MURDER ON THE MISSISSIPPI

Historical account that locates the roots of Abraham Lincoln’s anti-slavery views in a horrific frontier crime.

On April 28, 1836, a young free Black man, ashore in St. Louis from the riverboat on which he worked as a steward, was falsely arrested. On the way to jail, Francis McIntosh, told that his fate was prison or death, tried to escape, killing a sheriff’s deputy in his failed attempt. A crowd lynched him, chaining him to a tree and burning him alive. In Rutgers University political scientist Ambar’s telling, the incident directly inspired Lincoln’s first major political address, in which the future president spoke of the fracturing of civic order on the frontier and, in that “growing lawlessness,” the threat to democracy. In that context, Lincoln also evoked the Founders, who by that point had mostly passed from the scene, leaving their descendants to work out the solution to problems of republicanism, slavery, and self-government. Ambar examines that violence, which often targeted Blacks free and enslaved, prostitutes, and white gamblers, all subject to “creeping mob violence.” The audience for Lincoln’s 1838 Lyceum Address would have heard echoes of Jacksonian populism, but also his increasing advocacy of federalism and his growing sympathy for the rising abolitionist movement—the latter not a safe position to stake out even in free Illinois. Ambar convincingly explains that by then Lincoln “simply abhorred” slavery, even while being careful to frame it as a matter of “bad policy.” The mob violence would grow to civil war, of course, and its legacy haunts us today; as the author meaningfully writes, “We are still trying to make peace with racism’s incompatibility with democratic life, a fusion of values Lincoln thought to be essential from the very start of his political career.”

A fresh investigation of antebellum politics and the era’s foremost champion of equality before the law.