In May of 1856, the steamboat Effie Afton barreled into a pillar of the Rock Island Bridge—the first railroad bridge ever to span the Mississippi River—unalterably changing the course of American transportation history. Within a year, long-simmering tensions between powerful steamboat interests and burgeoning railroads exploded, and the nation’s attention, then absorbed by the Dred Scott case, was riveted by a new civil trial. With nothing less than the lifeblood of two vital American industries at stake, a handful of crack legal practitioners—including a lanky prairie lawyer named Abraham Lincoln—descended on a Chicago courtroom.Dramatically reenacting the Effie Afton case from its unlikely inception to Lincoln’s soaring oratory to the controversial finale and fallout, historian and lawyer Brian McGinty brilliantly animates this legal cauldron of the late 1850s and Lincoln’s most momentous, pre–Civil War trial, an essential first act to a pivotal Lincoln drama we barely knew existed.