Unable to Escape This Toil: In Search of Abraham Lincoln’s Forgotten New England Tours

＂Combining history, travelogue, and memoir, Kent’s engagingly written account is sure to find a receptive audience among Lincoln scholars and enthusiasts alike.＂ -John C. Rodrigue, PhD, author of Freedom’s Crescent, finalist for the 2024 Gilder Lehrman Lincoln Prize and recipient of the John L. Nau III Prize in Civil War Studies Lincoln in New England revisits the important towns where Lincoln spoke and the pivotal figures that helped define the great issues leading to the Civil War. Readers join native New Englander and Lincoln historian David J. Kent as he travels back in time to examine the nation’s downward spiral into conflict. Readers will explore the crucial issues that predicated the civil war, the birth of the Republican Party as an anti-slavery faction, and New England’s own short-lived flirtation with secession in the spirit of independence. Through the book’s first-person travelogue style, historical maps with redrawn routes, original writings from Lincoln himself, insight from Lincoln historians, and black and white photographs, readers gain a full picture of the region’s vital influence leading up to the Civil War.

David J. Kent is an award-winning Abraham Lincoln scholar, former scientist, author, and traveler. He is Immediate Past President of the Lincoln Group of DC with a decade of ongoing group leadership, as well as on the Executive Committee and Board of the Abraham Lincoln Institute and on the Board of Advisers for the Lincoln Forum. He is the author of Lincoln: The Fire of Genius and Lincoln: The Man Who Saved America. David writes extensively on Lincoln for a range of media outlets. His writing has appeared in Civil War Times, Lincoln Herald, The Lincolnian, Lincoln Forum Bulletin, Smithsonian’s Civil War Studies newsletter, Writer’s Digest, Tesla Magazine, Science Panorama, and elsewhere. He writes ongoing columns in each quarterly issue of the Lincoln Herald and Lincolnian.