Michael Les Benedict, Professor of History, The Ohio State University, received his B.A. and M.A. from the University of Illinois at Urbana/Champaign, his Ph.D. from Rice University. His research areas are nineteenth-century U.S. Legal and Constitutional History and the Civil War and Reconstruction. He has been an NEH fellow, a Guggenheim fellow, a Woodrow Wilson fellow and a Fulbright Senior Lecturer in Japan, and currently is the Samuel I. Golieb Research Fellow, New York University School of Law, and a Ford Fellow, American Council of Learned Societies. He has published articles in the American Historical Review, the Journal of American History, Journal of Southern History, Civil War History, and the Supreme Court Review and other legal and historical journals. His books have included The Impeachment and Trial of Andrew Johnson (1973), A Compromise of Principle: Congressional Republicans and Reconstruction, 1863–1869 (1974), The Fruits of Victory: Alternatives in Restoring the Union (1975), (1986). He has in press an extended essay, "Civil Rights and Liberties," for the American Historical Association Bicentennial Essays on the Constitution.

Herman Belz, Professor of History, University of Maryland, College Park, received his A.B. degree from Princeton University, his M.A. and Ph.D. from the University of Washington. He teaches nineteenth-century American Legal and Constitutional History at the University of Maryland, where he has been on the faculty since 1966. He received the Albert J. Beveridge Award for his first book, Reconstruction and the Union: Theory and Policy during the Civil War (1969). He has written two other books, A New Birth of Freedom: The Republican Party and Freedman's Rights, 1861–1866 (1976), and Emancipation and Equal Rights: Politics and Constitutionalism in the Civil War Era (1978), and joined Alfred H. Kelly and Winfred A. Harbison as co-author of the sixth edition of The American Constitution: Its Origin and Development (1983). He has published articles in the American Journal of Legal History, Journal of American History, Reviews in American History, and the Review of Politics, in addition to contributing to the American Spectator and Commentary. He has received numerous awards and fellowships including a Guggenheim Fellowship. He delivered the Seventh Annual McMurtrie Lecture at the Louis A. Warren Lincoln Library and Museum in 1984 on the subject "Lincoln and the Constitution: The Dictatorship Question Reconsidered," published later the same year under the same title.

Frank J. Williams, president of the Abraham Lincoln Association and the past president of the Lincoln Group of Boston, is an attorney in Providence, Rhode Island, and a delegate to that state's constitutional convention. He received his A.B. from Boston University and his J.D. from the Boston University School of Law. He also holds a Master's Degree from Bryant College. An active and avid Lincoln student and collector, Williams surveys the Lincoln field annually for Hobbies magazine and for this journal. He lectures widely, most recently at the "Lincoln Family" Symposium, at Hildene, Vermont. He serves on numerous Lincoln-related advisory committees and boards and was principal advisor for several recent symposiums, most notably, "Lincoln and the American Political Tradition" at Brown University, an activity for which Williams received a special Barondess Award.