This work reveals the monumentally influential friendship between America's sixteenth president and Gustav Koerner, a German revolutionary who settled on the Illinois frontier. With research based in unique correspondence previously ignored by Lincoln and Civil War scholars, this innovative volume sheds light on an unexamined aspect of Abraham Lincoln's life.

Exiled from Germany as a revolutionary in 1833, Koerner met Lincoln in frontier Illinois when they were both young lawyers. Radical and determined to offer America a new view of exalted rights and liberty, Koerner become a state Supreme Court judge and lieutenant governor of Illinois. He interceded at a crucial moment at the 1860 Republican National Convention that opened the door to Lincoln's nomination. In addition to serving as a catalyst for Lincoln's ascension to the executive branch, author Donald Allendorf explains how Koerner and other German revolutionaries of the time came to irreparably impact the United States's politics and legal system. Using Koerner's personal letters and memoirs, this book tells the story of two very different lives that merged against a backdrop of slavery, nativism, and the road to the nomination.