its name suggested, was considered a western extension of the state. But it became difficult to hold as Americans poured west to fill up the new lands after the war. In 1796 Connecticut sold its Ohio land to a group of Connecticut investors. … Moses Cleaveland, whose last name would grace the metropolis of the Western Reserve, thought of it as "New Connecticut," a state unto itself.

> Eventually Rockefeller decided that his talents were better suited to the challenges of refining and shipping the oil rather than extracting it. Two years after Lincoln's visit, the young Clevelander would launch an oil refinery along a small creek that flowed into the Cuyahoga

> at Schenectady. A few young movers and shakers, showing a little too much leadership, took it upon themselves to fire a celebratory cannon as Lincoln's train approached. The only problem was that they managed to fire it directly into his train, taking out a section of the forward car, shattering three windows "into atoms," covering passengers with broken glass, and terrifying everyone. For the second time since the trip started, an errant artillery blast had caused windows to break near the Lincolns.

> an early version was called the "Vertical Screw Railway." But eventually it would be called by a simpler name: the elevator. Its inventor was a former toymaker from Vermont, Elisha Otis, who had filed his patent only a few weeks earlier. Otis had been trying to improve railroad brakes when he began to look into the problem of carrying weight upward, along grooved metal tracks, with power supplied by a steam engine. At first, his device was intended to help factories move heavy equipment from one floor to another

> After he was elected, panicky rumors spread up and down Wall Street that the Republicans were radicals who wanted to punish the wealthy. Many business leaders blamed Lincoln for the fact that Southern states were seceding

> with the passage of the Fugitive Slave Act in 1850, the marshal was obligated to capture suspected runaways. As a result, Independence Hall saw a new function: as a holding pen for African-Americans about to be returned to slavery

> At the last minute, just before midnight, a fake package was delivered to the conductor, to distract him, while the real package—Abraham Lincoln—slipped quietly into the sleeper through the back door and was ushered into his berth. Pinkerton and Lamon followed close behind. ( )

5694. Lincoln on the Verge Thirteen Days to Washington, by Ted Widmer (read 8 Jun 2020) This is a carefully researched book which tells all that you could want to know about Lincoln's 1861 trip from Springfield, Ill., to Washington. He was attended by large crowds as he went by train from Springfield to Chicago, Indianapolis, Cincinnati, Columbus, Pittsburgh, Cleveland, Buffalo, Albany, New York City, and Philadelphia. Warned of a plot to kill or kidnap him in Baltimore, he went secretly to Washington, skipping Baltimore. This book is well put together and I never lost interest in the momentous journey. ( )