There are over 16,000 books on Abraham Lincoln, the 16th President of the United States. You agreed to pick the best read on Old Abe and I insisted we discuss his thrilling Lincoln on the Brink among the five. Before we get to the books, introduce our international audience to Abraham Lincoln.
there is much to admire about abraham lincoln. It comes at a crucial time, when all Americans knew a crisis was brewing. almost all historians would say that he handled that crisis extremely well. he triumphed in a military contest, deepened democracy, expanded education and strengthened infrastructure. he expanded the role of the president in American life. and most important of all, he dealt a fatal blow to slavery.
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His amazing literary ability, which few knew when they voted for him, was key to his impact. As president, he delivered extraordinary public addresses that are Shakespearean in some respects and Biblical in others.
It’s emotionally interesting. Abraham Lincoln has more ups and downs than perhaps any other president. he is very strong, but also vulnerable. that makes him an attractive central figure for a history book. and he is tragically struck down at the moment of his greatest triumph, immediately after winning the civil war. that almost seems like a shakespeare plot twist. so he continues to fascinate.
When abraham lincoln ran for president in 1860, his supporters highlighted his initial biography. his rise from a log cabin in kentucky to the white house is astounding. What are those basic biographical facts?
his campaign brilliantly turned his disadvantages into advantages. he had a very low level of education, just a few years of school here and there. he did not go to high school or college. he had an insignificant role in national politics before becoming president: just a two-year term as a congressman that was 12 years ago. he lacked legislative, business, and military achievements. but the only thing he did not lack was a moral compass. and so he came when america was lost and really helped us get our bearings.
his fascinating book, lincoln on the verge, focuses on abraham lincoln on the brink of his presidency. tell us about the book and the importance of that period he writes about.
is a story about abraham lincoln’s 13-day train ride to his inauguration. We tend to have a static image of Lincoln, posed in a photograph or standing rigid in a daguerreotype. but he was a man of action. I wanted to show it in motion.
along his train ride to washington, lincoln meets thousands of people every day. you are improving your ability to influence people with a speech. trying to keep the country together was both physical and intellectual work. he was shaking tens of thousands of hands to keep the united states from falling apart. it was a physical test but one for which he was well qualified. We don’t think of Abraham Lincoln as a young man, but he had just turned 52 and was still vigorous.
“there is much to admire about abraham lincoln”
this trip also shows america in all its different hues. it is a country that is different, not only between north and south, but also between the northern, southern, western and eastern parts of the individual states. southern ohio is really different from northern ohio. Pennsylvania is very diverse. following lincoln on this trip through america allows me to show the complexity of the country in the 19th century.
America is also clearly tricky in 2021. Reading about the dramatic differences among 19th-century Americans, from region to region, still resonates today.
One of the things that made the book so compelling to me is the efficient and effective way you explained what a dangerous time this was for American democracy. Can you summarize that aspect of the book?
That also resonated with me because of all the turmoil we went through in 2020. Democracy wasn’t working well in 1860, in DC and around the world. The federal government was not very effective, and the lame president, James Buchanan, was lame in every way. he was a jerk in meetings. Southern slave interests had controlled the United States government almost without exception since 1789. The vast majority of free people in this huge and complicated country did not want to be ruled by the slave owners and their representatives in Washington.
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In Congress, disagreements boiled over, causing abolitionist Massachusetts Senator Charles Sumner to nearly come to a standstill after he was brutally beaten by a South Carolina congressman. the congress was not working. there was hardly any compromise or negotiation.
1860 is truly the end of an era. it is the failure of the first chapter of American history. They tried a form of democracy from 1789 to 1860. When Lincoln was elected, half the country didn’t accept him and they split. that was a sign of an inconsistent commitment to democracy on his part.
lincoln had gigantic challenges. it was up to him to reunify the country. but if he won the war by simply crushing the south in a bloodbath, he could not have put the country back together and it would have been much more difficult for the country to function as a democracy again. so he wants to win by persuading all the people that democracy is worth the gigantic effort to preserve the union.
around the world, people have their eyes on the us. uu. because democracy is failing everywhere. the German revolution of 1848 has failed. In France, too, a revolution failed in 1848. In Italy, popular uprisings were faltering. so if American democracy had completely collapsed, it might have been the final nail in the coffin of democracy. if lincoln had failed, democracy might have been seen as another weird utopian move.
lincoln had to keep this complicated country together, defend democracy at home and around the world, and begin offering the benefits of citizenship to all americans who had been denied them, including formerly enslaved americans. these benefits included voting, education, jury duty, and running for office. it is remarkable how many of these goals he accomplished in four years.
one of his recommended books is about the strength that made abraham lincoln such an effective president. tell us about lincoln sword by historian douglas wilson.
douglas wilson is an excellent lincoln scholar, based at knox college in illinois. he is an extremely close reader of lincoln. Lincoln’s words are very important because they are a kind of writing for Americans. Sometimes the words are hard to pin down because three or four people listening to Lincoln’s speech may spell them differently. Douglas Wilson meticulously checks every word spoken and helps us understand Lincoln’s writing process. Featuring all of Lincoln’s most famous speeches, Wilson tells us why the speech needed to be given, the speech-writing process, and the various iterations of the speech. his intense literary focus is gripping. every time i read douglas wilson’s work, i feel energized by lincoln’s words.
according to richard norton smith, wilson “reconstructs man by deconstructing his words”. what do abraham lincoln’s writings reveal about him?
reveals the logic of a lawyer. There is a remarkable clarity to Lincoln’s arguments that builds from paragraph to paragraph. That’s Lincoln, the lawyer who was so used to swaying juries in Illinois. But poetic inspiration is also evident in Lincoln’s word choices. His writing shows that Lincoln was a deep reader, especially of Shakespeare and the King James Bible. We wouldn’t love Lincoln if he just made clear arguments. lincoln moved us with the beauty of his words. Wilson breaks down, sentence by sentence, how Lincoln moved public opinion with specific words.
That brings us to a book by pulitzer prize-winning garry wills about one of lincoln’s most powerful speeches, delivered in 1863 at the dedication of a cemetery for the war dead. tell us about lincoln in gettysburg.
is a wonderful book that packs all of the author’s formidable scholarship into one short speech. the gettysburg address is only 272 words long. It probably took him three minutes to say it. wills makes the moment crackle with electricity. explains how lincoln wrote the address, on the way to gettysburg. he deconstructs the discourse itself and contextualizes it. The entire history of the United States was pivoting, in these three minutes, from a state-based way of thinking about our society to a nation-based way of thinking. In this speech, Lincoln rededicated the United States to citizenship for all of his people. until that time, African Americans were largely excluded from citizenship. In this speech, Wills shows that Lincoln is realigning the stars of our country to become a federal union stronger than the states and dedicated to the rights of all citizens, including African Americans. It was a big step forward.
The phrase of those 272 words that has resounded ever since is “a new birth of freedom”. what does that phrase mean?
Those words were crucial and refer, I believe, to the Emancipation Proclamation that had already happened, also to the ongoing process of emancipating African Americans, and to the work toward the Reconstruction Amendments that would follow the Civil War. The 13th Amendment, which abolished involuntary servitude, occurs while Lincoln is still alive. Amendment 14 enters into force a few years later. It promises “equal protection under the law” and provides full citizenship rights to anyone born in the United States. and the 15th amendment, which prevents states and the federal government from denying a man the right to vote on the basis of “race, color, or previous condition of servitude” is ratified in 1870. Then, a “new birth of liberty” It basically means that the United States is finally focused on fulfilling the promises of the Declaration of Independence. in 1776, the founders wrote that “all men are created equal.” Amendments 13, 14 and 15 made that idea legally applicable.
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next is harold holzer’s emancipating lincoln: the proclamation in text, context, and memory. the emancipation proclamation declared that, as of new year’s day 1863, enslaved people in the rogue states would be free “henceforth, and free forever; and the Executive Government of the United States, including the military and naval authorities thereof, shall recognize and maintain the liberty of such persons, and shall take no act or acts to restrain such persons, or any of them, in any of their efforts. for their royal freedom.”
it’s hard for me to choose just one harold holzer book because there are so many and they are all very good. emancipating lincoln is very compelling and relatively short. three chapters of three talks he gave at harvard, on what made the emancipation proclamation such a remarkable document. The Emancipation Proclamation had more impact on politics and law than Lincoln’s speeches, which are much more familiar to students of history.
“his amazing literary ability…was key to the impact he had”
and holzer is also restoring how hard it was for lincoln to do that. that’s important because sometimes we take it for granted, or worse yet, we criticize it. statues of him have recently been torn down and his name has been stripped from public schools. it is possible to find imperfect things that were not racially sensitive to our perfect ears. But what Harold Holzer brilliantly demonstrated is that emancipation was politically difficult to achieve and had a huge impact, as understood by African Americans in particular. It’s a beautiful little book that returns Lincoln to what was probably his most important role, the role of the emancipator, the man who ended slavery.
In his introduction, holzer presents lincoln’s emancipation as a response to “hard revisionist scholarship” that stripped lincoln of the credit for abolition and “the new birth of liberty” he called for at gettysburg. revisionism, needless to say, is nothing new. one of the statues you refer to was across the river in boston. The only text my high school son receives, in a social studies class focused on the 1860s and later, portrays Lincoln as a cynical politician who was adamantly opposed to equal rights for African Americans. How and why has Lincoln’s reputation risen and fallen in the 158 years since he signed the Emancipation Proclamation?
that statue was built after lincoln’s death; he had nothing to do with it. It’s troubling in many ways, the body language is wrong, but we still need to proceed with caution and listen to the voices from the Lincoln era.
if frederick douglass, who stands second to none as a brave and uncompromising witness to his people, were alive, he would be appalled by those who assess lincoln out of context. Douglas was skeptical when he won Lincoln. Lincoln moved slowly against slavery at first. But four years later, when he saw what Lincoln had done, he was full of praise for him. In 1865, after the Emancipation Proclamation and Northern Victory, and Lincoln’s second and final inaugural address pledging the vote of African-American veterans, it was clear that he had moved America a great distance.
Finally, tell me about the last Abraham Lincoln book on your list, John E. washington knew lincoln.
is a great book and an unusual book, first published in 1942 by an African-American teacher who grew up in the shadow of the capitol. The book was recently republished with an excellent introduction by historian Kate Masur. john e. washington amassed a lot of fantastic oral history and documents to tell the untold story of the black people who knew lincoln.
African Americans from many walks of life came into contact with Lincoln. there were African-Americans working in the white house. he was friends with a young man named william johnson who worked in the treasury department. His barber in Illinois, William de Fleurville, was born in Haiti and they knew each other well. The stories in this book deepen our understanding of Lincoln and his presidency. They weren’t just white men in blue uniforms; there were many African-Americans playing important roles behind the scenes.
reconstructing the lives of African-Americans who knew that Lincoln is Washington by creating a social story of the kind that became popular in the 1960s?
I’m sure we could find earlier examples of social history. For example, there are some very interesting books written about the experience of the average soldier in the American Revolution. But despite the efforts of historians like w.e.b. Dubois, there had not been enough work focused on African Americans during the Civil War. This book helps correct that imbalance and shows how much Lincoln’s presidency depended on the help he received from other members of his extended family.
last question: as you noted earlier, like the thirteen days you wrote about in lincoln on the verge, the united states just went through a period between presidencies in which democracy was under great pressure. what lessons does lincoln’s life offer about how current president joe biden can deal with divisions in the united states? What lessons does Lincoln’s life offer for all leaders?
There is a great lesson to be learned from Lincoln’s efforts to address all Americans. lincoln always makes an effort to speak to the south. he always strove to “bind the nation’s wounds,” as he put it at the second inauguration. To survive, America needs presidents who focus on the entire country, not just the party or interest groups that elect them. I’m encouraged that President Biden has been like this so far.
lincoln also provides an example of action. Although he was slow to get out of the box, when the South attacked Fort Sumter, he responded swiftly, rallied the Northern army and mounted an overwhelming military response. While he was leading the war, he signed the Morrill Act in 1862, which expanded our public education system with land-grant colleges. he signed the Family Homestead Act, which helped immigrants and ultimately freed slaves start new communities in the West. he helped the railroad and telegraph spread across the country. he did not hesitate to use the powers of the presidency to act boldly and promote actions in congress that he believed would help americans. that has also been true for joe biden to date.
So far, Biden’s combination of unifying rhetoric and focused action has been impressive and yes, Lincolnian.
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