Prologue
Part one: "Equality before the law"
"We are becoming abolitionists... fast"
"It touched me to the soul"
Texas thunder
A daring escape attempt
A new doctrine is born
Separate is inherently unequal
"Truth in the end must prevail"
Part two: Unstoppable peril
Preserve the Union at any cost?
"You have whipped Webster!"
A fugitive slave returned, a new senator elected
"Slavery is the source of all meanness here"
The fugitive slave law assailed
Kansas and Nebraska - "at the very grave of freedom"
Bleeding Kansas
The crime against Kansas
Bleeding Sumner
Part three: A nation split asunder
The vacant chair
A reelection and a shocking death
The Dred Scott decision and trial by fire
Return from exile
"The barbarism of slavery"
Lincoln's election and Southern secession
"At last the war has come"
"Elevate the condition of men"
"The rebellion is slavery itself!"
British treachery
Part four: Death of slavery, death of a rebellion, death of a president
Emancipation in the nation's capital
"At last, the proclamation has come"
"The result is certain - sooner or later"
The thirteenth amendment and the end of the fugitive slave law
"Are you for your country, or are you for the rebellion?"
With malice toward none?
Richmond has fallen
"We are near the end at last"
Part five: "For all everywhere who suffer from tyranny and wrong"
Andrew Johnson's betrayal
The fourteenth amendment: "freedom without suffrage is still slavery"
"I begin to live!"
"My home was hell..."
"Guilty of all and infinitely more!"
"There can be no backward step"
"Good-bye and God bless you!"
"Great champion of liberty".