Lincoln's Greatest Case: The River, the Bridge, and the Making of America

The untold story of how one sensational trial propelled a self-taught lawyer and a future president into the national spotlight.

In May of 1856, the steamboat Effie Afton barreled into a pillar of the Rock Island Bridge, unalterably changing the course of American transportation history. Within a year, long-simmering tensions between powerful steamboat interests and burgeoning railroads exploded, and the nation’s attention, absorbed by the Dred Scott case, was riveted by a new civil trial. D...