[Abraham Lincoln] helped fell trees to build a large river raft to carry farm goods down a local river and then the treacherous Mississippi to New Orleans. There, they took the raft apart and sold the logs to build houses in the first bustling big city the future president had ever seen.

Lincoln then walked the nearly 800 miles back to central Illinois. //

The 1860 presidential election has always seemed like a political presidential watershed to me. //

That was the first national confrontation between the two major parties that have shaped American politics ever since and endure today. That's because their ideologies and platforms have been – shall we say – malleable, adapting adeptly to society's changing times, interests, and priorities and starving third parties of lasting issues.

The Republican Party was created in Wisconsin in 1854 around the dominant issue of the day, slavery. In its first presidential contest, the anti-slavery GOP carried the day with Abraham Lincoln as nominee. //

When slavery split Democrats into northern and southern wings in 1860, that election became a four-way race. The northern Democrat was old friend Illinois Sen. Stephen Douglas, who fared the worst.

There were 33 states then. Douglas won one of them, Arkansas. Lincoln needed 152 electoral votes. He got 180 from 18 states with only 39.7 percent of the splintered popular vote.

Welcome to the White House, Mr. President. Until 1933, Inauguration Days back then were in March. By March of 1861, seven states had seceded. Five weeks later, Confederates started the Civil War in South Carolina.

In 1863, Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation, freeing all enslaved people in the South.

As an attempt to begin national healing, for his 1864 reelection, Lincoln chose as his vice-presidential running mate a southern Democrat, Sen. Andrew Johnson of Tennessee.

That’s the only time a U.S. political party has nominated a bipartisan national ticket. It worked for the election. But not so well after, when GOP Congress met Democrat president. Post-presidency, Johnson became the only president to later serve in the Senate.

Lincoln’s second inauguration came outside the Capitol with John Wilkes Booth reportedly watching from nearby. Like much of what the self-educated Lincoln wrote, the speech was full of humanity, grace, and humility, and far shorter than today's wordy promise agendas salted with calculated applause lines:

With malice toward none with charity for all with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right let us strive on to finish the work we are in to bind up the nation's wounds…

The ensuing celebration lacked Lincoln’s favorite food, chicken fricassee. But the 250-foot-long buffet table was laden with veal, venison, quail, oyster stew, and six flavors of ice cream, including Lincoln’s favorite, vanilla.

Twenty-five days later, the Civil War ended as the deadliest conflict still in U.S. history.

Thirty days after that inauguration, the Lincolns went to a play at Ford’s Theater. It was Good Friday.

Allegedly to see the performance better, the president’s bodyguard, John Parker, left his post outside the Lincolns' box. But he wound up in a nearby saloon.

Confederate sympathizer Booth had no trouble sneaking in behind the president with his .44 Derringer. The bullet entered the left side of Lincoln’s head, passed through the brain, lodging just behind the right eye.

The 56-year-old president, who had maintained the Union but would lose three of his four sons to illness, never regained consciousness and died the next morning.

(In a bizarre twist, Lincoln's eternal rest was interrupted 12 years later by a band of grave robbers who successfully absconded with the presidential corpse for some weeks, seeking ransom for the kidnapped body. Which explains why Abraham Lincoln now rests in a Springfield memorial in a coffin sealed within two tons of cement and steel.)