Robert C. Bray is professor emeritus of American Literature at Illinois Wesleyan University. Among his works are Reading with Lincoln (Southern Illinois University Press, 2010) and Rediscoveries: Literature and Place in Illinois (University of Illinois Press, 1982).

Jason Emerson is an independent historian. He is the author of multiple books, including The Madness of Mary Lincoln (2007) and Mary Lincoln for the Ages (2019), both from Southern Illinois University Press.

Robert Fabrikant was Senior Law Clerk to Chief Justice Warren E. Burger. He is Professor in the Practice at Howard University School of Law, and Senior Counsel at Manatt Phelps & Phillips in Washington, D.C. He acknowledges the exemplary effort of his assistant, Valerie Brooks, for shepherding him through the editorial process.

Guy C. Fraker, an ALA director, is a graduate of the University of Illinois College of Law, and practiced law in Bloomington for 52 years. He has written and spoken extensively on Lincoln, including Lincoln’s Ladder to the Presidency: The Eighth Judicial Circuit and Looking for Lincoln in Illinois: A Guide to Lincoln’s Eighth Judicial Circuit (2012; 2017, both Southern Illinois University Press). He served as Chair of Looking for Lincoln, the action arm of the Abraham Lincoln National Heritage Area.

Louis P. Masur is Board of Governors Professor of American Studies and History at Rutgers University and is the author of many books including Lincoln’s Last Speech: Wartime Reconstruction and the Crisis of Reunion, 1861–1865 (Oxford University Press, 2015) and Lincoln’s Hundred Days: The Emancipation Proclamation and the War for the Union (Harvard University Press, 2012).

Tom Morris works as a senior trial counsel at the U.S. Department of Justice. He pursued his interest in Civil War history in an MLA program at Johns Hopkins University, and this article is a condensed version of his thesis supervised by Dr. D. Duane Cummins.

Graham A. Peck is the Wepner Distinguished Professor of Lincoln Studies at the University of Illinois Springfield. He is the author of Making an Antislavery Nation: Lincoln, Douglas, and the Battle over Freedom (University of Illinois Press, 2017), and has directed and produced two films on Lincoln and Douglas. He recently co-directed an art residency titled Making Our History: Artists Render Lincoln’s Legacies.

Richard Striner was professor of history at Washington College, in Chestertown, Maryland, for more than 30 years. He is author of Lincoln and Race (Southern Illinois University Press, 2012) and Summoned to Glory: The Audacious Life of Abraham Lincoln (Rowman & Littlefield, 2020), among many other works.

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The signature ‘Abraham Lincoln’ on our new cover comes, through the courtesy of Michelle Krowl, from the Library of Congress’s John G. Nicolay Papers on his March 4, 1861, appointment as private secretary.