Less than a decade after the Republican Party was formed on the basis of opposition to slavery, Abraham Lincoln was elected in 1860 as the first Republican president. During the Civil War, a group of black men from Baltimore gave a Bible to Lincoln, and he thanked them by writing that it "is the best gift God has given to man" and "but for it, we could not know right from wrong." A very popular book titled "A People's History of the United States" by Marxist Howard Zinn portrays Lincoln's opposition to slavery as driven by greed instead of principle. He does this by quoting Lincoln out of context and ignoring statements like the following, which Lincoln made in 1860: "This is a world of compensations; and he who would be no slave must consent to have no slave. Those who deny freedom to others deserve it not for themselves; and, under a just God, cannot long retain it."