The Political Craft That Made Abraham Lincoln President

‘He Has the People: Abraham Lincoln and the Election of 1860’By Jonathan EarleOxford University Press, 232 pagesOn October 25, 1858 in Rochester, New York, Senator William Henry Seward delivered his famous irrepressible conflict speech: “The United States must and will, sooner or later, become either entirely a slaveholding nation, or entirely a free-labor nation.” The slaveholding South was on the march, Seward warned, abetted by the federal government in the hands of Democrats, who had to be replaced by Republicans who understood that the time for compromise with the slave owning states was over.Seward’s stirring, militant speech made him the front runner for the Republican presidential nomination in 1860. Then, almost immediately, as Jonathan Earle shows, Seward misstepped. While Abraham Lincoln coolly and deliberately began to muster support throughout the North, Seward began to temporize, walking back his most militant language, and then taking off for a European tour, thinking it was best to seem above pandering for political support.Lincoln gained ground, allaying worries about his folksy persona by delivering a profound speech at Cooper Union in New York City. He demolished the popular sovereignty doctrine heralded by rival Stephen Douglas, then the surefire favorite for the Democratic presidential nomination. Lincoln, a great politician and lawyer, was also, Mr. Earle argues, a superb historian who refuted the argument that the federal government could not prohibit slavery in the territories. Lincoln showed that the founders, including George Washington, did not expect the territories to decide the slavery issue. Unlike some biographers of Lincoln, however, Mr. Earle is careful not to give him too much credit. For Lincoln to succeed, his rivals, like Seward, had to do themselves considerable damage. Douglas, unwilling to give up on popular sovereignty, did not go far enough in preserving the rights of slaveholders so far as increasingly militant Southerners were concerned. His emphatic support of the Union seemed to them the ultimate capitulation to Northern anti-slavery interests.At the same time, Lincoln’s anti-slavery stance seemed moderate and consistent — in part, because he stayed home and did not make himself a target as Douglas did in his then unprecedented campaign tour of speechifying. “As the 1850s dawned,” Mr. Earle observes, “it seemed far more likely to seasoned political observers that any impending national conflict could pit an industrial East against a rural South and West, or native-born Protestants against Catholic immigrants.” The South might get riled up about Abraham Lincoln, but in the North he gained adherents who believed, whatever his opposition to slavery, that he shared their beliefs in the inferiority of the black race.Seward’s followers still liked the idea of him as a winner, but he did not have quite enough support to secure a first ballot nomination. When Lincoln’s canny campaign manager, David Davis, began to pick off delegates, and Seward’s man, Thurlow Weed, indulged in shady dealings behind the scenes, the Seward contingent began to crack.Lincoln emerged as the trusty outsider, a man of integrity, even if, to at least some extent, his own managers also made deals or at least hinted at rewards if delegates supported a candidate who could win Illinois, Indiana, and make inroads in the Northeast, Seward’s base. Ballot by ballot Seward’s seeming invincibility attenuated until Lincoln triumphed.What distinguishes Mr. Earle’s approach to a campaign that has been written about so many times is his deft insertion of a biography within the drama that led to Lincoln’s election. A journalist, Murat Halstead, an attendee at all the political conventions of that year, becomes Mr. Earle’s inside man, behaving like the new journalists of the 1960s, providing not merely a narrative of events but a shrewd sizing up of the personalities who dominated the political stage. So engaging is Halsted’s commentary, his “you are there” reportage, that I anticipated his frequent appearances with considerable relish, wondering what he would make of the newest developments. He embodies that cliché of the journalist who writes the first draft of history, removed just enough from the politicking to see it without the special pleading of political operatives. Halstead thus becomes a touchstone by which the political events of 1860 are measured.Mr. Rollyson’s book, “Making the American Presidency: How Biographers Shape History,” will be published on Presidents’ Day 2027.

The Political Craft That Made Abraham Lincoln President

The Political Craft That Made Abraham Lincoln President

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