Abe Lincoln and John Brown

ERIC FONER, LONDON REVIEW OF BOOKS


Abe: Abraham Lincoln in His Times
by David S. Reynolds.
Penguin, 1066 pp., £33.69, September, 978 1 59420 604 7
The Zealot and the Emancipator: John Brown, Abraham Lincoln and the Struggle for American Freedom
by H.W. Brands.
Doubleday, 445 pp., £24, October, 978 0 385 54400 9


Abraham Lincoln​, memorialised as a child of the frontier, self-made man and liberator of the slaves, has been the subject of more than 16,000 books, according to David S. Reynolds’s new biography, Abe. That’s around two a week, on average, since the end of the American Civil War. Almost every possible Lincoln can be found in the historical literature, including the moralist who hated slavery, the pragmatic politician driven solely by ambition, the tyrant who ran roughshod over the Constitution, and the indecisive leader buffeted by events he could not control. Conservatives, communists, Civil Rights activists and segregationists have claimed him as their own. Esquire magazine once ran a list of ‘rules every man should know’. Rule 115: ‘There is nothing that can be marketed that cannot be marketed better using the likeness of Honest Abe Lincoln.’

It seems safe to assume that even the most diligent researcher will not be able to discover significant new material about Lincoln – a diary, say, or previously unknown speeches and letters. Instead the biographer must take an original interpretative approach. And, against all odds, Reynolds, who teaches at the City University of New York, manages to say new and important things about Lincoln in his elegantly written book. Rather than a conventional account of Lincoln’s life, Abe is a ‘cultural biography’. The familiar trajectory of Lincoln’s career is here, from his youth in Kentucky and Indiana to his emergence as a national figure forced to preside over a cataclysmic war and its ‘astounding’ (Lincoln’s word) result: the emancipation of four million slaves. But Reynolds is more interested in the way Lincoln’s character and political outlook reflected ‘the roiling cultural currents’ of the nation in which he lived.

Lincoln’s America, Reynolds says, was suffused with sensationalism, violence, raw humour, and spectacles high and low. On the streets of New York, theatregoers attending performances of Shakespeare rubbed shoulders with the audiences for blackface minstrel shows. Nearby, P.T. Barnum’s American Museum featured General Tom Thumb (an adult less than three feet tall) alongside such frauds as the ‘Feejee Mermaid’. Lincoln felt at home with both elite and popular culture. Reynolds believes that his success as a politician stemmed from his engagement with the diverse cultural phenomena around him. For Reynolds, Lincoln really was ‘Abe’, the everyman depicted in his campaign literature.

To situate Lincoln in his cultural context, Reynolds takes the reader down numerous narrative byways. A discussion of Lincoln’s taste in music, including the erotic ballad ‘I won’t be a nun’ and, improbably, ‘Dixie’, a paean to the Old South, leads to a long examination of 19th-century popular song. When, after the death of their 11-year-old son Willie, Lincoln and his wife Mary arrange for seances in the White House, we learn about the popularity of spiritualism. Mention of Uncle Tom’s Cabin leads to a discussion of the emotional intensity of mid-century writing and what Reynolds calls the ‘opportunistic sensationalism’ of reformers who dwelled on the degradation of drinkers and the physical abuse of slaves, an approach Lincoln rejected as counter-productive.

Political cartoonists sometimes depicted Lincoln in the guise of Charles Blondin, a tightrope walker famous for crossing Niagara Falls on a high wire, navigating a dangerous course without leaning too far to the left or right. Reynolds describes Lincoln as a ‘political Blondin’, who chose an ideologically balanced ‘Blondin-like’ Cabinet and sought a ‘Blondin-like balance in the military’ by appointing both Democrats and Republicans to command troops. The repeated invocation of Blondin is certainly original.



Reynolds’s Lincoln is not simply a sponge who absorbs what’s going on around him in the culture. Abe devotes far more attention than most biographies to Lincoln’s formative years on the frontier, where he learned to trust his own judgment. Unlike most frontiersmen, he did not hunt, gamble, drink or use tobacco. At a time of intense religious revivalism, Lincoln never joined a church and even expressed admiration for Tom Paine’s Deist tract The Age of Reason. Lincoln didn’t share the prevailing hatred of Native Americans and despite his physical presence (he was 6’4”) tried to avoid the brutal altercations that marked the region’s rough-and-tumble male culture. At an early point in his career Lincoln even suggested that property-owning women should enjoy the right to vote. Despite Reynolds’s subtitle, ‘Abraham Lincoln in His Times’, the Lincoln of Abe sometimes seems like a woke inhabitant of our own era: ‘environmentally conscious’, forward-looking with regard to gender, kind to animals and sympathetic towards ‘ethnic others’.

Reynolds sees 19th-century America as a country that lacked coherence, where individualism was rampant and established institutions weak. The resulting ‘formlessness’, he argues, gave Lincoln a desire for structure in both his own life and the larger world. As a counterweight to the centrifugal forces around him, he revered the national Union, represented by the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, documents that his speeches brilliantly enlisted in the cause of anti-slavery. As a party leader in Illinois, Lincoln understood the need to maintain peace among the various Republican factions – radicals and conservatives, nativists and immigrants, former Democrats and former Whigs. Union was as essential to the party as to the nation. In his personal life, Lincoln sought to enlist reason against his tendency towards intense emotion and occasional depression.

Politically, Reynolds writes, Lincoln ‘stuck close to the centre’, seeking a middle ground between abolitionists, whose intemperate attacks on individual slaveowners seemed to him to endanger the Union, and Northerners indifferent to the evil of the South’s ‘peculiar institution’. Because of his reverence for the Union, Lincoln called for Northern acquiescence in measures he privately abhorred, notably the draconian Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, since the Constitution established the right of owners to have runaways captured and returned.

His idol was Senator Henry Clay of Kentucky, known as the Great Compromiser. Clay died in 1852, and Lincoln must have realised that his fifty-year effort to rid his state of slavery had accomplished nothing. But well into the Civil War, Lincoln clung to Clay’s plan for abolition: gradual emancipation, monetary compensation to the owners, and ‘colonisation’ – that is, encouraging freed slaves to leave the United States for Africa or the Caribbean.

What does all this tell us about what Reynolds calls the ‘hotly contested’ subject of Lincoln’s racial attitudes? A little over twenty years ago, Lerone Bennett Jr, an African American historian, published Forced into Glory, which drew on Lincoln’s prewar statements opposing civil and political rights for Blacks (his comment on female suffrage was limited to whites), and his advocacy of colonising freed slaves, to depict him as an inveterate racist. The book had the drawbacks of any prosecutor’s brief, but it forced historians and the general public to confront aspects of Lincoln’s career that had mostly been swept under the rug. Outraged members of what one scholar has called the ‘Lincoln-Industrial Complex’ rushed to defend the Great Emancipator.

Insisting on ‘the complete falsity of the charges of innate racism’, Reynolds joins the defence. He insists that in interactions with individual African Americans, Lincoln did not display signs of prejudice. ....Reynolds makes clear that no one with political ambitions could ignore the deeply ingrained racism of Illinois. The state’s notorious Black Laws denied Blacks basic rights, and racist language suffused politics. In the 1858 debates during the campaign for one of Illinois’s seats in the Senate, Lincoln’s antagonist, Senator Stephen A. Douglas, freely used the word ‘nigger’ and accused Lincoln and the ‘Black Republicans’ of wanting freed slaves to move to Illinois, take the jobs of whites, and marry white women. Warned that Douglas’s assault was weakening his party’s electoral chances, Lincoln denied that he believed in ‘Negro equality’. But unlike Douglas, Reynolds points out, he did not waver from the conviction that the inalienable rights in the Declaration of Independence – life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness – applied to all persons, regardless of race. These are valid points. Nonetheless, it is fair to say that unlike the abolitionists, who demanded not only an immediate end to slavery but full citizenship rights for Blacks, Lincoln found it impossible to imagine the United States as a biracial society of equals.

A writer who chooses his words with care, Reynolds struggles to find the right ones for Lincoln’s racial views. At one point he refers to his subject’s ‘hidebound’ outlook. He writes that Lincoln ‘associated himself’ with colonisation, a weak way of describing his service on the Board of Managers of the Illinois Colonisation Society and his numerous speeches and presidential messages promoting the policy. At a notorious 1862 meeting with a group of free African Americans, Lincoln urged his listeners to encourage emigration among their people. Reynolds sees this encounter, which outraged most Black leaders and seems to have inspired racial violence in the North, as a calculated performance to prepare conservative whites for the coming announcement of emancipation.

Once he issued the Emancipation Proclamation on 1 January, 1863, Lincoln’s racial views underwent rapid evolution. Unfortunately, while devoting a chapter to a careful analysis of Lincoln’s two greatest speeches, the Gettysburg Address and the Second Inaugural, Reynolds says relatively little about the Proclamation, although that pivotal document offers compelling evidence of the changes in Lincoln’s thinking. In it, Lincoln abandoned his long-held plan for gradual emancipation in favour of immediate freedom for more than three million slaves (about 750,000 were not covered, mostly because they lived in states that had not seceded) and dropped the idea of colonisation, urging Blacks to ‘go to work for reasonable wages’ in the United States. For the first time, he authorised the enrolment of African Americans in the Union army. Lincoln doubtless understood that military service would lead to demands for equal citizenship after the war. He never became egalitarian in a modern sense, but in the last two years of his life, spurred by the crucial role of Black soldiers in the ongoing conflict, his thinking changed dramatically. In his final speech, in 1865, he publicly advocated the right to vote for educated Blacks and those who had served in the army. By then he had moved well beyond his culture: at the time only a tiny number of Black men enjoyed the right to vote.




In​ The Zealot and the Emancipator, H.W. Brands has written a dual biography of Lincoln and the abolitionist John Brown, who in 1859 led a band of 22 men to seize the federal arsenal at Harper’s Ferry, Virginia, in the hope of sparking a slave insurrection. The divergent paths chosen by Brown and Lincoln illuminate a problem as old as civilisation itself – what is a person’s moral responsibility in the face of glaring injustice?

Lincoln and Brown never met. Both came from humble origins, but in many ways they could not have been more different. Lincoln thrived in the world of 19th-century American capitalism, rising through ambition, hard work and continual self-improvement to solid middle-class status, while Brown, who failed at numerous ventures and more than once experienced bankruptcy, seemed to sink beneath the economy’s turbulent waters. Where Lincoln the rationalist declared that man could not know the will of God, Brown ‘knew’ that he had been chosen for a divine mission to overthrow slavery. Lincoln condemned mob violence and insisted that respect for the rule of law must become the nation’s ‘political religion’. Brown, like many abolitionists, believed in a ‘higher law’ that legitimised resistance to unjust man-made statutes.

As with Lincoln, the historical literature contains many John Browns – freedom fighter, terrorist, Civil Rights pioneer and madman. For an earlier generation of historians, who saw the Civil War as needless carnage brought on by irresponsible fanatics, Brown was Exhibit A. But African American radicals have long hailed Brown as a rare white person willing to sacrifice himself for the cause of racial justice. Stokely Carmichael, who popularised the idea of ‘Black Power’ in the 1960s, identified Brown and the Radical Republican leader Thaddeus Stevens as the only white figures in American history worthy of admiration. Lately, with the destruction of slavery occupying a central place in accounts of the era’s history, Brown has come to be widely admired. Fifteen years ago, Reynolds published an adulatory biography, whose hyperbolic subtitle describes Brown as the man who ‘killed slavery, sparked the Civil War and seeded Civil Rights’. Brown was recently the subject of a TV series, The Good Lord Bird, starring Ethan Hawke. Brands writes that his students in Austin, Texas, ‘can’t get enough of John Brown’.

Lincoln and Brown both hated slavery but that conviction by itself did not tell a person how to take action against it. When the Fugitive Slave Act became law, Brown formed the League of Gileadites, a mostly Black group pledged to armed resistance. Later, he spirited a group of Missouri slaves to freedom in Canada. Lincoln, by contrast, insisted that no matter how reprehensible, the law must be obeyed. When the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854 opened territories in the Trans-Mississippi West to the expansion of slavery, Brown armed himself and headed there with several of his sons to take part in the local civil war over slavery known as ‘Bleeding Kansas’. During this preview of the national conflict they murdered five pro-slavery settlers. Lincoln joined the new Republican party and committed himself to seeking legislation that barred slavery’s expansion.



A skilled narrative writer, Brands offers a vivid account of the raid on Harper’s Ferry and its aftermath. In military terms, the event was a disaster. No slaves rose up to join Brown (in fact there weren’t very many in the mountains of what is now West Virginia, where the arsenal was located, far from the plantation belt). After commandeering weaponry, Brown abandoned his plan to retreat into the Alleghenies and fight a guerrilla war against the slave system. Instead, he and his men remained in place and were quickly overwhelmed by local militia and a contingent of Marines led by Robert E. Lee. But Brown’s demeanour at his trial for treason, where he cited the Bible as his inspiration, and his subsequent execution, made him a martyr in the eyes of many Northerners. He had made the gallows ‘as glorious as the cross’, Ralph Waldo Emerson exclaimed. Lincoln, the lawyer and constitutionalist, saw the raid as a setback for the anti-slavery cause and strove to dissociate the Republican party from Brown’s action. Among those who witnessed Brown’s hanging was the actor John Wilkes Booth, later Lincoln’s assassin. He called Brown ‘a man inspired, the greatest character of the century’, and resolved to outdo him.


Lincoln and Brown differed not only on strategy but on underlying principles. Unlike Lincoln, Brown saw the struggles against slavery and racism as interconnected. He was determined to live an anti-racist life. Richard Henry Dana Jr (the author of Two Years before the Mast) was astonished when visiting Brown’s farm in upstate New York to find Black guests seated at the dinner table. Brown introduced them not by their first names but as ‘Mr’ and ‘Mrs’. It was obvious to Dana that they had not been spoken to that way very often in their lives. Brown was inspired by the example of black abolitionists, many of whom he knew well, and by slave rebels such as Nat Turner. His armed band was interracial, although Brands tells us little about the motives and goals of the five black men who fought at Harper’s Ferry. Brands observes that one of the reasons Lincoln promoted colonisation, despite recognising the near impossibility of transporting millions of men, women and children out of the country, was that history offered no example of ‘a successful biracial republic’. Brown, however, thought the United States could become just that.

Both Brands and Reynolds conclude their books by noting that the paths chosen by Lincoln and Brown eventually seemed to converge. In 1864, convinced he would not win re-election because of Northern war weariness, Lincoln proposed that the Black abolitionist Frederick Douglass raise a force of soldiers who would move into the South, spread word of the Emancipation Proclamation, and encourage slaves to seek freedom behind Union lines. The idea bore a striking resemblance to Brown’s original plan at Harper’s Ferry.

Today, Lincoln is widely revered, while many Americans, including some historians, consider Brown mad. Yet it was Brown who wrote, in a note written shortly before his death, ‘The crimes of this guilty land will not be purged away but with blood.’ At his Second Inaugural, in March 1865, Lincoln embraced Brown’s penetrating insight that slavery was already a system of violence and so could not be eradicated peacefully. Echoing Brown, Lincoln explained the Civil War’s staggering death toll as divine retribution for two and a half centuries of ‘blood drawn by the lash’. He was reminding his listeners that violence in America did not begin when John Brown unsheathed his sword; it was embedded in slave society from the outset. And in the end, as Brands concludes, ‘Union arms, not Union arguments, overthrew slavery.’

Meet a Trump Predecessor: 1858 South Carolina Senator James Henry Hammond

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

 We are faced with the odd prospect of a president fighting desperately to keep a job he evidently doesn’t want. Trump has continued to insist he did not lose the 2020 election, and yet seems to have given up on governing. He has not taken any questions from reporters since Election Day and has spent a great deal of time golfing. Today the G20, the “Group of Twenty, which consists of leaders of developed or developing countries from around the world, met virtually. After speaking briefly, Trump turned his attention back to tweeting false information about the 2020 election. Then, while members of the G20 began to talk about responses to the global pandemic, Trump went golfing. This was his 298th golf trip during his presidency. Today America surpassed 12 million coronavirus infections.

While the president golfs, President-Elect Joe Biden is trying to pressure Congress to pass another coronavirus bill as the economy lurches toward another drop. Incoming presidents usually want to hold their influence in reserve to take credit for new policies, but Biden is pushing forward because he is so concerned about the economy. Unless Congress passes a new bill, about 12 million Americans will lose their unemployment benefits at the end of the year. Hunger and homelessness will follow.

The image of a political leader insisting he deserves a crucial leadership role he has little interest in filling echoes South Carolina Senator James Henry Hammond in 1858. Hammond stood up on the floor of the Senate in the midst of the sectional crisis and told his colleagues he had not studied the issue that was tearing the nation apart, but felt able to vote on it anyway. He would simply vote as his southern friends did, he said, because they were leaders and he trusted them to have done the work he hadn’t. In any case, it didn’t matter much what anyone said, according to Hammond, because the Constitution had limited the government so it could do nothing but protect property. Even if an overwhelming majority of Americans wanted the government to do something more expansive, it could not.

Hammond went on to explain that men like him and the other white slave holders who directed the Democratic Party in his era belonged at the top of society. They were naturally supported by the masses, whom he called “mudsills” after the timbers driven into the ground to support the plantation homes above. “In all social systems there must be a class to do the menial duties, to perform the drudgery of life,” he explained. Those people were dumb and unskilled, but they were strong and loyal. So long as their betters directed them, the mudsills would labor effectively, producing capital which moved upward and permitted “that other class which leads progress, civilization, and refinement,” to move the country forward.

Elsewhere, Hammond made his principles clear: “I repudiate, as ridiculously absurd, that much-lauded but nowhere accredited dogma of Mr. Jefferson, that “all men are born equal.” In his mind, Hammond belonged in the Senate because he was a member of the ruling class.

The following year, aspiring politician Abraham Lincoln answered Hammond with the vision that would become the intellectual underpinning of the newly formed Republican Party. Lincoln rejected the idea that society moved forward thanks to the efforts of a few rich men. He denied that most people belonged to a lower, menial class into which they were, as he said, “fatally fixed” for life.

Instead, Lincoln argued that, if properly organized, society progressed thanks to the hard work and innovation of ordinary men. While rich men had no incentive to think up new ideas, he said, ordinary Americans worked and innovated so they could provide for themselves. As they did, they made more money than they and their families needed, so they would use the surplus to buy goods that would support merchants, shoemakers, and so on. In turn, those people would work hard and accumulate capital, which in turn would support a few financiers and industrialists, who would use their own accumulated capital to hire men just starting out, and the cycle would begin again. The heart of the system was not wealthy men, but hardworking ordinary ones.

Central to this system was government’s guarantee that all men were equal before the law and that all men had equal access to resources. This meant that the government must not protect the very wealthy. It would require a government that did more than protect property; it must keep the economic playing field between wealthy men and ordinary men level.

These two versions of America appear, once again, to be on the table.

Biden won in places that are thriving. Trump won in places that are hurting.

 

WASHINGTON POST DAILY 202

“The parts of America that have seen strong job, population and economic growth in the past four years voted for Biden, economic researchers found. In contrast, Trump garnered his highest vote shares in counties that had some of the most sluggish job, population and economic growth during his term,” Andrew Van Dam and Heather Long report. “Trump fared well among voters who said the economy was their top concern, and he even won votes in places that didn’t fare particularly well under his presidency. This is perhaps a continuation of the 2016 election, when Trump won a huge share of places that had struggled under [Obama]. These trends help explain why Biden was able to flip the counties that contain Phoenix, Fort Worth and Jacksonville, Fla., all of which are growing and prosperous urban hubs. And it helps explain why Trump did better than expected in Osceola County and Miami-Dade counties, the two Florida counties with some of the state’s highest unemployment rates. … The economy often decides elections, but the surprise in this case was that good economic performance didn’t appear to favor the incumbent. …

“In the 2000 election, Republican George W. Bush won 2,417 counties that drove 45 percent of the U.S. economy, while Democrat Al Gore won 666 counties that made up to 55 percent of the economy, a fairly even split of the economic map. In 2020, Biden won 490 counties that account for 70 percent of the U.S. economy, while Trump won 2,534 counties amounting to just shy of 30 percent of the economy, according to an analysis by Mark Muro, senior fellow at the Metropolitan Policy Program at the Brookings Institution, and his team … For Democrats, it was a notable increase from 2016, when Hillary Clinton won counties amounting to 64 percent of the U.S. economy. The United States is transforming into a knowledge and digital economy, and the political map appears to be shifting with it. Some call it the urban versus rural divide, but it is also a digital versus blue-collar split.”

“Exit polls in Pennsylvania show that Biden’s victory came not from big inroads among White voters without college degrees,” Dan Balz notes. “He lost them by about the same margin — 32 points — as Hillary Clinton did in 2016. And in 2020, those voters made up 45 percent of the Pennsylvania electorate, compared with 40 percent in 2016. Biden won with Black votes in Philadelphia and a larger share of the suburban vote around Philadelphia than Clinton four years ago. One major question is whether, without Trump on the ballot in the future, suburban voters — especially White women with college degrees — will remain strongly Democratic or revert to previous patterns as a key swing vote? Results of some House races suggest Trump was a bigger problem for some suburban voters than the Republican brand itself.” 

Republican Gov. Kim Reynolds of Iowa called her party’s down-ballot victories “a validation of our balanced response to covid-19, one that is mindful of both public health and economic health.” (Olivia Sun/AP)

As the pandemic rages, Republicans say the election’s results validate their approach. 

“In the states where the virus is spiking highest — particularly in the Upper Midwest — Republicans made substantial gains down-ballot. Often they did so by railing against the very tool that scientists say could best help arrest the virus’s spread,” Griff Witte reports. "Victories in state and local races have allowed GOP leaders to claim a mandate for their let-it-be approach to pandemic management, with pleas for ‘personal responsibility’ substituting government intervention. As hospitals fill and deaths climb, it’s a philosophy that public health experts warn could have disastrous consequences this winter. … 

“In Iowa, cases have grown by nearly 180 percent in two weeks, and the average daily death count is well above its springtime peak, according to state data. Yet Trump — who held mostly maskless rallies in Iowa — won the state by a large margin, as did Joni Ernst, the incumbent Republican U.S. senator. … Republicans in North Dakota were also rewarded by voters, with the party managing to deepen its dominance of state government even as coronavirus cases jumped tenfold in the three months before the election. … Next door, in Montana … [voters chose] Rep. Greg Gianforte (R-Mont.), who was photographed without a face covering and embracing maskless supporters while on the campaign trail, [as governor]. Gianforte said he will consider rolling back the state’s restrictions in a bid to boost the economy. … In states that still have Democratic governors, losses in the legislature erased any hopes that they would have an easier time implementing their virus-fighting strategies.”

Moderna’s vaccine found to be nearly 95 percent effective.

“Biotechnology firm Moderna announced Monday that a preliminary analysis shows its experimental coronavirus vaccine is nearly 95 percent effective at preventing illness, including severe cases — a striking initial result that leaves the United States with the prospect that two coronavirus vaccines could be available on a limited basis by the end of the year,” Carolyn Johnson reports. “The news comes a week after pharmaceutical giant Pfizer and its German partner BioNTech lifted the stock market and people’s hopes with the news that their coronavirus vaccine was more than 90 percent effective. Moderna’s vaccine … is being tested in 30,000 people. Half received two doses of the vaccine, and half received a placebo. To test how well the vaccine works, physicians closely monitored cases of covid-19 to see whether they predominantly occurred in people who received the placebo group. Of the 95 cases of covid-19, the disease caused by the virus, 90 were in the group that received the placebo … With cases of covid-19 confined almost exclusively to trial participants receiving a placebo, that sends a strong signal that the vaccine is effective at thwarting the virus. The data have not yet been published or peer reviewed … 

“Moderna has committed to completing its trial before applying for emergency-use authorization — which means waiting until there are 151 cases of covid-19 in the study. … It is …. expected to reach its endpoint in seven to 10 days … [Moderna CEO Stéphane Bancel] anticipates a vaccine might begin to become available to those at high risk in the second half of December. Unlike Pfizer, which invested $2 billion of its own money in researching and developing a vaccine, Moderna is part of Operation Warp Speed, the government initiative designed to erase the financial risk of vaccine and therapeutics development by providing upfront funding to companies and helping coordinate the trials. Moderna received $2.5 billion from the U.S. government to support research, development and manufacturing of its vaccine candidate, whereas Pfizer signed a contract to sell doses to the U.S. government.” 

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

Today Trump’s followers—including the neo-fascist Proud Boys and Marjorie Taylor Greene, a racist QAnon believer newly elected to the House of Representatives from Georgia-- congregated in Washington, D.C., to claim that Trump won the 2020 election. President-Elect Joe Biden’s overwhelming victory, they say, was fake, despite the many administration officials insisting that the election was “the most secure in American history.”

Trump’s motorcade drove through the crowd on his way to play golf. Far from discouraging his followers’ distrust of our democratic system, he is actively encouraging it. His many lawsuits, which are being tossed out or decided against him, seem designed to stoke the narrative that he was cheated. His surrogates are taking to popular outlets to insist that the election was rigged and that Trump, in fact, won. He refuses to concede the election, insisting that there were “illegitimate” ballots that must be discarded, and is stalling the necessary preparations for a transition to the Biden administration.

Trump praised GSA administrator Emily Murphy, who is refusing to sign the paperwork that would allow Biden to receive intelligence briefings and let his transition team access needed government resources: “Great job Emily!” 

Meanwhile, the president appears to have lost whatever interest he might have had in actually governing. As the country reels from the coronavirus surge that has now infected more than 10 million of us, killed more than 244,000, and crippled the economy, he is apparently focused exclusively on the past election. He has not gone to a coronavirus task force meeting in at least five months, rarely reads the daily reports on the virus, and is no longer briefed about the crisis by doctors. He has apparently decided simply to let the conflagration burn. At the same time, he is refusing to let his staffers talk to incoming Biden staff about the pandemic.

“The duty of a president is to protect the national security of the United States, and this is the most prominent disease of mass destruction America’s ever faced, and we have a commander in chief who has run away from the problem and has made it worse,” Jack Chow, a U.S. health official under George W. Bush, told reporters from the Washington Post. “We had an opportunity twice over the past eight months to bring it down to safer levels, and we failed. We are on the verge of losing control of this pandemic.”

And yet, most Republican lawmakers are not willing to challenge Trump in public.

Indeed, in his willingness to abandon governance for his own benefit Trump is simply following the lead of Republican lawmakers like Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) who has steadfastly refused to take up bills from the Democratic-led House of Representatives, including a coronavirus relief package to address the coronavirus recession. Instead, McConnell has focused on packing the courts with pro-business judges. Excerpts from a new book by former President Barack Obama, due out next week, reveal McConnell’s response to a plea from then-Vice President Biden to pass a worthwhile bill. McConnell answered: “You must be under the mistaken impression that I care.”

Today’s Republican Party has traveled a long way from the party of Abraham Lincoln.

In the 1850s, the Republican Party rose to stand against a small group of wealthy southern white slaveholders who had taken over the government. Those slaveholders made up only about 1% of the American South. They ran the Democratic Party, but they knew their system of human enslavement was unpopular and that they were in a political minority even in the Democratic Party. It was only a question of time until the majority began to hem in their ownership of other human beings.

So when folks started to urge the government to promote infrastructure in the growing nation, building roads or dredging harbors, for example, these southern leaders worried that if the government began to intervene in the economy, the regulation of slavery would be just around the corner. They pushed back by insisting that the government could do nothing that was not expressly written in the Constitution. Even if the vast majority of the people in the country wanted the government to do something, it could not.

As pressure grew for government to promote economic growth for ordinary Americans, the southern slaveholders worked to cement their power. They courted poor white voters, telling them that any attempt to regulate slavery was an effort to lift Black people over them. From their stronghold in the Senate, southern leaders stopped legislation to develop the country and instead pushed laws that spread slavery into the West. When northerners objected, southern leaders packed the Supreme Court and got it to agree that Congress could not stop the spread of southern slavery even across the entire nation. But while they insisted the federal government could not promote the economy for ordinary Americans, they demanded a sweeping federal slave code to protect slavery in the West.

Their system was best for the nation, they explained. Society was made up of a mass of workers, drudges who weren’t terribly smart, but were strong and loyal. They were the “mudsills” of society, akin to the wood hammered into the ground that supported the grand plantation homes above. Directed by their betters, these mudsills produced capital, which accumulated in the hands of the wealthy. There, it did far more good than if it were distributed among those who had produced it, because society’s leaders used their wealth to innovate and build the economy, doing what was best for the workers, who could not understand their own interests. The nation thrived.

To secure this system, though, it was imperative that the mudsills could not vote. If they could, workers would demand more of the wealth they produced. White southerners had enslaved their laborers, South Carolina Senator James Henry Hammond told his northern colleagues in 1858, but northerners had not, and they foolishly allowed them to vote. “If they knew the tremendous secret, that the ballot-box is stronger than "an army with banners," and could combine, where would you be?” Hammond demanded. “Your society would be reconstructed, your government overthrown, your property divided… by the quiet process of the ballot-box.”

Men like Abraham Lincoln organized to overturn the idea that they were mindless workers, doomed to menial labor for life. In 1859, Lincoln articulated a new vision for the nation, putting ordinary men, rather than elite slaveholders, at the heart of national development.

Lincoln’s “Free Labor” theory held that the nation worked best when the government supported ordinary men rather than a wealthy elite. Ordinary men worked more intelligently and innovated more freely than an elite, and when the government used its power to free up resources for them, they built the economy far more efficiently than the enslaved workers who were hampered by the commands of an out-of-touch plantation owner. Rather than shunning economic development, the government should embrace it, they said, spreading free labor, rather than slavery, across the West.

When Lincoln won the 1860 election, southern leaders refused to accept the results of the election. They left the Union to launch a new nation that rejected the idea of human equality and was instead based on human enslavement.

Left in charge of the government, the new Republican Party rebuilt it according to Lincoln’s vision. To pay the enormous cost of the Civil War, they invented our first national system of taxation, including the income tax. Then, to enable people to pay those taxes, they spread opportunity to ordinary men, giving them western land (that we now recognize belonged to indigenous people), establishing our state universities, and building a railroad to take people across the country. Ultimately, they included Black men in their vision, abolishing slavery, establishing Black citizenship, and guaranteeing Black men the right to vote so they could protect their own interests.

Under the leadership of the Republican Party, Americans were, Lincoln reminded them, resolving “that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”

LINCOLN (not the movie)

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2012/nov/22/bombshell-american-public/

JAMES M. MCPHERSON   NY Review of Books, 11/22/12

In a Thanksgiving sermon in 1862 at the First Presbyterian Church in Philadelphia, the prominent clergyman Reverend Albert Barnes reflected on the momentous events of that second year of the Civil War. “It has been such a year as our country has never experienced before,” he said, “and will make more work for the calm and impartial historian of future times, than any one year in all our public history.” The four historians whose books are reviewed here have written about 1862 in a manner that is perhaps neither entirely calm nor impartial, but quite suitable to the tumultuous atmosphere of wartime crisis that pervaded the era. All four point toward the climax on the first day of 1863, when Abraham Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation, one of those “great national acts,” in the words of the black leader Frederick Douglass in a speech that year,



When Lincoln published a preliminary proclamation on September 22, 1862, warning Confederate states of his intention to issue a final edict on January 1, he did not realize that those two dates stood precisely one hundred days apart. Louis Masur’s Lincoln’s Hundred Days [ Lincoln’s Hundred Days: The Emancipation Proclamation and the War for the Union by Louis P. Masur Belknap Press/Harvard University Press, 358 pp., $29.95 ]  focuses on that crucial period, but it starts more than a year earlier to set the stage for those hundred days, and follows up with the aftermath and consequences of Lincoln’s historic action. Masur and Harold Holzer [ Emancipating Lincoln: The Proclamation in Text, Context, and Memory by Harold Holzer Harvard University Press, 213 pp., $24.95 ]  argue persuasively that the progression of events during that critical autumn of the war were full of contingencies and that the final outcome was by no means certain.





Seven Southern states had seceded in 1861 because they feared the incoming Lincoln’s administration’s designs on slavery. In a vain effort to stem further secessions and bring back the states that had gone out, Lincoln declared that he had no intention or power to interfere with slavery in the states, but only to restrict its further expansion. Southerners were not reassured. When the war began with the Confederate attack on Fort Sumter, four more states seceded. Many members of Lincoln’s own Republican Party urged him to strike against slavery. The slaves provided much of the labor that sustained the Southern economy and the logistics of Confederate armies. From almost the first days of the war, slaves began coming into Union lines wherever Northern armies and naval vessels penetrated the South. By the fall of 1861, tens of thousands of them had gained sanctuary and a practical if not yet legal freedom. Their labor was lost to the Confederacy and gained by the Union.

Abolitionists, black leaders, and radical Republicans pressed Lincoln to ratify and expand this process by using his war powers as commander in chief to seize enemy property—slaves—being used to wage war against the United States. But Lincoln hesitated to embrace such a sweeping policy. He was trying to hold together a precarious war coalition of Northern Democrats and Unionists from the border slave states that had not seceded (Missouri, Kentucky, Maryland, and Delaware) as well as Republicans. He was concerned—with good reason—that the first two parts of that coalition might break away if he took the kind of bold action the radicals wanted.

When General John C. Frémont issued an order freeing the slaves of Confederates in the border state of Missouri in August 1861, Lincoln revoked it. To a friend who protested this revocation, Lincoln explained that if he had let Fremont’s edict stand, Kentucky would have seceded. “Kentucky gone, we can not hold Missouri, nor, as I think, Maryland. These all against us, and the job on our hands is too large for us. We would as well consent to separation at once, including the surrender of this capitol.”¹

Apart from these practical consequences, wrote Lincoln, neither Fremont nor the president himself had the constitutional authority to order the freeing of slaves. “Can it be pretended,” he wrote, “that it is any longer the government of the US—any government of constitution and laws,—wherein a General, or a President, may make permanent rules of property by proclamation?” Masur notes the irony of the date of this letter: September 22, 1861, one year to the day before Lincoln issued his proclamation stating an intention to do precisely what he had said a president could not do. “Lincoln had much intellectual work ahead of him,” writes Masur; “events would help to take him there.”






All four of these books [The other two are The Long Road to Antietam: How the Civil War Became a Revolution by Richard Slotkin  Liveright, 478 pp., $32.95; and  Rise to Greatness: Abraham Lincoln and America’s Most Perilous Year by David Von Drehle Henry Holt,  666pp, $30.00] provide detailed and careful renderings of these events and of Lincoln’s intellectual journey. In August 1861, Congress in effect freed slaves who had worked in any capacity for Southern armies and who subsequently came within Union lines. The secretary of the navy ordered ship captains to accept all slaves (called “contrabands”) who sought asylum and to recruit able-bodied young males into the navy. In March 1862 Congress prohibited the army from returning to their owners any slaves who came into Union lines. The following month Congress abolished slavery in the District of Columbia, and in July 1862 passed a second act that “confiscated” the slaves and declared free all slaves of owners who could be proved to have supported the Confederacy.

Lincoln signed all of this legislation. He also tried to persuade representatives from the Union border states to accept a plan for gradual abolition of slavery in them, with compensation from the federal government. They refused, and that refusal moved Lincoln toward a decision to issue an emancipation proclamation. Confederate military counteroffensives in the summer of 1862 culminating in the Second Battle of Bull Run in late August reversed the momentum of Union victories earlier in the year, undercutting the hope that the war would soon be won without resorting to radical measures. Lincoln had grown disillusioned with Southern Unionists, such as Reverdy Johnson of Maryland and Thomas J. Durant of Louisiana, whom he had previously tried to conciliate.
"Those enemies must understand that they cannot experiment for ten years trying to destroy the government, and if they fail still come back into the Union unhurt."

Lincoln had overcome his earlier doubts about the constitutionality of a president making “permanent rules of property.” He was impressed by the arguments of William Whiting, a prominent New England lawyer and solicitor of the War Department, whose pamphlet The War Powers of the President, and the Legislative Powers of Congress in Relation to Rebellion, Treason and Slavery went through seven editions in little more than a year. Whiting maintained that the laws of war “give the President full belligerent rights” as commander in chief to seize enemy property, including slaves. “This right of seizure and condemnation is harsh,” wrote Whiting, “as all the proceedings of war are harsh, in the extreme, but is nevertheless lawful.” And once the slaves were “seized,” the government would surely never allow them to be reenslaved.³

As the war took a turn for the worse in the summer of 1862, Lincoln now fully embraced the idea that as commander in chief he could proclaim emancipation as a means of weakening the enemy. During a carriage ride on July 13, 1862, to attend the funeral of the infant son of Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton, the president startled his seatmates William H. Seward and Gideon Welles, the secretaries of state and the navy. He told them that he had made up his mind to issue the proclamation. As Welles later reported the conversation, Lincoln said that emancipation had become “a military necessity, absolutely essential to the preservation of the Union. We must free the slaves or be ourselves subdued.” The bondsmen were “undeniably an element of strength to those who had their service, and we must decide whether that element should be with us or against us.” Lincoln brushed aside any question of the constitutionality of such action.

The border states, Lincoln now acknowledged, “would do nothing” on their own; indeed, perhaps after all it was not fair to ask them to give up slavery while Confederates retained it. Therefore “the blow must fall first and foremost” on Confederates. “Decisive and extreme measures must be adopted…. We [want] the army to strike more vigorous blows. The Administration must set the army an example, and strike at the heart of the rebellion”—slavery.⁴

Nine days later, on July 22, Lincoln informed the full Cabinet of his intention. After some discussion of details, Seward advised that the proclamation be withheld during this period of defeatism in the North over Union reverses in the Seven Days Battles in Virginia some three weeks earlier. To issue it now might give the appearance—especially abroad—of an act of desperation, an appeal for a slave insurrection, “our last shriek on the retreat.” Wait until you can make it public backed by military success, counseled Seward. Lincoln accepted this advice and tried to turn the delay to his advantage. As Harold Holzer describes, he began to expand the circle of Washington insiders who knew his plan during this time. Meanwhile, he put the proclamation away and waited for a victory.

 

It proved to be a long, agonizing wait, but the success of the Army of the Potomac in turning back the Army of Northern Virginia at the Battle of Antietam on September 17, 1862, was the victory Lincoln had waited for. Five days later he called a special meeting of the Cabinet. “I think the time has come now,” he told them. “I wish it were a better time…. The action of the army against the rebels has not been quite what I should have best liked. But they have been driven out of Maryland.” When the enemy was at Frederick, Maryland, Lincoln had made a “promise to myself, and…to my Maker” that “if God gave us the victory in the approaching battle, [I] would consider it an indication of Divine will” in favor of emancipation. Antietam was God’s sign that he “had decided this question in favor of the slaves.” Thus he intended to issue that day the proclamation warning Confederate states that unless they returned to the Union by January 1, 1863, their slaves “shall be then, thenceforward, and forever free.”⁵

 

 

As Harold Holzer points out, there had been plenty of hints that something like this was forthcoming. Nevertheless, the proclamation landed like a bombshell on the American public. Republicans praised it, Democrats denounced it, some officers and soldiers in the Union army welcomed it, others including General George B. McClellan privately condemned it, many in the border states reprehended it, Southern whites ridiculed it, and blacks both free and slave thanked God and Abraham Lincoln for this righteous decree.

After Antietam, in September 1862, and the battle of Perryville in Kentucky the following month, which forced a Confederate army to retreat from that state, Union fortunes again took a turn for the worse. Democrats made gains in the fall elections of 1862, though the Republicans retained control of Congress.

In December 1862 the disastrous Union defeat at Fredericksburg, in Virginia, was followed by a Cabinet crisis in which Republican senators tried to force Lincoln to get rid of Seward as secretary of state and reorganize his Cabinet. Combined with Democratic gains in the elections, these events “ignited rumors that Lincoln would in fact blink and let the January 1 deadline pass without signing the order at all,” according to Holzer. His wife, Mary Lincoln, urged him not to sign. But Lincoln’s closest associates were confident that he would not back down. A New York Republican commented that “every conceivable influence has been brought to bear on him to influence him to withhold or modify—threats, entreaties, all sorts of humbugs, but he is as firm as a mule.” And so he was. On New Year’s Day, after shaking hands for three hours at the annual White House reception, Lincoln retired to his office and signed the historic document. “If my name ever goes into history it will be for this act,” he declared, “and my whole soul is in it.”


The final proclamation exempted from emancipation the border states and some parts of Confederate states controlled by Union forces. They were deemed not to be at war with the United States; therefore the president’s power as commander in chief to seize enemy property could not apply to them. These exemptions gave rise to the accusation that Lincoln “freed” the slaves in areas where he had no power, and left them in slavery where he did have power.

 

Nothing could be more wrong. For one thing, tens of thousands of ex-slaves lived in parts of the Confederacy that were occupied by Union forces but were not exempted from the proclamation. They celebrated it as their charter of freedom. For that matter, so did many slaves in exempted areas, which included the four slave-holding states that never left the Union (Missouri, Kentucky, Delaware, and Maryland) as well as Confederate areas that had been returned to Union control, such as New Orleans and the forty-eight Virginia counties that would soon become West Virginia. They recognized that if emancipation took hold in the Confederate states, slavery could scarcely survive in the upper South.

The proclamation officially turned the Union army into an army of liberation—if it could win the war. And by authorizing the enlistment of freed slaves in the army, the final proclamation went a long step toward creating that army of liberation. If the Emancipation Proclamation was merely a piece of paper that did not actually free anyone, as skeptics then and later charged, the Declaration of Independence was likewise a mere piece of paper that did not in itself create a new nation. Both outcomes depended on victory in a war to which these documents gave new purpose.

 Henry Adams, secretary to his father, who was the American minister to the United Kingdom, reported that “the Emancipation Proclamation has done more for us here than all our former victories and all our diplomacy. It is creating an almost convulsive reaction in our favor all over this country.” Similar reports came from elsewhere abroad. The American minister to the Netherlands wrote that “the anti-slavery position of the government is at length giving us a substantial foothold in European circles…. Everyone can understand the significance of a war where emancipation is written on one banner and slavery on the other.”⁷

But what would happen after the war? The proclamation was a war measure that would cease to have any force in peacetime. What about the exempted areas? Even in the Confederacy, the proclamation might free many slaves but it did not abolish slavery as an institution. By 1864 Lincoln and his party had committed themselves to a constitutional amendment to end the institution of slavery everywhere in the United States. When Congress finally adopted the Thirteenth Amendment, holding that “Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude…shall exist” within the US, and sent it to the states in 1865, Lincoln pronounced it “a King’s cure for all the evils. It winds the whole thing up.” It was the King’s cure he was never to see ratified.

Holzer and Masur would surely agree with David Von Drehle that 1862 was the year of Lincoln’s “rise to greatness,” a year that began with

the American experiment…on the brink of failure…. But when the first day of January came around again…[Lincoln] 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.

Lincoln’s problems with McClellan form one of the main narrative strands of Von Drehle’s book, and nobody has woven that strand more clearly into the events of 1862 than Von Drehle. For his part, McClellan repeatedly blamed lack of support from the Lincoln administration for his military reverses. A Democrat, McClellan did not like the turn toward a “hard war” of subjugation, emancipation, and confiscation of Southern property that took place in 1862. The general even toyed with the idea of publicly opposing the preliminary Emancipation Proclamation. Northern Democrats were already exploring with McClellan the prospect of his running for president in 1864. Some of them, plus an alarming number of officers in McClellan’s military entourage, were even urging him to “change front on Washington” and carry out a coup to place himself at the head of the government.



Von Drehle takes seriously this threat of a military dictatorship under McClellan, and Richard Slotkin takes it even more seriously in The Long Road to Antietam, in which he depicts the growing divergence between Lincoln and his principal army commander over war aims and strategy. McClellan wanted to restore the Union of 1860; Lincoln now prosecuted the war to destroy slavery and the social order it sustained, and to build a new order on the ruins of the old. “The idea of a military dictatorship was not an idle fancy,” Slotkin maintains. “The possibility of dictatorship would define the stakes in the personal and political conflict between President Lincoln and General McClellan.”

This may overstate the case. It is quite true that in letters to his wife and to political associates, McClellan referred to having received “letter after letter…conversation after conservation…alluding to the Presidency, Dictatorship etc.” After the failure of his Peninsula campaign in the summer of 1862, which he attributed to the Republican administration’s machinations to make sure that he did not succeed, McClellan told his wife that he had been gratified to receive “letters from the North urging me to march on Washington & assume the Govt!!” It is also true that Lincoln had to treat McClellan gingerly because of the general’s strong Democratic constituency in the North and his popularity in the army.

But when Lincoln finally removed McClellan from command in November 1862, “there was some grumbling in the ranks,” according to Von Drehle, “and some rifles flung to the ground in protest, but the long-feared military coup never materialized.” Nothing in McClellan’s tenure of command became him like his leaving of it. “Stand by General Burnside [his replacement] as you have stood by me,” he told soldiers who did not want to let him go, “and all will be well.”

McClellan rode off into the sunset, but returned two years later to run for president against Lincoln. He lost that battle too, prompting a Union naval officer to comment wryly that “McClellan meets with no better success as a politician than as a general.”⁸ Ironically, McClellan’s limited victory in the Battle of Antietam had given Lincoln the chance to issue the Emancipation Proclamation, the most powerful symbol of “the shift from a strategy of conciliation to a war of subjugation,” according to Slotkin, “a shift that required the permanent sidelining of General McClellan.” Only then could the war become not merely a struggle to preserve the nation launched in 1776, but one to give that nation “a new birth of freedom.”