For the Record

Statements about Abraham Lincoln’s understanding of the South in an Oct. 24 Alumni Scene story about William J. Cooper ’62’s recent book, We Have the War Upon Us: The Onset of the Civil War, November 1860–April 1861, deserve clarification. As PAW readers pointed out, Lincoln took two trips, at 19 and 22, to New Orleans, and his wife and his friend Joshua Speed were Kentuckians. But as Cooper writes in the book, “that part of the Border South was all that he knew.” Lincoln had “no first-hand knowledge of the South,” Cooper writes, and “no friends who could educate him about the South and southern politics.”