Murder on the Mississippi

Saladin Ambar, a political scientist and senior scholar at the Center on the American Governor at Rutgers University Eagleton Institute of Politics, has authored a fascinating and propulsive new book focusing on Abraham Lincoln’s 1838 address to the Young Men’s Lyceum in Springfield, Illinois. The book, Murder on the Mississippi: The Shocking Crimes that Shaped Abraham Lincoln (Diversion Books, 2025), focuses on the violent events that transpired in the 1830s that contributed to Abraham Lincoln’s political thought and this important speech that he gave long before he became a political figure in the United States. The title of the speech, On the Perpetuations of Our Political Institutions, is a bit of an interesting feint, since Lincoln spends most of the speech explaining that American citizens need to understand their own role as the foundation of those very political institutions, and they need to take on what he calls a “civic religion” to imbue the country with a reverence for the laws and the Constitution.  Ambar takes a two-pronged approach to the narrative of this book, and both are important to our understanding of the speech itself and Abraham Lincoln’s political thinking. Threaded throughout the book is an ongoing analysis of Lincoln’s thinking in terms of the content of the Young Men’s Lyceum speech, and, in order to best understand that thinking, Ambar also traces the historical incidents, particularly the lawless murders of both black and white individuals, that are going on around Lincoln, in Kentucky, in Illinois, in Missouri, and also further south, in Mississippi. The twin issues of mob violence and slavery shape Lincoln’s words in 1838, but they do so in different ways. This speech is not taking on slavery directly, but slavery haunts the narrative of the speech.  Mob violence, on the other hand, drove Lincoln towards writing and delivering this speech, and Ambar takes the reader through the key episodes that shape and contribute to Lincoln’s thinking.

In Murder on the Mississippi, Ambar digs into the various incidents of mob violence, in different places along the Mississippi River. He starts with the five white gamblers who were killed in Vicksburg, Mississippi. This story, along with another group of white individuals murdered in Mississippi—because they may have had a hand in helping a Black insurrection—are among the lesser known events that contributed to Lincoln’s Lyceum speech. In both of these Mississippi incidents, the individuals were white, but they existed on the outside of what was considered appropriate or acceptable behavior within the societies where they were living. Ambar notes that “it is Lincoln’s speech that stands alone for connecting the fears of Black rebellion and moral decline with racial treason.”[1] The next section of the book focuses on the violent lynchings of Francis McIntosh (to whom the book is dedicated) and Elijah P. Lovejoy, and how McIntosh’s gruesome death among a crowd numbering in the hundreds “galvanized the forces of abolition like other.”[2]  Lovejoy’s death stems from his protests about McIntosh’s lynching, and these deaths transpired in much closer proximity to Lincoln himself, taking place in southern Illinois and Missouri. These events, detailed in Murder on the Mississippi, help us to understand the various dimensions of Lincoln’s speech in 1838 to the Springfield audience. They also contribute to a broader understanding of Lincoln’s perspective on the American republic, the fragility of the commitment to the law and political institutions as established by the Constitution, and the ways in which race and slavery undergird civil society in the United States.

Lilly J. Goren is a professor of political science at Carroll University in Waukesha, WI. She is co-editor of The Politics of the Marvel Cinematic Universe Volume I: The Infinity Saga (University Press of Kansas, 2022), and of The Politics of the Marvel Cinematic Universe Volume II: Into the Multiverse (University Press of Kansas, 2025). She can be reached @gorenlj.bsky.social

[1] Saladin Ambar. Murder on the Mississippi: The Shocking Crimes that Shaped Abraham Lincoln. Diversion Books, 2025, p. xxxiii

[2] Ibid.