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Like It begins with Abraham Lincoln, presidential candidate and railroad lawyer, asking Grenville Dodge, future Union Army General and chief engineer for the Union Pacific Railroad, what would be the best rail route through the prairie to the Pacific. If the Gettysburg Address restated the fundamental American values of the Revolution to make them applicable to, and so unite, all Americans, and if the Civil War united America North and South, then the railroad was to unite it East and West. The railroad was another Lincolnian idea, an ideal, a force for both unity and growth. Lincoln found that ideal so important that he pursued it even while waging, indeed, while for a long time losing the Civil War. Ambrose underscores that the railroad not only grew out of the same vision that led the Union through the Civil War, but also out of the same military organization.