“Our progress in degeneracy appears to me to be pretty rapid.” So Abraham Lincoln wrote on August 24, 1855, to his friend Joshua Speed. Is it melodramatic to worry that the statement appears apt today?

Lincoln was primarily concerned about the state of the nation. But he also knew in 1855 that the party he’d been affiliated with and loyal to his entire adult life—the Whig party—was doomed. Lincoln spent much of that year and the next few years helping to organize a new party, the Republican party. Almost providentially, the Republicans rose out of the ashes of the Whigs, won the presidential election of 1860, and saved the nation.