“Oh, for heaven’s sake,” Mother says eventually. “I can tell you anything you need to know for your little book,” but Asia has already made a different plan. She writes to those friends of Father’s she knows well, asking them to send her what they remember, along with any playbills and reviews they might have kept. It occurs to her that Father’s sister may have had her own letters and memorabilia. Aunt Jane has recently died, but Uncle Mitchell is still in Baltimore, cast off by his children and living a grasping existence in a squalid garret. Asia decides she would rather talk to her drunken, miserly, contemptible uncle than to her mother.

It is now 1854. June is prospering in San Francisco. He and Hattie have had a baby girl. Her name is Marion Rosalie Edwina Booth.

Edwin is booked for a fall tour to Australia and Hawaii arranged by the British actress and manager Laura Keene. His letters are full of excitement and plans. “I will make a fortune,” he promises, “and then I will lose it all before I return.”

Lincoln and the Kansas-Nebraska Act

We were thunderstruck and stunned; and we reeled and fell into utter confusion.

—Abraham Lincoln’s first response to the Kansas-Nebraska Act, 1854

Prior to the admission of Kansas and Nebraska into the Union, the federal policy was to keep the slave and free states in some sort of rough balance. For over thirty years, slavery had been forbidden north of the 36°30′ latitude. The Kansas-Nebraska Act voided this prohibition, upending the Missouri Compromise and threatening those arrangements that had been holding the Union together, if barely.

Stephen Douglas now proposed that decisions about slavery should be made locally, state by state, vote by vote. Congress debated the matter for months, often with spectacular threats, epithets, accusations. The Act was eventually passed by the Senate in March, the House in May. President Pierce signed it into law on May 30th.

The entire political landscape transformed. A feeling in the North that the South had long wielded too much power over the national politics, that they were expanding slavery into the new territories and perhaps had their eyes on the North itself, resulted in the end of the Whig Party and the creation of the Republican.

The abolitionists doubled their efforts. Kansas became a place of blood and terror. Preston Brooks, a congressman from South Carolina, beat Charles Sumner from Massachusetts nearly to death on the floor of the Senate with his cane. Sumner’s recovery from this beating took three years while Brooks became a hero throughout the South, receiving canes as gifts wherever he went. Rather than saving the Union, the Kansas-Nebraska Act hastened the war.

Douglas returned to Illinois to defend himself. He told his friends he could have traveled all night by the light of his own burning effigies. As he began to cross the state, speaking in support of his Act, Lincoln began to follow and answer him.