Abraham Lincoln

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    ‘Lincoln had something to say’: historians ponder lessons for the age of Trump

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    Asked what Abraham Lincoln might have to say to Americans in 2024, an election year in a country as divided as at any time since the civil war Lincoln won, the NPR host Steve Inskeep said the 16th president would advise that a big part of “building a political majority is making alliances with people you believe to be wrong”.“One of the things that drew me to the topic of Lincoln was the present and the dilemmas and difficulties of democracy right now,” Inskeep said on Saturday, appearing in connection with his book Differ We Must: How Lincoln Succeeded in a Divided America, at the 27th Annual Abraham Lincoln Institute Symposium, at Ford’s Theatre in Washington DC.“I did feel like Lincoln had something to say,” Inskeep said, “and I’ve tried to express it. And it has to do with dealing with differences in a fractured society. And it has to do with building a political majority, which is a skill that I think some of us perhaps have forgotten, or we’re being told to forget.“And part of building a political majority is making alliances with people you believe to be wrong. And hopefully you don’t believe they’re wrong on everything. But maybe out of 10 things, you think they’re very wrong about three things and can find some way to agree on some of the other seven and move forward and at least agree fundamentally on the idea that we have a constitution, we have a republic, we have a democracy. We have a system to mediate our differences. We have institutions and we should uphold them.”The 46th president, Joe Biden, has made Donald Trump’s threat to that constitution, republic and democracy a central plank of his re-election campaign.Trump, the 45th president, refused to admit defeat in 2020, inciting the deadly January 6 attack on Congress in an attempt to stop certification of that election. Despite that – and while facing 88 criminal charges, multimillion-dollar civil penalties and attempts to keep him off the ballot by constitutional means – he stormed to a third successive presidential nomination by the party that still calls itself the party of Lincoln.Three weeks short of the 159th anniversary of Lincoln’s death – he was shot by John Wilkes Booth at Ford’s on 14 April 1865, Good Friday, and died the following morning – Inskeep and other historians gathered in the very same theatre. James Swanson, author of Manhunt: The 12-Day Chase for Lincoln’s Killer, now the basis for an Apple TV drama, was among those in the stalls.The event took place at the end of another tumultuous week in US politics, in which Trump railed against Democrats while struggling to pay a $454m bond in his New York civil fraud case; sought to have federal criminal charges over his election subversion dismissed; was accused by the White House of employing “unhinged antisemitic rhetoric”; called for the jailing of Liz Cheney, a conservative opponent; and stoked huge debate over what he meant when he predicted a “bloodbath” if Biden beat him again.View image in fullscreenAppealing to the better angels of Americans on both sides of the partisan divide, Inskeep said Lincoln’s example, including his magnanimous approach to defeated Confederates after the civil war, might help voters decide not “to simply denounce, isolate or ostracise those we believe to be wrong.“It is an approach to political difference that I think is a little bit out of fashion now, but it is fundamentally what Lincoln did. It is fundamentally the reason we decided the civil war” and thereby ended slavery.Lincoln “understood that the north had the population, they had the economy, they had the advantages that become real in wartime, that eventually come to tell on the battlefield. And Lincoln had to keep enough people unified to have that political majority, and in order to have that majority win.“It’s a central message and matter for our time.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionAlso appearing were Callie Hawkins, chief executive of President Lincoln’s Cottage, a national monument in Washington; Gordon Leidner, author of Abraham Lincoln and the Bible; George Rable, author of Conflict of Command: George McClellan, Abraham Lincoln, and the Politics of War; and Michael Zuckert, author of A Nation So Conceived: Abraham Lincoln and the Paradox of Democratic Sovereignty.As moderator, Lucas Morel, professor of politics at Washington & Lee University in Virginia, returned to a persistent theme of audience questions: how can Americans use Lincoln’s example today.Inskeep said: “Lincoln … understood that people would act in their self-interest but tried to harness that into something larger. And part of recognising that people have self-interest lay in trying to work out who that person was, which I feel is another thing we’re discouraged from doing.“We’re encouraged to speak our truth, which is great, because there’s lots of truths, lots of experiences that were suppressed and ignored and less so now. But the next step is to put yourself in the shoes of the other person, to understand where they’re coming from. And an additional step for a politician, of course, is to appeal to them.”Rable, meanwhile, said voters could learn from viewing Lincoln not as some perfect figure from the past, but as a politician and leader with faults like any other.“Here you have a full-bodied human being” Rable said. “He has strengths, he has weaknesses. And I think [we should] look at leaders that way, rather than saying, ‘OK, this leader does this, I’m just going to dismiss him,’ or, ‘I’m going to believe everything that this leader says’.” More

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      Joe Biden’s great-great-grandfather was pardoned by Abraham Lincoln

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      Joe Biden’s great-great-grandfather was charged with attempted murder after a civil war-era brawl – but pardoned of any wrongdoing by Abraham Lincoln, a newspaper said on Monday, reviving on the US holiday of Presidents’ Day the often contentious issue of presidential powers to grant pardons.Citing documents from the US national archives, the historian David J Gerleman wrote in the Washington Post that Biden’s paternal forebear Moses J Robinette was pardoned by Lincoln after Robinette got into a fight with a fellow Union army civilian employee, John J Alexander, in Virginia. Robinette drew a knife and sliced Alexander.The newspaper reported that Robinette worked as an army veterinary surgeon for the army during the US’s war between the states. He was convicted of attempted murder and sentenced to two years hard labor after failing to convince a court he had acted in self-defense.Three army officers appealed the conviction to Lincoln, arguing it was too harsh. Biden’s long-ago White House predecessor agreed, and Robinette was pardoned on 1 September 1864, seven months before Lincoln was assassinated.Gerleman wrote that the 22 pages of court martial transcript he found in the national archives helped to “fill in an unknown piece of Biden family history” – on a Presidents’ Day that fell a week after Lincoln’s 12 February birthday, to boot.The historian said that Robinette’s trial transcript had been “unobtrusively squeezed among many hundreds of other routine court-martial cases” and revealed “the hidden link between the two men – and between two presidents across the centuries”.Article II, section 2 of the US constitution authorizes American presidents “to grant reprieves and pardons for offenses against the United States, except in cases of impeachment”.The power is rooted in the monarch’s prerogative to grant mercy under early English law, which later traveled across the Atlantic Ocean to the American colonies. US presidents typically use the power to pardon at the end of their terms.Recent presidents have used the powers to differing degrees. George W Bush issued 200 acts of clemency; Barack Obama, 1,927: Donald Trump, 237; and Biden so far 14, excluding thousands pardoned for simple possession of marijuana.Biden’s marijuana pardons only apply to those who were convicted of use and simple possession of marijuana on federal lands and in the District of Columbia.Jimmy Carter issued 566 acts of clemency, excluding more than 200,000 for Vietnam war draft evasion.Lincoln’s pardon to Robinette was of 343 acts of clemency he issued.According to the Post, the fight between Robinette and Alexander took place on the evening of 21 March 1864, at the army of the Potomac’s winter camp near Beverly Ford, Virginia.Alexander, a brigade wagon master, had overheard Robinette saying something about him to the female cook. An argument ensued, and Alexander was left bleeding. Robinette’s charges included attempted murder. Though he was not found guilty on that charge, he was convicted on the others and imprisoned on the Dry Tortugas island near Florida.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThree army officers who knew Robinette later petitioned Lincoln to overturn his conviction, writing that the sentence was unduly harsh for “defending himself and cutting with a penknife a teamster much his superior in strength and size, all under the impulse of the excitement of the moment”.The request went through a West Virginia senator, who described Robinette’s punishment as “a hard sentence on the case as stated”. Then it went to Lincoln’s private secretary, who requested a judicial report and the trial transcripts.When the letter eventually reached Lincoln, he issued a pardon “for unexecuted part of punishment”. The then-president signed it: “A. Lincoln. Sep. 1. 1864.”Robinette was released from prison and returned to his family in Maryland to resume farming.A brief obituary following Robinette’s death in 1903 eulogized him as a “man of education and gentlemanly attainments”.The obituary made no mention of Robinette’s wartime court-martial or his connection to Lincoln, the Post said.Robinette died about 12 years before Biden’s late father – his great-grandson – was born. More

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      A skirt served my grandfather well in the first world war | Brief letters

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      Re your letters about men’s skirts (12 January), I am proud to say that my grandfather fought his way through the whole of the first world war wearing a khaki skirt. As a soldier he was part of the London Scottish regiment fighting in the trenches. Furthermore, it is said that his fellow soldiers told that he shaved every day.Mary TippettsBristol It’s useful to get a clear sight of what really matters to the UK and US governments. The prompt military action against Houthis in Yemen (Report, 11 January) shows clearly that any threat to global trade and the smooth running of capitalism is far more important than meaningful action to protect Palestinian civilians in Gaza.Norman MillerBrighton I agree with the first eight reasons (Yes, it’s cold, it’s wet and it’s dark – but here are nine reasons to love January, 14 January), but I take issue with number nine: “It really can’t get any worse.” What about February?Geoff SmithEndon, Staffordshire Re dramas that have changed history (Letters, 14 January), Harriet Beecher Stowe, who wrote Uncle Tom’s Cabin, was allegedly greeted by Abraham Lincoln during the American civil war with the words: “So you’re the little woman who wrote the book that started this great war.”Tom StubbsLondon What’s all this about men in their 70s wearing underpants (Letters, 14 January)? Gosh, I must try it sometime.Toby WoodPeterborough More

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      Liz Cheney read my book: a historian, Lincoln and the lessons of January 6

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      The publication of Liz Cheney’s book, Oath and Honor, is bringing plaudits, once again, for her courage in calling out Donald Trump’s efforts to overturn the constitution. From this historian, it brings a different kind of gratitude. Not only for her patriotism, which has already come at a cost, but for how she allowed the slow work of history to inform a fast-moving political situation that was rapidly becoming a crisis.In this case, the history was a little-known story about the vexed election of Abraham Lincoln, embedded in a book I wrote in 2020, Lincoln on the Verge: Thirteen Days to Washington. The book came out with almost laughably bad timing: in April 2020, just after Covid hit. Printing plants struggled to get the book to stores, stores struggled to stay open, all talks were canceled. After nearly a decade of research, it seemed like the book would go straight to the remainder bin. But as it turned out, people still read it, including members of Congress.Lincoln’s presidency is, of course, well known. It is difficult to imagine a world in which he is not looking over us from the Lincoln Memorial. But as I researched the presidential transition of 1860-61, I was surprised to discover just how much resistance he faced. He nearly didn’t make it to Washington at all.Then, as now, a significant subpopulation refused to accept the result of an election. We all grew up learning about the result: the civil war, which killed 750,000. In the weeks before Lincoln’s arrival, armed militias menaced Congress and there were rumors of a violent takeover of the Capitol, to prevent his inauguration. Seven states seceded before he arrived. Four would secede after.Passions came to a head on 13 February 1861, when Congress assembled to tally electoral certificates. Lincoln had clearly won, with 180 votes. The closest runner-up was the candidate of the south, John C Breckinridge, with 72. Amazingly, the certificates, carried in a wooden box, were sent to Breckinridge, who as the outgoing vice-president was also president of the Senate. If the certificates were miscounted, he would stand to benefit. Then Congress might interfere, as it did in 1824, when it denied the winner of the popular vote, Andrew Jackson, in the so-called “Corrupt Bargain” that put John Quincy Adams in power.To his eternal credit, Breckinridge counted honestly and Lincoln was confirmed. Another southerner, Gen Winfield Scott, posted soldiers around the Capitol and kept an anti-Lincoln mob from entering the House. Breckinridge would become a high-ranking Confederate but he helped to make Lincoln’s presidency possible.Strangely, these footnotes from my research began to come back to life at the end of 2020, during another interregnum, as Americans awaited the arrival of Joe Biden. Once again, there were dark rumors of violence, and a plot centered around the counting of the electoral certificates, to be held on 6 January 2021. The parallels are not perfect. In 1861, the country was weakened because a lame-duck president, James Buchanan, checked out. In 2021, an enraged president directed traffic. But still, I felt a sense of deja vu that fall.We all know the rest of the story. On the day of the count, Trump summoned a mob to disrupt the vote. They were more successful than in 1861, with results we are still dealing with. But they failed, thanks to bravery of the Capitol police and the members of Congress, including Cheney, who stood their ground.At the time, I wondered if anyone beside me was thinking about the eerie parallels to 1861. It turned out that Cheney was, for the simple reason that she was reading my book.I learned about her interest in profiles written during the hearings staged by the January 6 committee. I heard similar stories about Jamie Raskin, the Maryland Democrat and committee member who mentioned my book in his 2022 book, Unthinkable. They may have passed it to each other. Just that image, of a Democrat and a Republican sharing a recommendation, is heartening.In Cheney’s book, she describes reading my book in December 2020, remembering “chilling reading” as storm clouds gathered. Everything about her courage since January 6 would be familiar to the Americans of 1861 – northerners and southerners alike – who stood up for Lincoln. Many disapproved of him, or worried about rumors spread by his enemies. But they believed in democracy, and the constitution, and wanted to give him a chance. They were patriots in the old-fashioned sense.It is a simple thing to agree with our allies. What is harder is to agree with our adversaries, or at least to let them speak their piece. Democracy depends on that respect.When Lincoln finally arrived in Washington, after so many ordeals, he delivered a famous inaugural address, invoking our “better angels”. Since then, he has become something like the angel-in-chief, hovering over us, more present than most other ex-presidents. In 1963, he was looking over Martin Luther King Jr’s shoulder as he gave his “I Have a Dream” speech. In 1970, he gave some comfort to Richard Nixon when he wandered to the Lincoln Memorial to speak to anti-war protesters. To the rest of us, he can still appear unexpectedly, offering a form of communion. Or perhaps union is a better word, for a nation seeking desperately to find common ground.In his oft-quoted poem, The Cure at Troy, Seamus Heaney wrote of a “longed-for tidal wave”, a rare convergence when “justice can rise up” and “hope and history rhyme”. History does not always rhyme, despite the quote often attributed, falsely, to Mark Twain. But now and then, the convergences are real. Liz Cheney found one, and acted on it. This historian is grateful for every reader, but especially for one who read a book so well.
      Ted Widmer, distinguished lecturer at the Macaulay Honors College of the City University of New York, is the author of Lincoln on the Verge: Thirteen Days to Washington More

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      ‘The Lincoln shiver’: a visit to the Soldiers’ Home, a less-known Washington gem

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      When Joe Biden seeks release from Washington pressures, he goes to his house in Rehoboth Beach, Delaware. Donald Trump, of course, had Mar-a-Lago in Florida and even Richard Nixon had the “Western White House”, in San Clemente, California. Presidents often have places to go to escape.Abraham Lincoln needed an escape more than anyone but his bolt hole was closer to home: a cottage at the Soldiers’ Home, on a hill north of the White House in Washington DC itself. It’s still there, a lesser-known historical site in the capital.Callie Hawkins, chief executive of President Lincoln’s Cottage, a national monument since 2000, says: “At the height of the civil war, some of Lincoln’s close friends suggested he take a break, go somewhere else. And he said, ‘Three weeks would do me no good. This follows me wherever I go.’“It would be natural to think of this place as a retreat of some kind. But in many ways, this place brought him closer to the war. He was surrounded by veterans who were wounded. At that time, they lived in the building next door. Just in front of us, about 200 yards away, is the first national cemetery. And then from the other side of the house, he could have looked out on to Maryland and Virginia, both slave-holding states. And so it was really a constant reminder, being out here, of reality.“We’ll walk up to the statue, because I want to see how you stand up to Lincoln. You’re pretty tall yourself.”I’m 6ft 4in but in his famous hat, Lincoln has me matched. The bronze, by Ivan Schwartz and showing the 16th president with the horse he rode to and from the White House each day in the hot months – June to November – was installed in 2008.“It’s different in purpose to the Lincoln Memorial” on the National Mall, Hawkins says. “We wanted to push back against that idea that Lincoln can only be viewed from afar, as a figure larger than life, on a throne in a temple. Here, you can walk up and look him in the eye. And this is a view that many people who were part of this community, on the grounds of the Soldiers’ Home, would have had.”The statue is the most obvious manifestation of Lincoln at the Soldiers’ Home. But his presence is evoked elsewhere.From the terrace, where Lincoln played checkers with Tad, his son, visitors can look out as Lincoln did, down over Washington, to the Capitol, or out to Virginia and Maryland. Inside, the house is sparsely furnished, without attempt to recreate its look in Lincoln’s day. The result is strongly evocative. With the shutters closed, the study where Lincoln worked is dark. Next door, the drawing room is light.“It’s pretty magical,” Hawkins says. “There’s this thing that happens to a lot of people when they come in the cottage. It’s one of those sensations you can’t quite describe, but we have done our best and call it the ‘Lincoln shiver’.“It’s this full-body sensation as you are standing in this place and moving throughout these rooms, that Lincoln did the same at one of the most pivotal moments in American history. Added to that is that it’s a home, and homes are our most intimate spaces. You can just imagine Lincoln in his night shirt, or pajamas and bedroom slippers, moving about these grounds.”Hawkins describes one such appearance by Lincoln, during an evening visit from George Borrett, a British traveler, in 1864.“They brought them into this room and told them to have a seat. A few minutes later, Lincoln came walking through those folding doors.”I turn, see the doors, and there it is: the Lincoln shiver.There are other reasons for it. Lincoln and his wife, Mary Todd Lincoln, grieved here, after the death of their son Willie at the White House in 1862. Hawkins now oversees a striking exhibition about the Lincolns and grief, meant to help those grieving today. Other projects also seek to apply Lincoln’s legacy to modern problems. In January, Prison Reimagined will show portraits of presidents by incarcerated artists.But Hawkins’s evocation of Lincoln, in the drawing room he used, remains extremely powerful, conveying the simple humanity for which Lincoln has long been loved but also his place as perhaps the most powerful expressor – and expression – of the American democratic ideal.“His hair was ruffled, his eyes were sleepy, and his feet were enveloped in carpet slippers. He was essentially in his pajamas to greet people he had no idea were coming and who he did not know. Borrett said, naturally enough, the president asked about their travels. And then President Lincoln asked what I consider to be a really strange question. ‘What do you think of our great country?’“This was a country that in 1864, at the time of their visit, was literally at war with itself. And Lincoln asked a stranger, ‘What do you think of our great country?’ It’s such a such an interesting question. I think it really demonstrates Lincoln’s love for this country, his hope for this country, and what he thought was possible.”The conversation with Borrett happened the year after Lincoln wrote the Gettysburg Address: a short speech, at the site of the greatest civil war battle, that became a foundational text. Lincoln delivered it 160 years ago today.My visit to President Lincoln’s Cottage is somewhat less momentous, an hour or so’s respite from reporting the politics of a country as divided as at any time since that civil war. But for those of us who ponder such problems daily, Lincoln’s conversation with George Borrett has more to offer.“Lincoln started to talk about democracy,” Hawkins says. “This country being the last best hope of Earth. That if democracy didn’t take hold here, it didn’t have a chance anywhere.”
      President Lincoln’s Cottage is open daily, with hourly guided tours More

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      Bannon used Confederate code words to describe Trump speech, book says

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      The far-right Donald Trump ally and adviser Steve Bannon used Confederate code words linked to the assassination of Abraham Lincoln to describe a speech by the former US president before his historic first criminal indictment, a new book says.On 6 March this year, addressing the Conservative Political Action Conference in Maryland, Trump took aim at Alvin Bragg, the Manhattan district attorney then widely expected to bring charges over hush-money payments to the porn star Stormy Daniels, thereby making Trump the first former president ever criminally indicted.Trump told his audience: “I am your warrior; I am your justice. And for those who have been wronged and betrayed, I am your retribution. I am your retribution.”In a forthcoming book, Tired of Winning: Donald Trump and the End of the Grand Old Party, Jonathan Karl, chief Washington correspondent for ABC News, writes: “When I spoke with Bannon a few days later, he wouldn’t stop touting Trump’s performance, referring to it as his ‘Come Retribution’ speech.“What I didn’t realise was that ‘Come Retribution’, according to some civil war historians, served as the code words for the Confederate Secret Service’s plot to take hostage – and eventually assassinate – President Abraham Lincoln.”Lincoln was shot at Ford’s Theatre in Washington on 14 April 1865, by John Wilkes Booth, an actor. The president died the following day.Karl is the author of two bestsellers – Front Row at the Trump Show and Betrayal – about Trump’s rise to the presidency, time in the White House and defeat by Joe Biden.In his third Trump book, excerpted in the Atlantic on Thursday, Karl quotes from a 1988 book, Come Retribution: The Confederate Secret Service and Assassination of Lincoln.“The use of the key phrase ‘Come Retribution’ suggests that the Confederate government had made a bitter decision to repay some of the misery that had been inflicted on the south,” the authors write. “Bitterness may well have been directed toward persons held to be particularly responsible for that misery, and Abraham Lincoln certainly headed the list.”Bannon, Karl writes, “actually recommended that I read that book, erasing any doubt that he was intentionally using the Confederate code words to describe Trump’s speech.“Trump’s speech was not an overt call for the assassination of his political opponents, but it did advocate their destruction by other means. Success ‘is within our reach, but only if we have the courage to complete the job, gut the deep state, reclaim our democracy, and banish the tyrants and Marxists into political exile forever,’ Trump said. ‘This is the turning point.’”In Karl’s estimation, the “Come Retribution” speech “was a turning point for Trump’s campaign” for re-election.Trump began his 2024 campaign sluggishly but then surged to huge leads over his Republican party rivals in national and key-state polling, despite a charge sheet now totaling 91 criminal counts and two civil trials, one over his business practices and one concerning a defamation claim arising from a rape allegation a judge called “substantially true”.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionKarl writes: “The [federal] trial date for the charge of interfering in the 2020 election has been set for 4 March [2024]; for the hush-money case, it’s 25 March; for the classified-documents case, it’s 20 May.“As election day approaches and [Trump] faces down these many days in court, he will be waging a campaign of vengeance and martyrdom. He will continue to talk about what is at stake in the election in apocalyptic terms – ‘the final battle’ – knowing how high the stakes are for him personally. He can win and retake the White House. Or he can lose and go to prison.”Bannon is quoted as saying: “Trump’s on offense and talking about real things. The ‘Come Retribution’ speech had 10 or 12 major policies.”But, Karl writes, “Bannon knew that the speech wasn’t about policies in a traditional sense. Trump spoke about whom he would target once he returned to power.“‘We will demolish the deep state. We will expel the warmongers,’ Trump said. ‘We will drive out the globalists; we will cast out the communists. We will throw off the political class that hates our country … We will beat the Democrats. We will rout the fake news media. We will expose and appropriately deal with the RINOs. We will evict Joe Biden from the White House.“‘And we will liberate America from these villains and scoundrels once and for all.’” More

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      The Lincoln Miracle review: how Republicans chose their great redeemer

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      ReviewThe Lincoln Miracle review: how Republicans chose their great redeemer As the Republican Party marches right, Edward Achorn’s second book on the 16th president makes instructive readingThe party of Lincoln is dead. A half century after the civil rights backlash begat Richard Nixon’s southern strategy, Donald Trump announced on Fox News that his accomplishments may have surpassed those of the 16th president.Why Abraham Lincoln’s meetings with Black Americans matterRead more“So, I think I’ve done more for the black community than any other president, and let’s take a pass on Abraham Lincoln, ’cause he did good, although it’s always questionable.”Descendants of those freed from slavery under Lincoln? They would probably differ.Trump grew up in Queens, a New York borough, but his heart belongs to Dixie. He called the Confederate Robert E Lee one of the greatest US generals and said there were good people on both sides in Charlottesville, Virginia, when white supremacists marched in August 2017 and a counter-protester was murdered. Truly, Trump has cast the Republican party in his own image.Against this bleak backdrop, Edward Achorn delivers The Lincoln Miracle, an in-depth examination of Abraham Lincoln’s successful quest for the Republican presidential nomination at the convention of 1860.Achorn is Pulitzer finalist, particularly interested in the 19th century and baseball. The Lincoln Miracle is Achorn’s fourth book but second on Lincoln, after Every Drop of Blood, about the second inaugural address of 1864. The Lincoln Miracle is beautifully written, filled with vivid and easily digested prose.The reader knows Lincoln will prevail, the US will shortly be at war with itself and the Union will triumph at great cost. Foreknowledge does not detract. The Lincoln Miracle’s themes are timeless, its subtitle apt: Inside the Republican Convention that Changed History.Achorn deftly lays out the personas, demographics and rivalries that shaped the nominating contest and the 1860 election. The Whig party was spent, riven by slavery and nativism. Anti-Catholicism was a force. Anti-German sentiment too. The nation was buffeted by the competing pulls of abolitionism and preservation of the Union. Republicans were divided, Democrats fractured. The Democratic convention was an abject failure. Compromise was not in the air.Three years earlier, the supreme court had issued its infamous Dred Scott decision, reading slavery into the constitution. Short of constitutional amendment or war, there was little to be done. Slavery had morphed into a right.At the Illinois Republican convention in 1858, Lincoln delivered what would come to be known as the House Divided speech. “A house divided against itself cannot stand,” he quoted from the Book of Matthew, his Baptist upbringing manifest. Lincoln may have been a deist but he appreciated Scripture. According to Achorn, he believed “pain and failure were endemic to human life”. People could only do so much. The rest was in the hands of an “inscrutable” God.“I believe this government cannot endure, permanently half-slave and half-free,” Lincoln said. “I do not expect the Union to be dissolved – I do not expect the house to fall – but I do expect it will cease to be divided. It will become all one thing, or all the other.”Lincoln had served one term in Congress, back in the 1840s. His antipathy to slavery was well known. So was his opposition to popular sovereignty, the notion that new states could decide for themselves if slavery would be legal within their borders. In 1858, Lincoln was running for a US Senate seat. He battled the Democrat Stephen Douglas on that very point. Lincoln won the debates but lost the election. In 1859, John Brown seized the federal armory at Harper’s Ferry, Virginia, in an attempt to arm the enslaved. He was put to death for treason. The glue that held the country together was quickly coming undone.Lincoln had a rematch with Douglas. In the fall of 1860, in a four-way election, both men vied for the White House. Lincoln had been an underdog for the Republican nomination, never mind the presidency. How he won the first prize before he won the second is a tale worth telling. His political march signaled how he would govern, how he would impose his vision and will on the country.Lincoln respected the foundational documents, wedding his opposition to slavery to the founders’ stated ideals.“He was acceptable,” writes Achorn, “because he celebrated the founding fathers and Declaration of Independence. Lincoln believed intensely that the founders had opposed slavery as an obvious contradiction of the values enshrined in the Declaration of Independence and had set it on the road to extinction.”Nowadays, the 1619 Project takes a different view. The issue is live once more.Lincoln knew patience could be a virtue, that he could bend time to his side. At the Republican convention, in a huge wooden “wigwam” in Chicago, he was the darkest of dark horses. With each round of balloting, his odds improved. After the first round, Lincoln was more than 70 votes behind William Seward, the New York senator and favorite to be the nominee. After the second ballot, Seward’s margin collapsed. Lincoln’s victory, in the third round, was inevitable. Seward became Lincoln’s secretary of state.Every Drop of Blood review: how Lincoln’s Second Inaugural bound America’s woundsRead moreThe Lincoln Miracle describes political battles on a stage long vanished. The book lands in an America transformed. The last president from Lincoln’s party demands the constitution be terminated. He considers a return to the White House – and dines with an anti-Semite and a white supremacist.But 19th-century dynamics have not completely vanished. On the right, John C Calhoun, father of the filibuster, proponent of white supremacy and secession, is praised. Into the Republican presidential race strides Nikki Haley, a Trump appointee turned rival who once told the Sons of Confederate Veterans states had the right to secede. There’s more. The civil war the Confederacy fought to maintain slavery? A matter, in Haley’s weasel words, of “tradition versus change”.More than 150 years after Lincoln’s assassination, the embers of civil war still glow. The Lincoln Miracle is relevant reading indeed.
      The Lincoln Miracle: Inside the Republican Convention that Changed History is published in the US by Grove Atlantic
      TopicsBooksAbraham LincolnAmerican civil warUS politicsRepublicansHistory booksreviewsReuse this content More

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      Lincoln and the fight for peace: John Avlon on a president in the shadow of new war

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      InterviewLincoln and the fight for peace: John Avlon on a president in the shadow of new warMartin Pengelly The CNN analyst says the 16th president’s example can guide America through dark times – at home as well as abroadJohn Avlon has published a book about Abraham Lincoln and peace in a time of war. He sees the irony, of course.Why Abraham Lincoln’s meetings with Black Americans matterRead more“I’d like to think that sometimes I can look around corners,” says the CNN political analyst, a former editor-in-chief of the Daily Beast. “But I didn’t anticipate that Putin would invade Ukraine opposite the book.“But there is a foreign policy dimension to the book that is probably unexpected.”In Lincoln and the Fight for Peace, Avlon offers both narrative and analytical history. He retells and examines the end of the American civil war, Lincoln’s plans for reuniting his country, his assassination and how in the former slaveholding states Reconstruction was defeated and racism enshrined in law.He also considers how Lincoln’s ideas about reconciliation and rebuilding lived on, ultimately to influence the rebuilding of Germany and Japan after the second world war, and how the 16th president’s politics of “the golden rule” – treat others as you would have them treat you – offers a model for solving division at home and abroad.More than 15,000 books have been written about Lincoln, but Avlon’s arrives in an America still subject to the attentions of Donald Trump, while from Russia Vladimir Putin pitches Ukraine into war and the world into nuclear dread.“When people pick up a book about Abraham Lincoln now,” Avlon says, “I think the flow-through is [about how] we belatedly realised the dangers of taking democracy for granted, of embracing or encouraging these tribal divides, which can wreak havoc.“So, too, there’s a real danger at taking for granted the liberal democratic order that has preserved a high degree of peace and prosperity in Europe over the past 75 years.“… There are moments where we abruptly remember that defending democracy at home and abroad is a cause that can be as heroic as winning it in the first place, and no less urgent.“It gets back to, ‘Let us have faith that that right makes might’” – a key line from Lincoln’s Cooper Union speech of 1860 – “and the flip side of that is what’s being tested [by Russia]. There are people in the world who believe that might makes right.”‘Despotism taken pure’Lincoln said a famous thing about Russia in a letter in 1855, five years before his election as president.“Our progress in degeneracy appears to me to be pretty rapid,” he wrote to a friend, Joshua Speed. “As a nation, we began by declaring that ‘all men are created equal’. We now practically read it ‘all men are created equal, except negroes’. When the Know-Nothings get control, it will read ‘all men are created equal, except negroes, and foreigners, and Catholics’.“When it comes to this I should prefer emigrating to some country where they make no pretense of loving liberty – to Russia, for instance, where despotism can be taken pure, and without the base alloy of hypocrisy.”Other than that there isn’t much to go on, Russia-wise. But as Avlon points out, Lincoln was writing not just about the curse of slavery but about a domestic political threat: the Know Nothings, a nativist-populist party.The link between the Know Nothings and the Republican party of Trump and Marjorie Taylor Greene has been made before, including by Avlon himself.“It’s obviously safe to say that Lincoln wouldn’t recognise today’s Republican party. His Republican party was the modern progressive party of its time, it was a big tent party, dedicated to overturning slavery.“I think, as you are trying to root Lincoln in the context of contemporary politics, you definitely need to go beneath the party label. And the fact that the Republican party now finds its base among the states of the former Confederacy is a clue … The labels may change but the song remains the same, to a distressing extent.“I was struck by what [Ulysses S] Grant said in 1875. And I checked that quote three times, because it seemed too on the nose: ‘If we are to have another contest in the near future of our national existence I predict that the dividing line will not be Mason and Dixon’s but between patriotism and intelligence on the one side and superstition, ambition and ignorance on the other.’”‘Our nation is not evenly divided’Many observers think a second American civil war is possible, along fault lines widened by a white supremacist far right which may see Putin and Putinism as a model for negating demographic change. Avlon, whose book has been well received in the political centre and on the never-Trump right, does not think civil war is imminent.“I thought Jamelle Bouie made a great point in a column a few weeks ago,” he says, “where he said, ‘Look, we don’t have structural issues like slavery.’“I do think that the current trend of polarisation, where politics becomes a matter of identity and the incentive structures move our politicians towards the extremes, rather than finding ways to work and reason together, is incredibly dangerous.“But first of all, if you look at the numbers, our nation is not evenly divided. We’re not a 50-50 nation on most issues. We’re 70-30 nation and many issues, whether it’s gay marriage, marijuana, [which] run through the country [with 70% support].“The section that believes the big lie [that Trump’s defeat was caused by voter fraud], they’re very loud. But they’re 30%, a super-majority of the Republican party. We often forget that a plurality of Americans are self-identified independents.‘What it means to be an American’: Abraham Lincoln and a nation dividedRead more“That does not diminish the danger to democracy when one party buys into a self-evident lie. Or when around a quarter of the country refuses to get vaccinated during a pandemic.“But you have to have faith in American democracy, when you look at history, because we have been through far worse before. Every generation faces great challenges. And if you’re overwhelmed by them, or pessimistic … that will not help solve them. You know, difficulty is the excuse that history never accepts.”Histories like his, Avlon says, can help readers “draw on the past to confront problems and then aim towards a better future”. His book aims “in part to give us perspective on our own problems. We’ve been through worse. We’ll get through this.“We need to be aware it’s dangerous to play with these tribal divisions for short-term political gain. And that we have an obligation to form the broadest coalition possible to defend democracy and our deepest values, which we forget sometimes.“Rooting things in the second founding and Lincoln, I think, can be clarifying and can help build that big tent again.”
      Lincoln and the Fight for Peace is published in the US by Simon & Schuster
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      Top 10 books about US presidents | Claude A Clegg III

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      Top 10 books about US presidentsFrom the anguish of Lincoln to the showbiz of Reagan and Obama’s introspection, these books show the power and helplessness of America’s commanders-in-chief The US presidency was supposed to be something different, something novel, compared with the fossilised monarchical rule that it supplanted after the American revolution. Born of Enlightenment theory, settler colonialism and 18th-century warfare, the US constitution gave the chief executive primarily an enforcement role, with the authority to lead armed forces in the event of foreign encroachment or domestic unrest but stripped of the capacity to legislate or issue judicial decisions. The architects of the new republic meant for the president to preside over a citizenry well-endowed with rights, not to rule over cowed subjects.Chief executives from George Washington and Abraham Lincoln to Franklin Roosevelt and Ronald Reagan have been sorely tested by both the responsibilities and the limitations of the country’s highest, loneliest office. Through civil war, economic catastrophes, foreign misadventures, social upheavals and plagues, the presidency has endured, but it – and the 45 men who have occupied the job – has been moulded and often humbled by the promise and perils of the office.Is the US presidency – indeed, American democracy – equal to the dire challenges of the 21st century? One could certainly argue that it isn’t, based on the ongoing bungling of the Covid-19 response, the horrifying (and presidentially inspired) insurrection of 6 January 2021 and the glacially slow and fickle efforts to address everything from climate change to widening social inequality. If the founding fathers meant to circumscribe the power of the presidency out of a well-founded fear of kingly abuses, then they would surely comprehend the creeping threat that authoritarianism and political extremism present to the US system of government today. Nevertheless, they probably could not have guessed that the hard lessons that they had learned about the fragility of democracy would be so fiercely resisted or blithely ignored more than two centuries after they beseeched a patrician general from the Virginia countryside to preside over their fledgling experiment in government by the people.Of the many works that I have found useful in thinking about the history of the US presidency and for writing my newest book, The Black President: Hope and Fury in the Age of Obama, these 10 have been among the most helpful. They are a mix of biographies, memoirs and reportage which, taken together, represent some of the best writings by and about the small group of powerful people who have occupied the White House.1. Never Caught: The Washingtons’ Relentless Pursuit of Their Runaway Slave, Ona Judge by Erica Armstrong Dunbar (2017)Dunbar’s important book is less a biography of George Washington, Martha Washington, or Ona Judge, the runaway enslaved woman whom the first couple made such extraordinary efforts to recapture, than a look into the power and privilege of a slaveholding elite forcing its way through a new republic rhetorically committed to liberty. The relentless pursuit of Judge by the Washingtons after her bold flight from the new US capital in Philadelphia is expertly told by Dunbar.2. The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family by Annette Gordon-Reed (2008)This history of overlapping, intertwined families vivifies the world around Thomas Jefferson, the third US president, while skilfully making more legible the travails and aspirations of the enslaved people on his storied estate at Monticello. The decades-long relationship between Jefferson and Sally Hemings, one of the Black women he owned and who bore several of his children, occupies the core of the book, but Gordon-Reed manages to craft a complicated and often contradictory history that extends far beyond the tangle of race, gender, and status that marked the Jeffersons and the Hemingses’ commingled journey through US history.3. Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln by Doris Kearns Goodwin (2005)This book follows the intersecting biographical tributaries of the powerful, ambitious men whom Abraham Lincoln, the nation’s 16th president, was able to steer toward the rushing river of his own turbulent civil war presidency. Lincoln as political strategist and savvy tactician is the frame that Goodwin points up most dramatically. But the book also succeeds at conveying Lincoln as a beleaguered and empathic head of state whose mettle is tried time and again by those around him and news from the battlefield.4. Personal Memoirs of Ulysses S Grant (1885-1886)Rightly considered by many historians and literary critics as among the best of presidential autobiographies, this book was completed a generation after the Confederate surrender at Appomattox as Grant succumbed to a slow strangulation by throat cancer in the 1880s. The memoirs provide a vantage point on the nation’s bloodiest and most defining conflict that only a soldier elemental to the war and its aftermath could offer.5. Theodore Rex by Edmund Morris (2001)As the best biographical volume on America’s 26th president, Theodore Roosevelt, Morris’s book draws bold-coloured portraits of outsized historical figures, with equally knowing shades of nuance and frailty. Morris has the contextual eye of the historian and sets scenes that are alive and convincing. He also conveys mood and meaning as well as any novelist.6. Franklin D Roosevelt and the New Deal, 1932-1940 by William Leuchtenburg (1963)Dated, frayed, and surpassed by newer research and more eloquent storytellers, Leuchtenburg’s volume on the first two presidential terms of Franklin Roosevelt still stands the test of time as a scholarly, well-researched, and jargon-free narration of arguably the most consequential presidency of the 20th century. It is the tale of the rise of the liberal welfare state against the backdrop of the Great Depression and the gathering clouds of world war. Leuchtenburg tells the story well and sets the standard for future researchers.7. The Making of the President, 1960 by Theodore White (1961)White’s fascinating chronicle of the 1960 presidential race is the starting point of quality, book-length journalistic coverage of modern American politics. Writing in the moment, White had an eye for discerning the essential character of men such as John F Kennedy and Richard Nixon who sought the country’s highest office, even as the media ecosystem of his day made such discernment more difficult to achieve.8. Sleepwalking Through History: America in the Reagan Years by Haynes Johnson (1991)Johnson captures the zeitgeist of the 1980s by juxtaposing the countervailing forces of American optimism – or the desperate need of many Americans to again believe in their scandal-wracked government – against the greed, corruption, militarism and debt that threatened to unmask the soothing myths of American exceptionalism. At the centre of Johnson’s story is a self-made man, an actor by training and temperament who through force of will, theatrics – and a good dose of luck – led the country through domestic and external perils whose ramifications are still being felt today.Top 10 books about the Roman empire | Greg WoolfRead more9. Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance by Barack Obama (1995)Of Obama’s autobiographical writings, this one provides the best understanding of his origins and burgeoning sense of self. His early and more frank ruminations on race are present here, and the book is not encumbered by the exigencies of political campaigning. At once a memoir, travelogue and deeply introspec­tive meditation, it is a fluent self-study of his efforts to reconcile himself with his eclectic lineage and to discover his place and pur­pose in the world.10. Game Change: Obama and the Clintons, McCain and Palin, and the Race of a Lifetime by John Heilemann and Mark Halperin (2010)The essential volume on the 2008 presidential primaries and general election. Heilemann and Halperin had generous access to many of the historical players – including Barack Obama, John McCain, Hillary Clinton and Sarah Palin – and their staffs. It is a fast-paced, even breathless read, and anyone who paid even casual attention at the time to the historic events chronicled here will recognise its richly drawn characters, plotlines and twists of fate.
      The Black President: Hope and Fury in the Age of Obama by Claude A Clegg III is published by Johns Hopkins University Press. To help the Guardian and Observer, order your copy from the Guardian bookshop. Delivery charges may apply.
      TopicsHistory booksTop 10sPolitics booksUS politicsAbraham LincolnFranklin D RooseveltJohn F KennedyRichard NixonfeaturesReuse this content More