Lincoln's Pre-Inauguration Stop

On February twenty-first, eighteen sixty-one, Abraham Lincoln was on a train bound from Springfield, Illinois, to Washington, where in less than two weeks he would be inaugurated as the sixteenth President of the United States. The country was already fracturing. Several Southern states had already seceded by the time his train passed near this point.

The train made a brief stop, and Lincoln stepped onto the rear platform to speak to a crowd gathered along the tracks. It was one of dozens of whistle-stop appearances on the twelve-day inaugural journey, each one a chance for Americans to see the tall, bearded man who would soon inherit the crisis. He would not pass through this way again as a living president.