Edward L. Ayers is Tucker-­Boatwright Professor of the Humanities, and President Emeritus, University of Richmond. Among his many publications are The Thin Light of Freedom: The Civil War and Emancipation in the Heart of America (2017).

Michael Burlingame holds the Chancellor Naomi B. Lynn Distinguished Chair in Lincoln Studies at the University of Illinois Springfield. He has written and edited several books about Lincoln, including a two-­volume biography, Abraham Lincoln: A Life (2008). He is currently working on a book about Lincoln’s interactions with African Americans in both Springfield and Washington.

Daniel Crofts taught history at The College of New Jersey from 1975 until his retirement in 2014. He writes about the North-­South sectional crisis that led to the Civil War. His most recent book, Lincoln and the Politics of Slavery: The Other Thirteenth Amendment and the Struggle to Save the Union (2016), was awarded the University of Virginia’s Bobbie and John Nau Book Prize in American Civil War Era History.

George R. Dekle, Sr., who was awarded emeritus status upon his retirement from the Levin College of Law at the University of Florida in 2006, is a 30-year veteran of the State Attorney’s Office of the Third Circuit of Florida. He keeps busy in retirement by writing books on historic criminal trials and has written two books on Lincoln’s criminal practice.

Wayne Wei-­siang Hsieh is an associate professor of history at the United States Naval Academy. He is the author of West Pointers and the Civil War: The Old Army in War and Peace (2009) and co-­author with Williamson Murray of A Savage War: A Military History of the Civil War (2016).

John Hoffmann was formerly librarian and curator of the Illinois History and Lincoln Collections of the University of Illinois Library at Urbana. His publications include a number of pieces on Lincoln, the Civil War, and Illinois history as well as biographical sketches of Benjamin P. Thomas and Robert W. Johannsen. His history of the Lincoln ox yoke, now in the UI Library, appeared in For the People (Summer 2014).

Brian Craig Miller is Dean of Humanities, Social Sciences, and Fine Arts at Mission College in Santa Clara, California. He serves as the editor of the journal Civil War History and is the author of four books, including Empty Sleeves: Amputation in the Civil War South (2015).

Kevin Portteus is Lawrence Fertig Professor of Politics and Director of American Studies at Hillsdale College. The author would like to thank Lucas Morel for his helpful comments on this essay, and his guidance in bringing it to publication. He also thanks Brontë Wigen, his research assistant.

Adam I. P. Smith is Edward Orsborn Professor of U.S. Politics and Political History, and Director of the Rothermere American Institute, at the University of Oxford. Among his publications are The Stormy Present: Conservatism and the Problem of Slavery in Northern Politics, 1846–1865 (2017) and, as co-editor, Practicing Democracy: Popular Politics in the United States from the Constitution to the Civil War (2015).

Douglas L. Wilson has contributed, among other items, “William H. Herndon on Lincoln’s Fatalism” (JALA, Summer 2014). He is the George A. Lawrence Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus at Knox College and has co-­edited, with Rodney O. Davis, a quartet of foundational primary sources about William H. Herndon, in addition to publishing his own work on Shakespeare, Jefferson, and Lincoln.

Michael E. Woods is associate professor of history at Marshall University. He is the author of Emotional and Sectional Conflict in the Antebellum United States (2014) and Bleeding Kansas: Slavery, Sectionalism, and Civil War on the Missouri-­Kansas Border (2016).