"The History Channel" recently aired a three-episode series entitled "Abraham Lincoln." The second episode entitled "A President at War" was shown on 2-21-2022. I was only casually watching it until the episode began covering how Lincoln dealt with the "Trent Affair." President Lincoln did not want to have to fight another war, during the early stages of the Civil War, especially with Great Britain, over two captured Confederate diplomatic envoys, taken illegally by the USS San Jacinto off the RMS Trent, a British mail steamer headed shortly back to England. President Lincoln had decided to release the two men (Mason and Slidell) but needed to prepare the Northern Unionists for this unpopular political decision.

In the TV episode, President Lincoln is walking outside in the White House in the Rose Garden with his stated friend, John W. Forney, and Lincoln politely ask Forney to do him a personal favor: "Would he publish an article in his two newspapers (the Washington Chronicle and Philadelphia Press) justifying and supporting the unexpected release (soon to come) of the two Confederates, now in prison in Massachusetts, back to the British Navy." Forney apparently did.

This TV scene illustrates how powerful John W. Forney and Philadelphia's political and business interest were in America in 1861 when the Beale Wagon Road's six iron bridges, fabricated in Philadelphia and built in Indian Territory, were opened. John W. Forney was The Wanderer's (John Russell Young) newspaper boss.

In addition, you may have noted that the opening scene in The History Channel's series on Abraham Lincoln begins with President Lincoln hiding in disguise in his special railroad car, that was waiting for him in Baltimore, so as to avoid Confederate assassins identifying him late on the night of February 22, 1861 in Baltimore. The Preface of my recent "paper back book" on Beale's Iron Bridge Road begins on the morning of February 22, 1861 in Philadelphia with Lincoln giving his "Welcome Kansas to the Union" speech at Independence Hall. President Lincoln has already been informed by two independent sources the previous evening in Philadelphia that a Confederate assassination attempt would be made on him as he passed through Baltimore the next night.

John Russell Young, our young 18-year old eyewitness correspondent to the construction of the six iron bridges for the Beale Wagon Road in Indian Territory in 1859, was fortunately well connected to Philadelphia's powerful political and business interest by 1859, so his eleven articles about his trip out West got widely published in The Press and in other sources.