In my last post I teased “the big reveal,” the cover for my new book, Lincoln in New England: In Search of His Forgotten Tours. The time has come for that reveal.
As I mentioned, the cover is brilliantly colored. And it has a picture of Lincoln on it! Okay, that’s no big surprise. It’s basically a commandment written on stone tablets that any book on Abraham Lincoln must have a picture of Lincoln on the cover. I’ll explain more about the book below the photo, but without further ado, here’s the cover (trust me, you can hear the drum roll in your head right now):
The book is in an entertaining “ride-along” style. That means you get to come along with me as I visit the places Lincoln visited on his two tours through New England. The road through the New England landscape on the cover gives a sense of the thousands of miles I drove on Lincoln’s trail while I talked with dozens of experts and locals about Lincoln’s legacy. I wrote a post describing the book that has the details (see here), but here are the highlights:
Lincoln’s first trip was in 1848. He was an awkward-looking, ungainly, westerner little known to the sophisticated East other than he supposedly told funny stories. He was serving what was his only term as a U.S. congressman but was charged with going up to Massachusetts to campaign on behalf of Zachary Taylor, the Whig nominee for president. Taylor was a strange choice for the Whigs because of his role in the Mexican War (which Whigs “very generally opposed”) and as a southern slaveholder (Whigs, at least in the North, were against expansion of slavery into the newly gained western territories). Picking Taylor caused one faction of the Whigs to split off and form their own Free Soil Party, which threatened to sink the Whig chances. While speaking in nine locations over nearly two weeks, Lincoln was exposed to even more splits in the Whig Party, Conscience vs. Cotton Whigs, and a growing abolitionist movement. He was also influenced by the great Transcendentalist writers like Henry David Thoreau, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Louisa May Alcott, and Nathaniel Hawthorne. While mostly he attracted crowds for his entertainment value, Lincoln came away with a more mature view of himself, his party, and the struggles that the nation faced because of slavery.
During a tumultuous decade where slavery grew to be the defining issue leading to civil war, Lincoln was out of political office. He struggled to get back into politics, losing two senate races. The second loss, however, in which he engaged in seven highly publicized debates with Stephen A. Douglas, made him a household name. That led to an invitation to his February 1860 speech at Cooper Union, an address many call “the speech that made Lincoln president.”
But the speech was just the first of what became another two-week jaunt into New England in early 1860, this time through Rhode Island, New Hampshire, and Connecticut. No longer an unknown and occurring two months before the new Republican Party held its convention to pick a nominee, Lincoln was campaigning both for the party’s position on slavery and his own chances of gaining that nomination. He spoke in Providence and Woonsocket, RI, in four cities around Exeter, NH, where his son Robert was attending preparatory school to get into Harvard, and five stops in Connecticut, including Hartford and New Haven, where he encountered the Wide Awakes, a new grassroots organization that would help Republicans across the North. He tackled the issues of the day, most notably slavery, and was taken much more seriously than his 1848 visit, which was largely forgotten.
I had a lot of fun writing this book and traveling around my home state of Massachusetts and the other New England states where Lincoln visited. I also visited Maine and Vermont; places Lincoln never got to but became incredibly important to his nomination and his legacy. I spoke with tons of people, both experts and locals, to get a sense of how Lincoln was remembered (if at all). The book is an enjoyable ride, blending past and present, and even a bit of crystal-balling of the future. I hope you’ll join me.
Lincoln in New England: In Search of His Forgotten Tours is being published by Globe Pequot and is scheduled for release on March 3, 2026. The book is already available for pre-order, with price guarantees (if the price goes down, you’ll get the lower price). Check out the Globe Pequot page for links to Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Books-a-Million, and Bookshop, and of course, please check in with your local independent bookstore and encourage them to order the book.
I’ll be doing a grand promotion tour in the spring, so check here for my ongoing schedule. And feel free to contact me to speak at your organization.
[Lincoln in New England book cover created by Globe Pequot]
Coming in March 2026: Lincoln in New England: In Search of His Forgotten Tours
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David J. Kent is Immediate Past President of the Lincoln Group of DC and the author of Lincoln: The Fire of Genius: How Abraham Lincoln’s Commitment to Science and Technology Helped Modernize America and Lincoln: The Man Who Saved America.
His previous books include Tesla: The Wizard of Electricity and Edison: The Inventor of the Modern World and two specialty e-books: Nikola Tesla: Renewable Energy Ahead of Its Time and Abraham Lincoln and Nikola Tesla: Connected by Fate.
How time flies! The list of Lincoln statues grows, I get interviewed for a documentary, more tasks accumulate, and the big Lincoln in New England cover reveal nears. And that’s just in the last week.
I finally made it to Machu Picchu!
There stands a statue of Abraham Lincoln in Hingham, Massachusetts, New England. It’s immediately across the street from the Samuel Lincoln house. In Hingham, England, United Kingdom there is also a statue of Lincoln. But why? And who was Samuel Lincoln?
The statue in Hingham, England is actually a bust, not a full statue. It was created based on the life mask of Leonard Volk made in 1860 just after Lincoln’s nomination. It depicts a much younger, beardless (and shirtless) Lincoln. It sits in an alcove on the side of St. Andrew’s Church. The bust was installed in 1919 to commemorate the Lincoln ancestry that had for many generations worshiped at the St. Andrew parish.
Another connection is to Robert Burns, the Scottish poet whom Lincoln had a particular fascination. Lincoln had supposedly discovered Burns from Jack Kelso, an enigmatic friend from Lincoln’s New Salem days. Kelso had emigrated to the United States from Scotland, where he had previously been a Glasgow schoolteacher. He apparently owned many volumes of Burns that Lincoln read over and over (ditto for Shakespeare). Lincoln was hooked and recited Burns from memory on many occasions through his life. Robert Burns is eminently present in Edinburgh, including a large monument at the foot of Calton Hill (not far from the aforementioned Lincoln statue). Burns is also one of the three Scottish writers featured in the Writers’ Museum tucked into Lady Stair’s Close a few steps off the Royal Mile that leads to the Edinburgh Castle. He is joined there by Robert Louis Stevenson and Sir Walter Scott.
The American Civil War Museum in Richmond, Virginia once had a statue depicting Abraham Lincoln and his son Tad sitting on a park bench. As of this writing it is no longer there, and hasn’t been since 2023. So, where is it?
While at the Valentine I also got to see another “Civil War President.” A statue of Jefferson Davis had stood for many decades along Monument Avenue in Richmond. During the 2020 protests over the murder of George Floyd in Minnesota, the Davis statue was vandalized with paint, then pulled down. That statue now sits – or more accurately, lays – in the Valentine’s main gallery. Pink and yellow paint splatters the bronze, Davis’s head is bashed in from the fall off his pedestal, and his right arm is nearly severed. The display symbolizes the city’s change in attitude over its prior adulation of Confederate figures. All of its many dozens of Confederate statues have now been removed, with the exception of a few remaining on the grounds of the Viriginia State Capitol (you walk past them as you proceed from the equestrian statue of George Washington to the Governor’s Mansion). They are now joined by two large group statues, one featuring the many women who fought for voting rights and the other of Barbara Johns and others who fought the battle that would become Brown v. Board of Education. Johns is scheduled to replace Robert E. Lee in the U.S. Capitol’s Statuary Hall. Interestingly, it was Edward Virginius Valentine who had sculpted both the Lee statue (now removed from the hall and currently at Richmond’s Museum of History and Culture) and the one of Davis now at the Valentine Museum. Hopefully, Johns will make it into Statuary Hall soon, perhaps after the new governor takes off after this fall’s election.
Abraham Lincoln is best known as the sixteenth President of the United States, long before the POTUS acronym was invented. He was elected in November 1860 and by the time he was inaugurated in March 1861, seven southern states had seceded, with four more joining them just over a month later after the new Confederacy attacked Fort Sumter. But this wasn’t the first time Lincoln had been put forward for executive office. In 1856 he was nominated by his fellow new Republican Party members for Vice President after the party had nominated John C. Fremont for President.
On June 11, 1848, congressman Abraham Lincoln arrived back in Washington, D.C. after having traveled all night from Philadelphia, where he attended the Whig National Convention that nominated Zachary Taylor for president. Upon his return he finds a letter from his wife Mary, who has been visiting her family in Kentucky for several months. These two events begin a campaign and a mystery.
