Phillip Shaw Paludan is the Chancellor Naomi B. Lynn Distinguished Chair in Lincoln Studies at the University of Illinois at Springfield. His books have explored legal, constitutional, and social aspects of the Civil War era. His most recent work, The Presidency of Abraham Lincoln (1994), won the Lincoln Prize, one of the highest honors in the field of Lincoln and Civil War studies.

Earl Schwartz is coordinator of the Social Justice Program and an assistant professor in the Religion Department at Hamline University, St. Paul, Minnesota. He is author of Moral Education: A Practical Guide for Jewish Teachers (1983) and co-author of When Life is in the Balance (1986) and Who Renews Creation (1993).

Thomas F. Schwartz is the Illinois state historian. His collaboration with Louise and Barry Taper and John Rhodehamel of the Huntington Library, San Marino, California, has produced the award-winning exhibition "'The Last Best Hope of Earth':Abraham Lincoln and the Promise of America," which appeared at the Chicago Historical Society in 1997.

Bruce Tap is an independent historian who resides in Grand Rapids, Michigan. He received the Ph.D. in history from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign studying with Robert W. Johannsen. Author of many articles and reviews, Tap has written Over Lincoln's Shoulder: The Committee on the Conduct of the War (1998). He is currently working on a biography of Zachariah Chandler.

Stewart Winger received the Ph.D. in 1998 from the University of Chicago, studying under Martin Marty. His dissertation, "Lincoln's Religious Rhetoric: American Romanticism and the Antislavery Impulse," was the winner of the 2001 Hay-Nicolay Dissertation Award given by the Abraham Lincoln Association to the best dissertation in Lincoln studies. The dissertation examines Lincoln's use of religious language in the context of nineteenth-century Romantic intellectual, legal, literary, and religious developments. Northern Illinois University Press has accepted it for publication.