On the same day—February 11, 1861—Jefferson Davis and Abraham Lincoln both set out on fateful meandering train trips: Davis from Vicksburg, Mississippi, over five days and 700 miles, to Montgomery, Alabama; Lincoln from his hometown of Springfield, Illinois, over twelve days and 1,900 miles, to Washington, D.C. That is where Nigel Hamilton begins his “dual biography,” Lincoln vs. Davis: The War of the Presidents. Both men were born in Kentucky. Both were 52 years old—or would be when Lincoln celebrated his birthday the next day. In Montgomery, Davis would take office as the provisional president of the Confederate States of America (CSA) on February 18. At that time, Davis’s CSA consisted of six states of the deep South, which, one after another, had seceded following Lincoln’s election on November 6, 1860: South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, and Florida (with Texas on the way). In Washington, Lincoln would be inaugurated president of the United States of America on March 4. With the recent admission of Kansas as a state (January 29, 1861), Lincoln’s USA consisted of 34 states, including the ones that supposed they had just seceded.  

What ensued Hamilton calls a