Abraham Lincoln The Freedom President The Freedom President [Paperback]

The life and times of America's most famous champion of liberty, a man of peace whose fate was to lead a nation at war with itself. Join young Lincoln in the Kentucky wilderness and see how his thirst for knowledge and justice led him to the presidency, where he would be called upon to preserve the Union and abolish the evil of slavery forever.1
 
A Murder Plot in Baltimore
 
LIKE MANY MURDER plots, this one began with a whisper and a boast.
 
The whisper of discontent came from many Southerners who were enraged at the results of the 1860 presidential election. Abraham Lincoln, a Republican and a Northerner, had been elected president of the United States. Though Lincoln’s anti-slavery platform had helped him narrowly win the election by carrying the vote in the Northern states, his popularity was sharply limited. As news of Lincoln’s success spread through the country, pro-slavery Southerners angrily cried that his election as the sixteenth president of the United States would mean civil war! The states of the South would never accept Abraham Lincoln, an abolitionist, as their president!
 
The boast of a plot to assassinate President Lincoln came from the lips of a man named Sipriano Fernandino. He was the house barber at Barnum’s Hotel in Baltimore, Maryland. Like many Southerners, he had been increasingly angered by pressure from Northerners to free the Southern black slaves and to prevent the spread of slavery into western territories which would soon become states. Fernandino believed the entire economic system of the South would collapse if it were forced to give up slave labor. Wealthy plantation owners counted on black slaves to work in their large cotton, rice, and tobacco fields, and they feared the cost of non-slave labor would destroy their profits.
 
Many Southerners believed that the eleven states which made up the South, and later the Confederacy, would have to secede from or lealà