Farmington Annual History Lecture

featuring

Dr. Saladin Ambar

Author of

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

Dr. Ambar will come to Louisville for a series of events from October 13-15,

culminating in a lecture under the Farmington Pavilion on October 15

with a barbeque dinner from Kingsley’s.

About Murder on the Mississippi:  The Shocking Crimes that Shaped Abraham Lincoln

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

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.”

Wednesday, October 14 – Private Dinner with Dr. Ambar,

Frazier History Museum – $500/person – hardcover book included

Thursday, October 15 – Public Lecture with Dr. Ambar,

Farmington – dinner provided by Kingsley’s – $90/person