Boss Lincoln: The Partisan Life of Abraham Lincoln

By Matthew Pinsker

Reviewed by Tony Roberts

W.W. Norton & Co. 480 pages. £30.   ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0393240788

 

            ‘His ambition was a little engine that knew no rest.’ William H. Herndon

Lincoln died on April 15^th 1865 at the Petersen House in Washington D.C., across the road from Ford’s Theatre where he had been shot. In this former boarding house, now a museum, there is a thirty-four foot tower comprising 6,800 facsimiles of books about the President. It ascends the middle of a spiral staircase for three floors.

I have fascinated admiration for Lincoln both as man and writer. As the shrewd literary critic Alfred Kazin once wrote, ‘It was Lincoln’s peculiar honesty.. that still makes him unfathomable and endlessly interesting.’ I have read a good number of biographies of the 16^th American President: including his law partner Herndon’s excellent, once-controversial Life of Lincoln (1889), Stephen B. Oates’s With Malice Toward None (1977) — I would recommend both —the exhaustive, two-volume Abraham Lincoln: A Life (2008) by Michael Burlingame and, most recently, David S. Reynolds’s cultural biography, Abe: Abraham Lincoln in His Times (2020).

Matthew Pinsker’s Boss Lincoln offers a different perspective and a necessary one. Like Herndon and the best of others, it eschews the hagiographic portrait of ‘Father Abraham’. Pinsker  focuses almost solely on the politician and statesman we now revere —the most famous American of the nineteenth century, as Doris Kearns Goodwin called him in Team of Rivals (2005). Pinsker tells us in his introduction that the biography acknowledges the orator, debater and writer —the public Lincoln —but focuses on the party boss:

‘Lincoln sounded much different in private than he did in public. He offered his party colleagues little prose poetry and rarely indulged in the warm, folksy language of his popular legend. The partisan Lincoln was intense —barking out orders, providing advice, pressing others to stay on task. The famously unkempt prairie attorney was methodical about political organization. There were still flashes of humor, but as a party leader Lincoln wielded a sarcastic wit to get things done.’

Boss Lincoln is a stimulating book for the Lincoln enthusiast because it scrutinises the man as the political animal he was. But it will be equally eye-opening for those who want to look behind the hallowed image of the nation’s saviour. Both will see the hardworking and calculating politician eternally busy behind the scenes and before the crowds. Prior to his Presidency, which covers the first two-thirds of this book, Lincoln’s political life was an unrelenting rollercoaster. However, the details of the doings in committees, caucuses, conventions, campaigns and congresses, prove something of a maze for the reader. It is safer to hold the key events in focus and simply enjoy the twists and turns of the politicking by which Lincoln ascended —what in our bitter times is becoming —a barely contested throne.

According to Herndon —the source of much ‘Lincolniana’ —he told a campaign biographer his early life could be ‘condensed’ to a line from a favourite poem, Gray’s ‘Elegy’: ‘The short and simple annals of the poor’. He was born in a log cabin in Hardin County, Kentucky, in 1809, the son of Thomas Lincoln and the religious Nancy Hanks. When title to their farm was challenged, the family moved to Indiana. After his wife’s early death in 1818, the father married Sarah Bush Johnston, a widow with three children whom young Lincoln became very close to (his ‘angel mother’). Growing tall, strong and ungainly, he had little schooling, since help was needed to work the land. He did not enjoy hunting and fishing but preferred reading (the Bible, Defoe, and Bunyan being early favourites). Privately depressive but socially popular, he became renowned as a good-natured, humorous raconteur.

As Matthew Pinsker notes: ‘American popular culture still celebrates Lincoln’s rough-hewn origins and plain prairie style, not his middle-class sensibilities or his rapid rise to political success.’ Having failed as a storekeeper, during the Black Hawk War (1832) he enlisted, though he claimed to have fought mosquitoes rather than Indians. In that year the self-taught Lincoln entered politics as a Whig in the free state of Illinois. This is where Boss Lincoln begins. He was defeated in his first attempt to enter the state legislature, but two years later succeeded, serving for three further terms.

In 1836 Lincoln began to practise law, moved to Springfield Illinois and, in 1841, married the politically ambitious Mary Todd of Kentucky (‘She wishes to loom largely,’ wrote a friend). He supported the failed presidential bid of Henry Clay, an early influence, in the 1844 national election. According to Pinsker, ‘In politics, he was an organization man, an aspiring party boss, who had broader interests in mind than merely his own prospects for officeholding.’

However, in 1846 he was elected to Congress for one term, opposing democrat President Polk’s war with Mexico (a successful bid for the acquisition of territory) and supporting the Wilmot Proviso, an attempt to guarantee this former Mexican land would ban slavery. The move reignited the slavery debate nationally. In Congress Lincoln wrote no bills, his biographer explains, though importantly he pushed his partisan position, helping to elect a Whig president, Zachary Taylor.

In 1849 he returned to law practice in Springfield, disappointed at not been rewarded for his efforts. By now much of the debate between Northern ‘free’ and Southern ‘slave’ states centred on the question of slavery and its extension into new territories. The 1850 Compromise, promoted by senators Henry Clay (Whig) and Stephen A. Douglas (Democrat), attempted to balance free and slave states. Since California was to become a free state it was decided that the status of territories resulting from the Mexican War (New Mexico and Utah), should be decided by their populations. This idea, called ‘popular sovereignty’, potentially nullified the Missouri Compromise of 1820 which, while balancing slave and free states, prohibited slavery in the upper part of the Louisiana Purchase lands, which had nearly doubled the size of the country. The 1850 bills also strengthened the right to recover slaves escaping to free territory.

Lincoln avoided public statement on the ‘near to worthless’ fugitive slave law, because the Constitution guaranteed it. Instead he focused on his law practice. In 1851 ‘Lincoln and Herndon’ represented the Alton & Sangamon Railroad in a lawsuit. He became a leading practitioner of railroad law in the state. His circuit-riding days as an attorney were giving way to this more lucrative employment. (It also led to the birth of the town of Lincoln in 1853, in honour of his contribution).  He was also constantly lobbying to keep Whig power in his part of the state.

Douglas’s Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854 repealed the Missouri Compromise. He intended it to open the way for construction of a transcontinental railroad through Chicago, Illinois, but the new act conferring statehood inflamed the slavery issue, since it allowed for popular sovereignty. This fomented ‘Bleeding Kansas’, when armed supporters of both sides flooded into the state to contest its status, many from Missouri, the slave state on its eastern border.

Lincoln focused on restoring the Missouri Compromise, leaving old Whig concerns —tariffs, banking, internal improvements —in favour of rallying his party around anti-slavery action. ‘Here was Lincoln in full motion as a mature party leader —capable of deft manipulation, blunt intimidation, or thoughtful argument as the circumstances required.’ Yet the 1854 Act split the Whigs on the slavery issue. The opportunistic Lincoln embraced the new anti-slavery Republican Party in Illinois, which fused the old Whigs with aspiring Republicans, anti-immigrant Know Nothings, and anti-slavery Democrats.

The campaign for John C. Frémont as the first Republican candidate for President in 1856 brought Lincoln back into the public eye. There was talk of him as a possible vice-president. It was at this time that he told a convention audience, ‘The Union must be preserved in the purity of its principles as well as in the integrity of its territorial parts.’ Although he increasingly promoted the anti-slavery case, at the same time he supported the separation of the races. Always the law and the Constitution were his lodestars. (He began to deploy the language of the Bible as a rhetorical weapon.)

Ultimately Lincoln was adopted Republican candidate for the senate and stood against the nationally famous Douglas (‘The Little Giant’), whom some Republicans had courted for their leader. He was defeated after a number of spirited debates, which included his House Divided speech (‘A house divided against itself cannot stand. I believe this government cannot endure, permanently half slave and half free.’) Douglas’s stance stemmed from his idea of popular sovereignty, while Lincoln debated on natural rights philosophy. The exchanges made a national figure of the Illinois politician.

Two years later came the prospect of promoting his candidacy for the Presidency. ‘The taste is in my mouth a little,’ he admitted, since hardly anyone had a ‘positive objection’ to him he said. With some manipulation, Lincoln became the compromise candidate at the Republican convention in Chicago after three rounds of balloting. In taking the nomination he had triumphed over the leading opposition from William Seward, soon to be his friend and Secretary of State. 

In 1860 Lincoln toured New York and New England, furthering his reputation with an address in spring at the Cooper Institute in New York City (‘Let us have faith that right makes might, and in that faith, let us, to the end, dare to do our duty as we understand it’). In the presidential contest, the Republicans were aided by a rift between Southern and Northern Democrats which weakened them at the polls. Candidates in those days were not expected to participate publicly in their campaigns. Lincoln remained in Springfield, bored but busy letter writing nevertheless.  

In the event it was Douglas’s turn to lose. With an 80% turnout of the six million voters, Lincoln took 180 electoral college votes (59%), though only 40% of the popular vote. His inauguration on March 4^th 1861 offered no mandate to release the Southern States: ‘Nor was Lincoln willing to conciliate the South on any important antislavery measures.’ This brought him everlasting troubles in Washington. Despite a popular misconception Lincoln ruled his cabinet, as well as holding to his convictions. Although taking soundings, he largely kept his own counsel through four years of recriminations.

He was regularly pilloried for his appointments, forced to skirmish with Northern Democrats and Republican radicals and conservatives, faced with hostile newspapers, inundated with calls to act more aggressively or be more cautious. Allegations of weakness, incompetence and corruption were levelled against his administration. There were rumours of vacillation within his cabinet, fury at mounting casualty figures, frustration at the many military defeats . There were calls to remove failed or incompetent officers (‘If General McClellan  did not want to use the army, he would like to borrow it’). Some generals held their positions through the well-worn political patronage system. Increasingly Lincoln’s time was taken up by military affairs  and slavery policy. Events gave him an education in both. His vision on emancipation matured.

He told editor Horace Greeley that ‘My paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union.’ He would do that, he wrote, by freeing all, some, or none of the slaves, and yet in private he constantly sought steps toward abolition. The poor midterm election results in November 1862, amid continuing battlefield defeats unnerved the Republicans, and he had to endure a cabinet crisis after the Union defeat at Fredericksburg in December, when radical Republican senators attempted to force Seward out.

And then victories by U.S. Grant in the Vicksburg Campaign and at Gettysburg in 1863 gave the Union hope. Lincoln was able to talk more openly about the emancipation of slaves (though initially on the grounds of military necessity). The restoration of the Union was no longer the only focus of peace talks. In 1864 he convincingly won the election, this time against the haughty McClellan. Yet as Joshua Zeitz noted in Lincoln’s Boys (2014), ‘It is easy to forget how widely underrated Lincoln the president and Lincoln the man were on the eve of his death…he never succeeded in translating his immense popularity with the Northern public into similar regard among the nation’s political and intellectual elites.’ Although the Union was victorious in 1865, he did not live to see the failure of the conciliatory postwar reconstruction he imagined.

A few years ago in Washington, my wife and I visited Ford’s Theatre and the Petersen house. In a glass case, in the shrine of Ford’s Theatre, a striking life mask of Lincoln from February 1865 is displayed. It brings the viewer powerfully close to the man—perhaps as Boss Lincoln does to the politician.