“Party and Political”: Abraham Lincoln and the Art of the Deal | Politics books

SSome historians are afraid to discuss their work in light of recent events, comparing subjects to current political players. Not Matthew Pinsker of Dickinson College, author of the major new book, Boss Lincoln: The Party Life of Abraham Lincoln, and the spinoff What Would Lincoln Do?.

“I’m not running away from it, that’s for sure,” said Pinsker of Carlisle, Pennsylvania.

“Obviously, with any historical analogy, there are more differences than similarities, and history never repeats itself. And I don’t want to use Lincoln as a weapon simply to support my point of view and oppose other points of view.”

“But I feel like we’re in a moment of crisis for democracy, and Lincoln is arguably the greatest Democratic politician in the history of the world. It’s only fair that we try to draw some inspiration from him, and that’s what I’m trying to do… He can offer insight to Democrats and Republicans and independents and even those who are disaffected. He was human. He wasn’t perfect. But I think we would all appreciate having a few Lincolns in politics today.”

The sixteenth president took office in 1861, with the dissolution of the Union. When he was assassinated in Washington on April 14, 1865, the Civil War was won and slavery was defeated. Lincoln is often ranked as the greatest president. Pinsker is often asked to compare him to other Republicans who rank among the worst.

Speaking to NPR about Donald Trump’s gaudy White House redesign and tearing down of the East Wing, Pinsker noted that Lincoln’s wife, Mary Todd Lincoln, “was charged with renovating the White House…and she overspent the budget, and he was angry. He complained that he had to pay for this damned old house. Now, Trump likes crap.”

That may not be the technical term for Trump’s alleged gold ornaments from Home Depot, but Pinsker was referring to Lincoln’s belief that the White House belonged to the American people, compared to Trump’s belief that the entire country was his playground. Thus, in a conversation, it is impossible not to put forward your own ideas. We’re talking hours after the Supreme Court angered Trump by ruling that his tariffs were unconstitutional. What would Lincoln do?

Pinsker is “confident that Lincoln understood the court to be the final arbiter of the law.” He objected to the court’s handling of the Dred Scott decision [1857, saying Black people could not be citizens]However, he said that the solution is to go to the people, win the elections, and appoint new judges. The only recourse to a Supreme Court decision you don’t like is to win more elections and change the nature of the body over time.

The next question: What would Lincoln do about a scandal like the one now ravaging Washington and the world, regarding financier and sex offender Jeffrey Epstein and his ties to powerful people, with Trump at the forefront?

“Lincoln had fundamental moral beliefs, and if he had a Cabinet official who violated those beliefs, he would have no trouble removing them. But he never dealt with anything like the Epstein scandal. I can’t really find any historical precedent for this kind of moral scandal. It’s shameful.”

In the era of Trump, some things simply cannot compare.

President Lincoln echoes Pinsker’s first book, Lincoln’s Haven: Abraham Lincoln and the Soldiers’ Home, where he received praise for finding new angles. A study of Lincoln as an uncompromising party leader—as a Whig in the 1840s, including his term in Congress; In the following decade, when the Republican Party formed against slavery; As a wartime president – Boss Lincoln had been years in the making.

“My kids teased me that the book had its own coming-of-age party,” Pinsker said. “But I’ve been working on this project off and on since I was an undergraduate student and research assistant [Lincoln biographer] David Donald and I have always worked on Lincoln as a partisan and a politician. I knew there was a book in it, and it took me a while to get to that copy.

“The key to writing new things is finding new evidence. And the not-so-hidden mystery of Lincoln is that every year we find some new documents hidden in some archive or attic box. Each one of them individually isn’t shocking, but over the past two decades there have been dozens of these private, secret communications written by him that have come to light, revealing a different side of him.”

“That’s the kind of basis of the material I use, and the rest comes from digitizing a lot of the sources. I live in this digital age. Historians from the past only had to work from archives and printed sources, so it was difficult to make connections between parts. It’s much easier for people our age to do that, and it creates a richer set of opportunities to understand the politics behind the scenes.”

Much of Boss Lincoln deals with such strategies, planning, dealing, presentation and counter-presentation of politics. Tense moments occur in smoke-filled rooms — though Pinsker maintains that one famous example of Lincoln’s political genius, the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment that abolished slavery, has been overrated in popular culture, especially by Steven Spielberg in the 2013 Oscar-winning film Lincoln.

“It shows Lincoln after making all the tough decisions and winning,” Pinsker said. “At that point [January 1865] They knew they could get the 13th Amendment… and they didn’t need to bribe people to support it. The film suggests that Lincoln condoned bribery. “This is not President Lincoln.”

Lincoln Pinsker can be found in episodes like that of The Blind Note from August 1864, three months before Election Day.

In the midst of a seemingly endless war, re-election was not likely. As Pinsker wrote, on August 23, “Lincoln wrote two sentences that he shared with no one. ‘This morning, as on some days past,’ he penned, ‘it seems very likely that this administration will not be re-elected. “It will then be my duty to co-operate with the President-elect, to save the Union between the election and the inauguration… because he will have secured his election on the understanding that he could not save it.”

Lincoln signed the document, sealed it, and asked his seven cabinet members to sign it. Then lift it away.

“This shows Lincoln at its best,” Pinsker said. “I don’t think you can appreciate what happened in August 1964 unless you realize everything I’ve been describing in previous decades, which is that Lincoln was an independent strategist. He worked alone. That’s another reason I use the title ‘Leader Lincoln.’ He’s not someone who leads by consensus. He’s not someone who leads by consensus.”

“At this critical moment, when almost everyone within his party is in revolt, they think they’re going to lose, and the factions are going in different directions, he’s adopting this kind of behind-the-scenes manipulative strategy to try to bring everyone together. He writes this document like Final Plan B that he’s going to show the Democrat who’s going to defeat him, if he loses, but he doesn’t show it to his cabinet officials. He has them sign the back of it.”

“Most historians thought they were signing allegiance to him, that they were signing up to his pledge to work with the Democratic president-elect between November and March, before the inauguration, to try to end the war. But they didn’t see it that way. These men were hard-line politicians. They were not signing anything except as a date stamp, and Lincoln wanted that in case he had to prove to the man who hit him that he knew he was going to lose for weeks, and wasn’t planning to arrest him.” Or overturn the election or worse, because that’s what the Democrats thought of Lincoln, and they viewed him as a tyrant, and Lincoln knew it.

“That’s why no one in the Cabinet wrote about this moment. They didn’t talk about it. It meant nothing to them. He didn’t tell anyone about it until after the election, when he showed it to them. In the epilogue to the book, I used that as a way for people to appreciate that Lincoln was operating in a very independent way, and even the people closest to him were ignorant of what he was doing.”

Among the smaller but similarly meaningful passages in Pinsker’s book is the story of Anna Dickinson, a young Pennsylvanian Quaker who became a prominent public speaker. In January 1864, “American Joan of Arc” was invited to address Congress on “the dangers of the hour.” What she said did much to strengthen Lincoln’s grip on power.

“Dickinson appears in Civil War books and Lincoln biographies, but I think most people have overlooked the crucial role she played in the winter of 1863-64,” Pinsker said. “She was a well-known—and perhaps influential—political speaker, and Republicans, the Unionists as they now called themselves, invited her to speak before Congress.”

“What was crucial about it was that it was radical, an abolitionist, and… [treasury secretary] Salmon Chase, a prominent radical, was trying to replace Lincoln as party leader, to become the nominee…and so her endorsement of Lincoln, delivered in Congress, marked an important turning point. “It deserves more attention.”

Returning to Pinsker’s view of history in the digital age, his work on Dickinson owes something to one of his students. In 2021, while researching the Library of Congress, Gracie Perrin found the fullest known description of the Capitol Speech. According to this report, from a Republican newspaper, Dickinson’s endorsement was met with “tremendous and long sustained applause.”

• Boss Lincoln, published by WW Norton & Company, is out now