In the months after his election, Abraham Lincoln famously assembled his "team of rivals" as the United States disintegrated. In this lecture, Harold Holzer, author of Lincoln President-Elect: Abraham Lincoln and the Great Secession Winter 1860-1861, argues that Lincoln was not the inexperienced country lawyer he has often been described as. He was every bit as shrewd during the "Great Secession Winter" of 1860 as he was as president. He used silence to his advantage and made a grueling (and sometimes dangerous) railroad journey to his inauguration, during which he reaffirmed the promise he had made during the campaign: to put slavery on the path to extinction.
