Abraham Lincoln and Coles County, Illinois

In the predawn darkness of Friday, February 1, 1861, aboard a westbound train, Abraham Lincoln, left Coles County for the last time.

Elected to the presidency the previous November and not yet having departed his home in Springfield for Washington, D.C., to be inaugurated, he had come on January 30 to visit his stepmother, Sarah Bush Lincoln, and to say farewell to friends and family in Charleston and the surrounding area.

He would never return. Having led the United States through the Civil War, he would die at the hand of assassin John Wilkes Booth in Washington’s Ford Theater on another Friday—April 14, 1865.

This book by history scholar Charles H. Coleman explores Lincoln’s close-knit family ties in and connection to Coles County, located in east-central Illinois: the home of his father and stepmother, Thomas and Sarah Bush Lincoln, as well as his stepbrother John and his stepsisters, Sarah Elizabeth and Matilda, along with their families, and where Lincoln himself was a frequent visitor during his lifetime.