Whereas today the Lincoln Memorial immortalizes the 16th president of the United States in stone, the adoration was far from universal in his own lifetime, particularly in the Southern and border states such as Missouri. After years of growing tensions between North and South and of violence along the Missouri-Kansas border, the election of Abraham Lincoln to the presidency, on November 6, 1860, threatened to tear the nation apart. This letter from a Missouri citizen, David M. Fox, to Governor Robert M. Stewart expressed his fears of what the election of Lincoln would mean for the future of slavery or, as he saw it, the continuation of his property rights, the “property too recognized by the highest law in the land."