Synopsis

Murder, mob rule, and the making of Abraham Lincoln—the story of three racially motivated murders in Mississippi River towns from 1835 to 1838 that inspired the speech that put Lincoln on the national map—“The Lyceum Address”Lynched: five white gamblers suspected of aiding a slave insurrection in Vicksburg, Mississippi. Burned alive: a Black man implicated in the death of a constable in St. Louis, Missouri. Gunned down: a white abolitionist in Alton, Illinois. These weren’t just acts of mob violence—they were warnings of a nation on the edge of collapse. In Murder on the Mississippi, award-winning historian Saladin Ambar unearths the horrors that shaped a young Abraham Lincoln’s worldview, pushing him to find his political voice in one of the earliest and most pivotal speeches of his career. Confronted by lawlessness, racial terror, and his own inner demons, Lincoln’s battle was political and deeply personal. Amid the string of murders on the American frontier, Lincoln faced the loss of his first love—and a descent into suicidal despair. Yet from this darkness, he emerged with a renewed purpose, one that would define his leadership in the fight for democracy, human freedom, and the rule of law. From the flames of mob violence rose a young Lincoln, forged in fire and soon to contend with a nation at war with itself.

About The Author

Saladin Ambar is Professor of Political Science and Senior Scholar at the Center on the American Governor at Rutgers University’s Eagleton Institute of Politics. He is the winner of the Association of American Publishers’ PROSE Best Book Award in Government and Politics for Stars and Shadows: The Politics of Interracial Friendship from Jefferson to Obama, and his Malcolm X at Oxford Union: Racial Politics in a Global Era is in development for a feature film. He is Co-Director of the Democracy Committee for New Jersey’s Reparations Council and was a contributor for the Lincoln Presidential Foundation’s docuseries on the Lyceum Address. He hosts the podcast “This Moment in Democracy” and has been a fact-checker and contributor for the Smithsonian Channel, CNN’s Race for the White House, and PBS’s MetroFocus. He is the father of teenaged triplets and lives in Philadelphia.