April 15, 1865 – Death of President Lincoln; Review of “Looking at Lincoln” by Maira Kalman

On this day in 1865 President Lincoln was declared dead at 7:22 in the morning, having been shot the night before at Ford’s Theater by John Wilkes Booth. It is hard not to be fascinated by the persona of Lincoln, and there are those who even fall in love with him a bit, such as Maira Kalman.

Maira Kalman, self-portrait

I am a big fan of the art of Maira Kalman. Her style is unmistakable – she is a cartoon artist, painter, writer, and journalist who is at once whimsical, colorful, and witty, and a delight for both the eye and the intellect. She is especially known for her “visual reporting” as well as her iconic covers for the “New Yorker” magazine. She combines realism with fantasy and commentary all in the same pictures, bringing to mind artists as diverse as Ludwig Bemelmans and Marc Chagall, and yet she is always identifiable as herself.

Some of her books are labeled as for “children” and some for “adults” but I can’t imagine the former not providing entertainment for the latter. This one, Looking at Lincoln, is no exception.

Looking at Lincoln is narrated by a little girl who is curious about Lincoln and goes to the library to learn more about him. She shares what she learns about his life in the pages that follow. This is no dry recitation of facts, however. She also gives her thoughts and impressions of what she finds out, and shares questions she has about Lincoln that must go unanswered, thus introducing the idea that history is more nuanced and complex than we can know.

This book was an outgrowth of Kalman’s visit to the Rosenbach Library in Philadelphia which sponsored a large exhibition on Lincoln in 2009, and still maintains an online archive of Lincolniana. There, she said, she “fell in love with A. Lincoln.”

Kalman exhibits an extraordinary talent for summarizing the most important aspects of Lincoln’s life in just 32 pages, while still focusing on incidents that kids would find interesting. The text is funny, informative, and inspiring. Her illustrations freely mix fantasy and reality in vibrant happy colors that fill the pages.

Near the end of the book, she writes:

Abraham Lincoln will live forever. And if you go to Washington, D.C. in the spring you can walk through the cherry blossoms and visit him.”

She continues:

At his Memorial you can read the words he wrote near the end of the war. ‘…With malice toward none, with charity for all.’ And you can look into his beautiful eyes. Just look.”

The back matter contains notes on sources. In addition, The Gettysburg Address is reprinted on the front and back inside covers.

Evaluation: This is an outstanding resource about Lincoln for both readers of all ages.

Rating: 5/5

Published by Nancy Paulsen Books, an imprint of Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 2012.

Note: You can hear Maira Kalman talking about how she got inspired to write this book, and reading an excerpt here.

And if Maira Kalman could actually meet with Lincoln in real life? On her blog, she explains what she would do:

Review of “Lincoln and the Triumph of the Nation: Constitutional Conflict in the American Civil War” by Mark E. Neely Jr.

The subtitle of this book, “Constitutional Conflict in the American Civil War”, is much more descriptive of its content than its actual title. Only the first third of the book deals with Lincoln’s actions, and even then, much of the constitutional analysis applies to the writings of Lincoln’s contemporaries like Horace Binney, William Whiting, and Sidney George Fisher. In any event, the book’s focus is on the constitutional issues faced by not only the North, but also the issues faced by the Confederate States under their constitution.

The most important question faced by both the North and the South was whether the Southern states could constitutionally withdraw from the Union. Unfortunately, the Constitution itself had nothing to say on the matter. By contrast, even the “feeble” Articles of Confederation had claimed the Union was perpetual. In his inaugural address, Lincoln skirted the constitutional issue, and relied instead on a legal argument: if the Union was merely a contractual arrangement among the states, the South could not unilaterally rescind that contract by secession—it required the assent of the other parties to the contract. Lincoln also contended that the nation antedated the Constitution:

Having never been states, either in substance or in name, outside of the Union, whence this magical omnipotence of “state rights,” asserting a claim of power to lawfully destroy the Union itself?…The states have their status in the Union, and they have no other legal status. If they break from this, they can only do so against law, and by revolution. The Union, and not themselves separately, procured their independence and their liberty. By conquest or purchase the Union gave each of them whatever of independence and liberty it has. The Union is older than any of the states, and, in fact, it created them as states.”

This claim had the advantage of adopting the Declaration of Independence, with its expression that all men were created equal, as a founding document. Famously, Lincoln solidified this vision at Gettysburg, declaring that the nation was created “four score and seven years ago” (the time of the Declaration of Independence) rather than “three score and sixteen years ago” (the time of the adoption of the Constitution).

Lincoln’s construction was not without precedent. In fact, the first Supreme Court Justice, James Wilson, wrote in Chisholm v. Georgia (2 US 419, 465, 1793):

Whoever considers, in a combined and comprehensive view, the general texture of the Constitution will be satisfied that the people of the United states intended to form themselves into a nation for national purposes. They instituted for such purposes a national government, complete in all its parts, with powers legislative, executive and judicial, and in all those powers extending over the whole nation. Is it congruous that, with regard to such purposes, any man or body of men, any person natural or artificial, should be permitted to claim successfully an entire exemption from the jurisdiction of the national government?”

Lincoln also seemed savvy enough to be aware of the cultural negotiation of both history and memory, and that he could use his facility with words to reframe both of them.

Lincoln deliberately avoided subjecting the question of secession to any court rulings. Instead, the constitutionality of secession was to be decided in presidential speeches, spirited newspaper editorials, widely read pamphlets, and on the battlefield.

1861 tribute to commander of Union forces Gen. Winfield Scott, shown as the mythical Hercules slaying the many-headed dragon or hydra, here symbolizing the secession of the Confederate states.

Lincoln did not trust the Supreme Court at that time. The Court was led by Chief Justice Roger B. Taney, the architect of the infamous Dred Scott decision, about which Lincoln had bruited powerful critiques. Lincoln wanted to avoid giving Taney the opportunity to turn the Court’s authority against him, because the constitutionality of other important issues loomed as well, such as the suspension of the writ of habeas corpus, the power to emancipate the slaves, and the power of the federal government to conscript members of the state militias. Taney had expended significant thought on some of these issues, and Neely says he was “itching to weigh in” on them. He never had the chance, however, because none of them ever reached the Supreme Court during the war.

Chief Justice Roger B. Taney

During the Civil War, the writ of habeas corpus was used to attempt to free two groups of prisoners: (1) “political prisoners,” those jailed for inciting desertion by troops or otherwise “hurting the [Union] army” and (2) underage soldiers who changed their minds about serving in the army. Article I, section 9, clause 2 of the Constitution stated: “The privilege of the Writ of Habeas Corpus shall not be suspended, unless when in Cases of Rebellion or Invasion the public Safety may require it.” It does not, however, say who or which branch of government (e.g. Congress, the President, Courts) is authorized to do the suspending. Lincoln simply arrogated the power. In the process, he ignored the opinion of Chief Justice Taney in the Ex parte Merryman case, in which Taney opined that only Congress, not the President, could suspend the writ. [Note that Merryman was not an opinion of the full Supreme Court; rather it was simply a writ issued by Taney pursuant to the Court’s original jurisdiction in habeas corpus cases for federal prisoners.] Lincoln’s decision to ignore Taney’s opinion was never tested in court. It became moot at the end of the war.

Lincoln believed emancipation of the slaves was important for the war effort. However, the Constitution seemed to recognize slaveholders’ property rights in their slaves, and the 5th amendment guaranteed those rights could not be abridged without due process of law. Arguably, the war powers clause authorized the president to commandeer the property of the nation’s opponents, but that right was thought to be limited to actions necessary for victory or the safety of the soldiers. Lincoln could not prove that emancipation was necessary—only that it was useful. Nonetheless, the Proclamation was issued as soon as Lincoln thought it was politically feasible, and it was never challenged in court.

Interestingly, Lincoln feared that the racism of his own troops might render the Proclamation a disadvantage to the Union cause. In the event, the nationalism of the troops trumped (temporarily, at least) whatever racism was prevalent, and the Proclamation did not sow significant dissension in the ranks.

The Union’s power to confiscate Confederate ships pursuant to its blockade was the only major constitutional issue adjudicated by the Supreme Court during the war. Prize Cases of 1863 (67 U.S. (2 Black) 635) questioned whether Lincoln acted within his presidential power when he ordered the blockade of Southern ports in April of 1861, authorizing the seizure of vessels from which revenues could not be collected on account of the “insurrection.” The owners of merchant vessels affected by the blockade sued for the restoration of their property on the ground that blockades were only legal in wartime, but no war had been declared by Congress, as mandated by the Constitution. Lincoln himself refused to recognize the conflict as a “war” (with its implication of two sovereign nations in dispute) rather than a “rebellion” or “insurrection.” In a 5-4 decision, the Court held that the hecatomb taking place could not be ignored. It was just too massive. War may not have been formally declared, but the Court claimed to know a war when it saw one. In the words of Justice Robert C. Grier, “As a civil war is never publicly proclaimed eo nomine against insurgents, its actual existence is a fact in our domestic history which the court is bound to notice and to know.”

Neely calls this decision “the most important Supreme Court decision of the Civil War.” Not only did the Court opine that the war could not be ignored as a fact, but it also disagreed on whether a civil war had to be publicly declared by Congress. James M. Carlisle, representing the ship-owners, insisted that “a war was something declared by Congress, period.” He averred:

The matter then comes back necessarily to the pure question of the power of the President under the Constitution. And this is, perhaps, the most extraordinary part of the argument for the United States. It is founded upon a figure of speech, which is repugnant to the genius of republican institutions, and above all, to our written Constitution.”

Richard Henry Dana, Jr., for the government, countered with the winning argument that war was “a state of things” and “not an act of legislative will.”

It’s a fascinating case, and still is relevant today. [For example, does the current confrontation with Al Qaeda trigger the president’s war powers?]

The Democrats also mounted an attack on the government’s war measures in state courts, where they expected a friendlier reaction than in federal courts. Their effort was unsuccessful, according to Neely, because the war ended before the cases could be resolved. He states, “[T]he nation was saved from violent confrontation with willful judges by the slowness with which the wheels of justice turned in the middle of the nineteenth century.”

More than 30% of the book is devoted to the issues faced by the Confederate states under their constitution. The Confederacy was formed by a process nearly identical to the process that formed the original United States. Each rebellious state held a “constitutional convention” that was outside of and in addition to its established state government. Neely asserts that the elections for the secession conventions were especially clean by the standard of the time, with a distinct absence of fraud or strong-arm tactics. The movement to secede, in Neely’s words, was “profoundly democratic.” [It might be suggested that because of the near unanimity of the sentiments of those attending the conventions, there was no need for fraud. However, fraud returned to southern elections in full flower after the war ended, especially with the prospect of freed black men and other republicans gaining political office.]

Although the Confederate constitution borrowed heavily from the federal constitution, each seceding state retained more autonomy under it than it had under the federal constitution—no surprise there. The government that resulted was not highly authoritarian, as one might expect from one led by slaveholders. Rather, it was very democratic in the sense the modern Israeli government is democratic: its constitution speaks of giving all its adult citizens equal rights [the Confederacy limited those rights to males], yet it blithely ignores the presence of a large minority who live within its jurisdiction, but who are accorded few if any rights.

The secession conventions produced constitutional crises of their own. Both the formerly legitimate state governments and the secession conventions continued to act, each ostensibly the sovereign power. Thus, every southern state had two separate governments claiming ultimate authority. Nevertheless, with the exception of South Carolina, the states resolved the problem pretty much without rancor and never with violence. Neely writes,

…some states simply enjoyed the fruits of the emergency actions of the conventions, including the democratization of war by ensuring that the men who fought for the slaveholding republic…could vote in [military] camp….Had the Confederacy prevailed…it would doubtless celebrate that period of government by secession conventions as the United States does today the 1787 Philadelphia constitutional convention.”

Neely raises interesting questions in comparing the Confederate and federal constitutions. For example, why did the Confederacy chose to emulate the federal form so closely? (The President even had a “white house” of his own.) He also notes that Jefferson Davis, like Lincoln, suspended the writ of habeas corpus, and even (near the end of the war) – out of desperation – considered arming at least some of the slaves.

White House of the Confederacy in Richmond

Part of Davis’s problem was that the central government of the Confederacy was not as strong or centralized as that of the Union. Although there were Confederate national courts, there was no Supreme Court. The founders of the Confederacy were always troubled by their need to accommodate state rights with an expanded federal authority necessary to fight a war. Southern governors jealously guarded their state militias, and did not necessarily want them subject to conscription into the national army. The issue of conscription was tested in several state courts. Some lower courts found conscription illegal, but all the state supreme courts upheld its legality on appeal. Curiously, the Confederate national courts seem never to have organized a reporting system; thus their national courts never could exert their proper influence on state decisions.

Confederate President Jefferson Davis

Neely observes that the Confederacy faced issues remarkably similar to those faced by the United States in the War of 1812. There, the New England states opposed the use by the federal government of New England militias to launch an invasion of Canada.

He concludes by exhorting his fellow historians to begin a “series of titles, beginning with ‘Constitutional Problems under Madison’ and stretching through all of our wars until we have accumulated a shelf of volumes that reconsider the role of the Constitution in America’s wars.”

Evaluation: In only 349 pages, this book contains some very meaty legal analysis. Moreover, even though there is a paucity of case law during the relevant time period, the book also contains some very thoughtful constitutional analysis of issues faced by both the Union and the Confederacy. Interestingly, much of the contemporary analysis came from newspaper editorials and impressively trenchant political pamphlets. Neely’s scholarly prose is readable despite the density of his subject matter, and he avoids sounding too lawyerly. I highly recommend this book for anyone with a serious interest in our constitutional history.

Rating: 4/5

Note: The author won the 1992 Pulitzer Prize for his book The Fate of Liberty: Abraham Lincoln and Civil Liberties. This book was awarded the Lincoln Group of New York Award of Achievement for 2011.

Published by The University of North Carolina Press, 2011

Review of “Rise to Greatness: Abraham Lincoln and America’s Most Perilous Year” by David Von Drehle

Von Drehle argues that 1862 was the most important year in the history of our nation, and he does so quite persuasively.

Many of Lincoln’s tasks after the onset of the Civil War involved appeasement: he had to make sure the touchy border states remained in the Union [ergo he could not speak out too forcefully for emancipation]; he had to make sure Britain and France did not join the war on the side of the South [thus his capitulation on the so-called “Trent Affair”) and he had to ensure that the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, Roger Taney (author of the notorious Dred Scott decision declaring that African Americans could never be considered U.S. citizens) did not thwart his military plans to protect the North by using what could be considered extra-Constitutional actions. Moreover, the Army, which numbered only 16,000 men before the war (and these men were spread out all over the continent), had been rapidly increased to nearly five times that number. But none of them knew how to fight! Nor did most of the men picked to lead them. Somehow Lincoln had to figure out which of these novices had the makings of generals who could lead the North to victory.

Needless to say, it took Lincoln a while to accomplish this last, especially since he had to take great care not to alienate all the supporters (among whom numbered many soldiers) of the infuriating and perhaps even treasonous George McClellan. But Lincoln was one of the few men in a leadership position at the time who was willing and able to take the long view, and to keep his eye on the prize, which was preservation of the Union.

Excerpt of Letter to Horace Greeley printed August 22, 1862

Why was this so important? Lincoln believed the American nation, with its bestowal of power upon ordinary people to elect its government (i.e., the doctrine of self government), was “absolutely and eternally right.” Furthermore, he could conceive of no government more noble than one “dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.” He could find no moral right in the despotism of men not only governing themselves but governing other men. But he knew a critical factor determining the success of this experiment was assurance to the citizenry that losing voters would not and could not destroy the system just because they lost. Like a marriage, any union won’t work when the parties say “I’m getting a divorce” every time something doesn’t go their way. Compromise is the key to maintaining any union worth having, and Lincoln believed firmly that the United States – this great experiment – should not perish from the earth.

[And yes, there was a slight problem with the reality of the nation as it was then constituted not living up to the promise, since some men were more equal than other men, and certainly more equal than women.] Lincoln begged his audience, in an 1858 debate against Stephen Douglas:

Now, my countrymen . . . if you have been taught doctrines conflicting with the great landmarks of the Declaration of Independence; if you have listened to suggestions which would take away from its grandeur, and mutilate the fair symmetry of its proportions; if you have been inclined to believe that all men are not created equal in those inalienable rights enumerated by our chart of liberty, let me entreat you to come back. Return to the fountain whose waters spring close by the blood of the Revolution. Think nothing of me—take no thought for the political fate of any man whomsoever—but come back to the truths that are in the Declaration of Independence. … I am nothing; Judge Douglas is nothing. But do not destroy that immortal emblem of Humanity—the Declaration of American Independence.”

Lincoln intended to help the nation “heed these sacred principles.” But he could not do it unless the “nation so conceived and so dedicated” were still in existence. This concern dictated all of his strategy, all of his decisions, all of his tactics, and it is this long-term vision that so many others in the government were unable to realize.

They also were not nearly as savvy as Lincoln about realpolitik. Lincoln felt he couldn’t just get rid of Simon Cameron, his corrupt and incompetent Secretary of War, or he would create a dangerous enemy and hopelessly alienate Pennsylvanians; nor could he just get rid of Samuel Chase, whose over-the-top politicking for Lincoln’s job outraged everyone but Lincoln – he needed Chase’s financial prowess to raise the money to fight the war. Nor could Lincoln satisfy Congress by firing George McClellan, the do-nothing general who consistently snubbed, insulted, and disrespected Lincoln. McClellan was far too popular among the troops; Lincoln knew better than to lose the loyalty of the army. He could not even appease the abolitionists by outlawing slavery just yet – the preservation of the union had to take precedence.

Lincoln with McClellan at Antietam, 1862

Again and again, Lincoln was able to push aside and rise above personal snubs, Congressional pressure, embarrassment over his wife’s questionable friendships with Confederates, and all the rest, to save the Union. Lincoln said:

Perhaps I have too little [resentment], but I never thought it paid.”

This remarkable man had a remarkable year in 1862. As Drehle writes:

…when the first day of January [1863] came around again, Lincoln’s greatness was no longer raw. Even as he had redefined American society, he had invented the modern presidency. He had steered himself and the nation from its darkest New Year’s Day to its proudest, and in the process Lincoln had become the towering leader who forever looms over the rebirth of the American experiment.”

Evaluation: You have to admire the author for undertaking this book. As he observed in his Note on Sources, “the sheer volume of material, both primary and secondary… is so vast that dropping into the subject as a writer is like falling into the sea.” Yet he succeeds admirably, providing a month-by-month account of Lincoln’s life in 1862 that puts us right into the thick of the times with a welcome lack of turgidity and tedium. Obviously the author could not include everything; new students of Lincoln may want to start with a more comprehensive biography. But for those who know even the bare outlines of Lincoln’s life and the politics surrounding it, this book provides a lively and always-interesting focused look at one of the most important years in America’s history.

Rating: 4/5

Published by Henry Holt and Company, 2012

February 12, 1809 – Birth of President Lincoln – How Would He Have Fared in the Polls?

Although Lincoln’s reputation is currently quite elevated, he wasn’t so popular while in office. The caliber of insults leveled at him was shocking both in tone and intensity. As President Nixon noted at Lincoln’s birthday ceremony in 1974:

No President in history was more vilified during his time in the presidency than Lincoln.”

Upon Lincoln’s election, for example, the most esteemed orator in America, Edward Everett, wrote in his diary:

He is evidently a person of very inferior cast of character, wholly unequal to the crisis.”

[Two years later, Everett spoke right before Lincoln did at Gettysburg. No one remembers what Everett said.]

Lincoln was jeered at for his accent, his clothes, his voice, his story-telling, and his appearance, not to mention, most importantly and subject to the most vituperation, his policies. He was called imbecilic (per Edwin Stanton); idiotic, a coward, and a gorilla (per General McClellan), and newspapers in both the North and the South showed him no respect whatsoever. They condemned him as a traitor, a dictator, “Massa Linkums,” a weakling, pusillanimous, and a murderer.

It is only with his assassination that his popularity ascended.

And now, 204 years later, he is our hero.

One must feel happy for the young man of thirty-one, who, profoundly depressed and even suicidal, made a confession to his friend Joshua Speed. Years later, in 1866, Speed recalled:

He said to me that he had done nothing to make any human being remember that he had lived — and that to connect his name with the events transpiring in his day & generation and so impress himself upon them as to link his name with something that would redound to the interest of his fellow man was what he desired to live for…”

Now, Lincoln’s likeness is everywhere: there are around 200 statues and sculptures of Lincoln in America, which amounts to almost one third of the more than 600 memorials and statues of American presidents. The number of books about him is legion. In fact, a stack of over 15,000 titles was erected in the lobby of the Ford’s Theatre Center for Education and Leadership, and reaches some 34 feet in height.




He may even, this year, win an Oscar….

February 24, 1863 – President Lincoln Signed the Arizona Organic Act

In spite of the name, this law had nothing to do with food. The Arizona Organic Act was a United States federal law introduced as H.R. 357 in the 2d session of the 37th Congress on March 12, 1862, by Rep. James M. Ashley of Ohio. The Act provided for the creation of the Arizona Territory by the division of the New Mexico Territory into two territories, along the current boundary between New Mexico and Arizona. The bill was driven by the desire to ensure that Arizona would not be a pro-slavery territory, as was New Mexico. The provisional government established by the bill abolished slavery in the new Arizona Territory, but did not abolish it in the portion that remained the New Mexico Territory. On February 24, 1863, President Abraham Lincoln signed the bill once it had been approved by Congress.

Nevertheless, for a brief time during the Civil War, Arizona became part of the Confederacy, and invading Confederate troops brought an unknown number of enslaved African Americans into the territory. The Confederate loss at the Battle of Glorieta Pass forced Confederate retreat from the territory. (The Battle of Glorieta Pass, fought from March 26 to 28, 1862 in northern New Mexico Territory, was the decisive battle of the New Mexico Campaign during the American Civil War. Dubbed the “Gettysburg of the West” by some historians, it was intended as the killer blow by Confederate forces to break the Union possession of the West along the base of the Rocky Mountains.)

The following month a small Confederate picket troop north of Tucson fought with an equally small Union cavalry patrol from California in the so-called Battle of Picacho Pass. A Union cavalry patrol of 13 men from California skirmished with 10 Confederate scouts from Texas. Eleven men in all were killed. This marks the westernmost battle of the American Civil War. (Every March, Picacho Peak State Park hosts a re-enactment of the Civil War battles of Arizona and New Mexico, including the battle of Picacho Pass. The re-enactments now have grown so large that many more participants tend to be involved than took part in the actual engagements, and include infantry units and artillery as well as cavalry.)

Picacho Peak, Arizona

Review of “Year of Meteors” by Douglas R. Egerton

The United States presidential election of 1860 was possibly the most seminal in our history. Egerton follows the election with great care, giving the bulk of his attention to Democratic party politics. He articulates the positions of Stephen Douglas, John Breckenridge, and John Bell, and describes what happened at the various party conventions held to select these candidates.

Egerton posits several theses about the election that I believe he proves quite adequately in this book.

One is that the “fire-eating” Southerners were determined to brook no compromises; they wanted to split the Democratic party vote. Their stated goal was to get a Republican elected, so that the South would have an “excuse” to secede. The two chief engineers of this plan were the rabid secessionists William Yancey of Alabama and Robert Rhett of South Carolina. Both of them had been publicly calling for secession for years.

The second is that, in spite of what later revisionist historians claimed about the motives of Southerners, it was never about “states’ rights”; it was always about slavery. As the Vice President of the Confederate States, Alexander Stephens, declared of the new government:

…its corner-stone rests upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery – subordination to the superior race – is his natural and normal condition.”

(It should also be noted that southern planters rejected northern offers to free blacks and then colonize them in Liberia or elsewhere so the southerners wouldn’t have to deal with them. Southern “Yanceyites” had no interest in freeing blacks. In fact, they wanted more enslaved workers, not fewer, and even lobbied to get the Atlantic slave trade re-opened to “stock” the western territories.)

At the time of the 1860 election, as Egerton points out:

[white southern planters] saw no reason to disguise their message; it would only be in later years, after the Confederacy had collapsed under northern guns, that statesmen writing their memoirs would think it necessary to point to more morally acceptable causes such as economic grievances.”

Even President Buchanan, trying to diffuse the secession crisis, made a speech in which he admonished that talk of liberty and equality by northerners could cause servile insurrections and terrify plantation mistresses in dread of what could happen to them. [No one of course was concerned about the terrified young black girls in the slave quarters, whose fears were actually based on reality. This best-ever example of projecting your worst characteristics onto your enemies was repeated over and over again in the South in the reconstruction years.] (Buchanan, who wasn’t even our worst or our most racist president, endorsed Breckinridge for president in the 1860 race because Breckinridge was the only one to favor a federal slave code for the territories, as opposed to letting the territories decide based on popular sovereignty, and thereby taking the risk that some of them would be – gasp – free.)

A third theory Egerton advances is that even had the Democratic party stayed united behind Stephen A. Douglas, Lincoln still would have won. He includes an analysis of the electoral and popular voting to support his position.

Stephen A. Douglas

Stephen Douglas, no matter what else he might have been, was a staunch unionist, and when Lincoln won the election, he backed him all the way, meeting with him often to consult on the deteriorating national situation. In fact, they got on so well that Secretary of State Seward, who wanted to exert the most influence over Lincoln, was disturbed over “the growing intimacy between the senator and the president.” As it happened, Seward needn’t have worried. At President Lincoln’s request, Douglas undertook a mission to the Border States and to the Northwest to rouse Unionist sentiments among their citizenry, but the non-stop schedule and non-stop drinking wore him down. He died of typhoid fever on June 3, 1861, at the age of forty-eight.

Discussion: This excellent book covers only a small slice of antebellum politics, but is rich in detail. It is especially valuable for its focus on Douglas and his southern rivals rather than on Lincoln. I enjoyed it a great deal, but I wouldn’t recommend it to a reader unfamiliar with the broader context, or with the constitutional, territorial, and sectional issues that were roiling the nation.

Rating: 3.5/5

October 16, 1859 – John Brown and His Followers Seize Harpers Ferry

On October 16, 1859, abolitionist John Brown (a white man known for his violent opposition to slavery) and twenty-one armed followers seized the United States Armory and Arsenal at Harpers Ferry, Virginia (now West Virginia). The would-be revolutionaries, including three free blacks, one freed slave, and one fugitive slave, hoped to incite a rebellion of freed slaves and overturn the institution of slavery by force.

John Brown as a younger man

The small band was no match for the U.S. Marines however, and on October 18, under Colonel Robert E. Lee, the Marines stormed the armory, freed the hostages, and arrested Brown and his men.

Brown was tried for treason by the state of Virginia, but stated that he believed he was doing “God’s work” in trying to end slavery.

On November 2, 1859, his last speech, given in court, averred:

This court acknowledges, as I suppose, the validity of the law of God. I see a book kissed here which I suppose to be the Bible, or at least the New Testament. That teaches me that all things whatsoever I would that men should do to me, I should do even so to them. It teaches me, further, to ‘remember them that are in bonds, as bound with them.’ I endeavored to act up to that instruction. I say, I am yet too young to understand that God is any respecter of persons. I believe that to have interfered as I have done, as I have always freely admitted I have done in behalf of His despised poor, was not wrong, but right. Now, if it is deemed necessary that I should forfeit my life for the furtherance of the ends of justice, and mingle my blood further with the blood of my children and with the blood of millions in this slave country whose rights are disregarded by wicked, cruel, and unjust enactments, I submit; so let it be done!”

The jury trial ended in Brown’s conviction and death sentence. Brown was executed December 2, 1859.

If you are familiar with Lincoln’s speeches, you may have noticed the similarities between Brown’s last speech and Lincoln’s second inaugural address, when Lincoln declaimed:

If we shall suppose that American slavery is one of those offenses which, in the providence of God, must needs come, but which, having continued through His appointed time, He now wills to remove, and that He gives to both North and South this terrible war as the woe due to those by whom the offense came, shall we discern therein any departure from those divine attributes which the believers in a living God always ascribe to Him? Fondly do we hope, fervently do we pray, that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. Yet, if God wills that it continue until all the wealth piled by the bondsman’s two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said “the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.”

In point of fact, many of those opposed to slavery voiced the same ideas at this time in history. Harbingers of Lincoln’s speeches can be found throughout the period. In general, however, Lincoln managed to express the sentiments better than others. (See, for example, some of the many analyses of Lincoln’s first inaugural speech, in which he changed Secretary of State Seward’s proposed words to sound more felicitious.)

One other connection between Brown and Lincoln was more unfortunate. John Wilkes Booth hated both men passionately; he came up to Harper’s Ferry in 1859 to witness Brown’s execution and help ensure there would be no attempts to rescue him by supporters. On April 14, 1865, he saw to the execution of Lincoln himself.

May 8, 1858: Lincoln’s Most Famous Court Case: The Almanac Trial

When Lincoln was a young man living in New Salem, Illinois, a local bully, Jack Armstrong, challenged Lincoln to a wrestling match. Lincoln won, and earned Armstrong’s respect and friendship.

Twenty years later, in 1857, Lincoln learned that Jack’s son William, nicknamed Duff, had been charged with murder. Jack was now dead, and Lincoln wrote to his widow, Hannah, offering to defend Duff at no charge.

He went to Beardstown, Illinois for the trial. The prosecution’s case rested on the testimony of key witness Charles Allen, who claimed he had seen Duff Armstrong perform the murder.

On cross-examination, Lincoln asked Allen about the precise details of what happened that night. Allen testified that on August 29, 1857, at approximately 11:00 p.m., there was a full moon and that from a distance of about 150 feet he saw Armstrong strike the lethal blow.

Lincoln asked the judge for permission to enter an 1857 almanac into evidence. This was not a common trial technique at that time, because the judicial system relied almost entirely on witness testimony.

Lincoln asked Allen to read the almanac entry for August 29, 1857. There was no full moon that night; in fact, there had been no moon at all by 11:00 o’clock. Therefore, it would have been impossible for Allen to see anything from a distance of 150 feet. Lincoln had successfully discredited the witness.

Armstrong’s trial was over by the end of the day. After only one ballot, the jury found Armstrong was not guilty.

Review of “An Honest Calling: The Law Practice of Abraham Lincoln” by Mark E. Steiner

The opening premise of this book is quite interesting. Steiner posits that Lincoln’s legal career has been largely ignored by historians for three reasons. One is that it is difficult for non-lawyers to navigate through the esoteric language characterizing legal practice. More importantly, Steiner suggests that because of “the positive cultural image of Lincoln and the negative cultural image of lawyers in American society,” most writers prefer to ignore or minimize the importance of Lincoln’s law career. Third, “the image of Lincoln the lawyer clashes with the images of Lincoln as frontier hero” – the homespun “rail splitter” whose simplicity metamorphosed into brilliance after he took office.

Biographers who mention Lincoln’s law career have treated it anecdotally, referring only to those cases that might “build Lincoln’s image or inflate his reputation.” There have been documentary problems as well; it has only been since 2000 that a state-of-the-art electronic collection of Lincoln’s legal writings has been available. Thus, “the quality and quantity of literature on Lincoln’s law practice suffers in comparison to the writing on other aspects of his life.”

Steiner attempts to remedy this gap by a detailed review of Lincoln’s legal practice including an overview of what law practice was like for an antebellum lawyer, how Whigs in particular approached the practice of law, a review of sources Lincoln used to learn and interpret the law, and a representative sampling of cases from Lincoln’s practice.

Steiner finds from the evidence that Lincoln was quite a competent lawyer; so much so, that when he began to do appellate work, he often found himself fighting (and even losing!) the battle against the precedents he himself had set in the lower court.

Lincoln did not pick and choose his cases according to any moral standard whatsoever; “Lincoln was willing to represent any side in a dispute, regardless of the argument that he would have to present.” (Steiner argues that (a) antebellum Whig lawyers valued law and order more than any particular value; and (b) they were paid so badly they could not afford to be choosy in any event.) That included representing slaveholders attempting to establish property rights to African-Americans. The only sort of work Lincoln didn’t like was representing out-of-state clients. These clients didn’t know Lincoln, didn’t defer to his judgment, and operated on a quickened pace and impersonal style that was not compatible with Lincoln’s way of doing things.

To me, the discussion of antebellum law on slavery is the most interesting section of the book. Free states refused to recognize slavery; if you brought a slave into the state for domicile (rather than for purposes of transit), the free state considered the slave to have been manumitted. A free state was under no obligation to uphold laws it deemed repugnant from other states. (Fugitive slaves were a separate matter, because the issue of runaways was governed by a federal statute applicable to all the states. The Dred Scott case concerned yet a third issue, dealing with the right of slaves to sue in federal court.) Lincoln defended a man who claimed his slave was “in transit” even though they had been in a free state for two years. Lincoln lost, and the slave Jane was declared free.

Other chapters deal in depth with cases of Lincoln’s relating to debt, railroad entitlements, slander, estates, and taxation. Whenever possible, Lincoln preferred to settle. When he had to try a case, he had a good record for winning. He was respected for honesty and integrity, but would not refrain from using a technicality to win a case. He was dedicated to apply the rule of law wherever and whenever he could, and that is what he determined to do, both as a lawyer and later as the president.

This book makes some interesting points about chronicling of Lincoln’s life, and about the decisions of historians to include or omit certain aspects of Lincoln’s identity from the record. It describes his law practice very well; it in fact includes many more legal details than I suspect most readers would care to know. On the other hand, its explanation of legal positions taken by the various states on slaves is important enough to merit inclusion in other histories.

Does this book help to answer the question “who was Lincoln and what was he really like?” Yes, a bit, in the way that knowing what a person does “at work” helps to provide clues to who he or she is. At the very least, it covers aspects of Lincoln’s character and personality that deserve to be summarized in more general treatments of Lincoln’s life. It doesn’t make for the fascinating reading that most books on Lincoln do, but it does represent a lot of solid research, and information that will be very appealing to a specialized audience.

February 27, 1860 – Lincoln Delivers a Speech at Cooper Union, in New York City

Many historians consider Lincoln’s Cooper Union speech to have been a seminal step on his road to the presidency.

Lincoln had not yet declared himself a candidate for the presidency; rather, he was speaking as a “Republican Party Statesman.” The goal of his speech (aside from gaining national exposure) was to prove, in contrast to the allegations of Senator Stephen Douglas, that the Founding Fathers had indeed intended for slavery to die out, and not to be expanded into new territories.

On the afternoon of the speech, Lincoln strolled the streets of Manhattan and stopped off at the studio of Matthew Brady to have a photograph taken.

At Cooper Union, Lincoln went through the voting records of the Founders for the audience, demonstrating that the majority of those who signed the Constitution and the Bill of Rights supported the prevention of the spread of slavery into federal territories. Not only that, but these men had voted for the exclusion of slavery both before and after the formation of the Constitution. This argument was meant to vitiate the contention of both Douglas and Supreme Court Justice Taney that when a U.S. citizen entered a federal territory, “the Federal Government can exercise no power over his person or property, beyond what that instrument confers, nor lawfully deny any right which it has reserved.” (Justice Taney writing in the Dred Scott decision, in which he famously denied that negroes were citizens.) [Taney’s position was not only reflective of accepted U.S. law at the time, but may have been constitutionally correct. See, Dred Scott and the Problem of Constitutional Evil by Mark A. Graber.]

Lincoln also emphasized that the Republican Party did not seek to wipe out slavery where it was constitutionally permitted: “Wrong as we think slavery is, we can yet afford to let it alone where it is.” Rather, he said, Republicans merely fought its expansion. They were also opposed to the resumption of the slave trade (which Lincoln explained would be a natural outgrowth of a law giving people the right to procure slaves in the new territories), but supported the Fugitive Slave Law (because it was the legislated law of the land).

Lincoln ended with the inspiring call: “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.”

The audience gave Lincoln a standing ovation. Lincoln, never short on ambition, went over to the New York Tribune offices after the speech. Although it was nearly midnight, he sat up and reviewed and corrected the galley proofs for his speech that would be printed in the next day’s newspaper. The speech, reproduced throughout the states, gave Lincoln great exposure, and garnered praise from both Republicans and Democrats alike. The New York Tribune hailed it as “one of the most happiest and most convincing political arguments ever made in this City … No man ever made such an impression on his first appeal to a New-York audience.”

You can read the entire text of Lincoln’s historic speech here.