Book Review: Abraham Lincoln: A Life, by Michael Burlingame
POTUS #16: Abraham Lincoln. The man who lived up to the myth.
John Hopkins University Press, 2008, 2024 pages
In the first multivolume biography of Abraham Lincoln to be published in decades, Lincoln scholar Michael Burlingame offers a fresh look at the life of one of America's greatest presidents. Incorporating the field notes of earlier biographers along with decades of research in multiple manuscript archives and long-neglected newspapers, this remarkable work will both alter and reinforce our current understanding of America's 16th president.
Volume 1 covers Lincoln's early childhood, his experiences as a farm boy in Indiana and Illinois, his legal training, and the political ambition that led to a term in Congress in the 1840s. In Volume 2, Burlingame examines Lincoln's life during his presidency and the Civil War, narrating in fascinating detail the crisis over Fort Sumter and Lincoln's own battles with relentless office seekers, hostile newspaper editors, and incompetent field commanders. Burlingame also offers new interpretations of Lincoln's private life, discussing his marriage to Mary Todd and the untimely deaths of two sons to disease. But through it all - his difficult childhood, his contentious political career, a fratricidal war, and tragic personal losses - Lincoln preserved a keen sense of humor and acquired a psychological maturity that proved to be the North's most valuable asset in winning the Civil War.
In my chronological journey through presidential biographies, I have arrived at the first A-lister since the Revolutionary War: Abraham Lincoln. "Honest Abe." The Rail Splitter. The Great Emancipator.
I've read presidential bios of varying lengths now, but Abraham Lincoln deserved first class treatment, and since I got started down this path of reading presidential volumes with Robert Caro's four-volume magnum opus on Lyndon Johnson, I couldn't justify taking the easy out with some lesser work on Lincoln.
Michael Burlingame is a historian whose life's work is Abraham Lincoln, and after having written several other books about Lincoln, he retired to write this one, which clocks in at 2024 pages in print, 83 hours on audiobook! It's split into two massive volumes, the first covering Lincoln's entire life up to his election as president, the second covering his presidency and the Civil War.
And boy does it cover everything. Most biographies necessarily have to leave out a lot of detail. With over 2000 pages, Burlingame covers every documented year of Lincoln's life, with letters and interviews with childhood friends and family, and deep dives into the fascinating world of 1850s Illinois politics. I think Burlingame tracked down just about everything anyone who knew Lincoln ever said about him. There is coverage of every one of the famous Lincoln-Douglas debates, the maneuvers and political brinksmanship that led up to the Civil War, a thorough examination of Lincoln's attitudes, words, and legislation regarding slavery, how he selected his cabinet, and how all the 19th century political sausage was made.
This isn't a book for someone who wants to speed-run through presidential biographies. It is going to be way too much detail for someone who doesn't care about details. But I wasn't bored. I felt immersed in Lincoln's era and Burlingame goes much deeper than all the things "everyone knows" about Lincoln. He does somewhat fall into the trap most biographers do, which is being so fond of his subject that I sometimes questioned the objectivity of his conclusions. Abraham Lincoln: A Life isn't an extremely opinionated biography (Burlingame doesn't reveal much about his personal politics), but it is opinionated, the author sometimes engages in a bit of speculation ("there is no hard evidence for this, but it seems likely"), and it is definitely favorable to its subject. That said, when the author does speculate, he cites extensive sources to justify it.
The Son of a Dirt Farmer
Volume one starts with Lincoln's childhood. A lot of presidents exaggerated their own personal histories, or their histories were exaggerated for them, sometimes posthumously. In Lincoln's case, there was no exaggeration: he was literally born in a one-room log cabin in Kentucky, the son of a no-account dirt farmer and a decent but uneducated mother. Lincoln's mother was known to be the smarter of the two, but she died when he was nine years old. (Here, Burlingame engages in some of his more dubious speculations about how this impacted Lincoln's psyche and his relations with other women.) His father remarried, and Abraham had a very close and affectionate relationship with his stepmother, who was rather shocked at the rude surroundings in which she found herself and did her best to tidy up and "civilize" the Lincoln family.
Abraham's father, Thomas Lincoln, sneered at young Abraham's "book learning." He became much closer to Abraham's step-brother, who also turned out to be a sort of shiftless no-account like his father. Abraham visited his stepmother regularly right until he left for the White House, but when his father died, he declined to visit him on his deathbed or attend the funeral.
Burlingame's account of Lincoln's early life makes it clear both how rough and violent early frontier society was, and how obviously exceptional Lincoln was. He was recognized at a young age as being unusually smart and good-natured. The man who someday would become president never had more than a few years of formal schooling, and yet he became first a lawyer, then a congressman, then a senator, and then president. But his early life was mostly failures. He started many businesses (shopkeeper, ferry operator, surveyor), most of which failed and left him in debt. Even then, he developed a reputation for honesty, and the moniker "Honest Abe," such as when he ran a general store (which failed because he and his partner didn't have good business sense) and would actually walk to a customer's house when he realized he'd accidentally shortchanged them.
He was also starting to enter local politics. He took time out from his unsuccessful political campaigning and his even less successful business to enlist in the local militia during the Black Hawk War. Lincoln never saw combat, but he did see the grisly aftermath of some combats. He entered as a Captain, and mustered out as a Private, just because of how the militias worked back then.
All of this was actually interesting (it really painted a vivid picture of rural Kentucky society, where people were crude, violent, and low-trust, making it all the more remarkable that it could produce a man like Lincoln), but Burlingame goes into even more detail when he reaches Lincoln's legal career. (This was back in the day when anyone could become a lawyer basically under a sort of informal apprenticeship program; no law school or bar exams required.)
Lincoln the Lawyer
Once, when I was a kid, I read a comic book biography of Abraham Lincoln. I remembered one story in that comic in which Lincoln, like some brilliant 19th century Perry Mason, springs a "gotcha" on a witness who claimed to have seen Lincoln's client kill a man under the full moonlight. Lincoln pulls out a Farmer's Almanac and shows the jury that the moon was barely visible that night. Even as a child, I was sure this was a piece of embellished mythology, like George Washington and the cherry tree.
I think it was this one.
Turns out, not so! People vs. Armstrong was a real case, Lincoln really did that, and his "gotcha" really did get his client (who probably was guilty) acquitted.
Another notable case Burlingame talks about is in re Bryant, also known as the "Matson slave case." This was a case where Lincoln, despite being anti-slavery, defended the property rights of a slave owner. It's a case that has troubled many Lincoln historians. Burlingame argues, with many citations, that this was consistent with Lincoln's extreme devotion to the law as written and his belief that lawyers were morally obligated to "take clients as they come" and provide legal representation to everyone. It foreshadowed some of his later political positions, where despite being anti-slavery, he would hew to "the law as written" even if he didn't like it.
The book details many mixed reports of Lincoln's actual talents as a lawyer. He was known for being honest and diligent in his duties, and he seemed to win a few notably difficult cases. He was also becoming known for telling stories at trial, with folksy, jocular humor, in a way that won over juries the same way he would win over voters later. There are no accounts of him ever being dishonest or sleazy in his law practice. However, apparently not all his fellow lawyers were impressed by him. Some said he was at best a mediocre legal mind, others called him lazy and more interested in kicking back in the law library to read newspapers than actually doing work. Some of the negative accounts of him were almost certainly class prejudice; that he was a backwoods hick from Kentucky would follow him all his life, and on several occasions he was treated very haughtily by big city lawyers, even on his own team. It does seem that Lincoln was a conscientious lawyer, but he didn't exactly hustle for clients or shoot for the big cases, which means had he not entered politics, he probably would have remained a modestly successful if well-regarded small-timer.
Lincoln's Love Life
Lincoln was awkward, gangly, and unhandsome. According to the author, he felt abandoned and mistrustful of women because of his mother's early death. (I am not sure Michael Burlingame, as steeped in Lincoln lore as he may be, is quite qualified to diagnose the man's psycho-sexual issues posthumously.) But he did have several romantic affairs, including Ann Rutledge. Apparently, there is some debate among historians as to whether Ann Rutledge and Abraham Lincoln were ever really sweethearts, let alone engaged, but Burlingame is firmly on Team Ann+Abe, and cites contemporary accounts of both their infatuation for each other, and Lincoln's devastation when she died of typhoid. According to Burlingame, it was one of a couple times in his life when Lincoln fell into a nearly suicidal depression.
He eventually recovered, engaged another woman in a semi-long distance relationship, and then when she got prematurely old and fat, he completely lost all attraction to her. And yet he still proposed to her, because he thought it would have been dishonorable of him not to. He was rather humbled when she turned him down!
And then came Mary Todd Lincoln.
Her Satanic Majesty
In 1842, Lincoln married Mary Todd, a woman who was to make his domestic life “a burning, scorching hell,” as “terrible as death and as gloomy as the grave,” according to one who knew him well.
History has not been kind to Mary Todd Lincoln. Widely regarded now as Lincoln's crazy "hell-cat" wife, there have been some attempts to rehabilitate her reputation, arguing that she suffered a difficult if privileged childhood, and that losing most of her children weighed heavily on her. This is true, but Burlingame documents a lot of the things she actually said and did, in front of witnesses, and, well, Mary may have been a traumatized, grief-stricken mother and later widow, but there was a reason Lincoln's White House staff referred to her as "Her Satanic Majesty."
Mary Todd was ambitious, perpetually dissatisfied with Lincoln's failure to earn to his potential and keep her in the manner she thought she was entitled, and at the same time, she claimed long before he even seriously entered politics that she was going to "make him President."
There are multiple accounts of her screaming at him, physically assaulting him, even throwing hot coffee in his face right in front of guests. In one incident, she literally chased him around their yard with a knife! Lincoln grabbed her (and the knife) and dragged her inside only when he saw that the neighbors were watching.
Burlingame speculates that Mary Todd may have suffered from BPD, among other things, but it's clear that she was, by all accounts, an unpleasant woman who constantly embarrassed her husband, caused a great deal of trouble once they were in the White House, and probably was narcissistic and mentally ill.
(Burlingame goes on to detail the entire Todd family - it turns out that many of them were horrible and/or crazy, and most ended up joining the Confederacy. That the author took time to drag Lincoln's in-laws so thoroughly says something both about his attention to detail and where his sympathies lay.)
Lincoln said, during their engagement, "It would just kill me to marry Mary Todd," and it seems pretty clear that while she was infatuated with him, he probably never loved her and knew he wasn't going to be happy with her. Which leads to the obvious question: why did he marry her? The answer appears to be that like his earlier engagement, having led her to believe that he would propose, he felt obligated to actually do it. It rather reminded me of Pierre marrying Helene in War and Peace - he's just so agreeable that he has a hard time resisting where he's being pushed. Lincoln just went along with what appeared to be his fate. When asked where he was going on his wedding day, he said, "To hell, I suppose."
They did not have a happy marriage, and one of Burlingame's more interesting observations is that, if they had, Lincoln would probably never have become president. By nature, he was a homebody and if he'd had a pleasant home to return to, he'd have been content doing an ordinary day's work and then coming home to sit by the fire with his family. Instead, he actively avoided returning home to Mary Todd, and became a workaholic, even traveling frequently and staying at friends' houses overnight (who apparently figured out that he was avoiding going home to his wife), and this played a large part in his rising professionally and then politically.
Mary, of course, would take credit for this later.
In the White House, her behavior was equally bad. She was haughty, imperious, needed to be the center of attention, and flew into rages if another woman (literally) so much as looked at her husband. There is also a great deal of evidence that she took bribes, embezzled public funds, and was involved in more than one scheme with shady White House employees and DC politicians to peddle influence and favors. Lincoln, when he became aware of some of his wife's misbehavior, would quietly settle any debts and fire any staff who'd conspired with her, but he probably (willfully or not) was never aware of the full extent of her venality.
That Time Lincoln Almost Fought a Duel
Lincoln's entrance into politics was fairly unremarkable. Burlingame argues that it was Lincoln's aversion to his rough upbringing as a farmer, and his disgust at his early exposures to slavery, that caused him to reject the Democrats (at that time, the pro-slavery and agriculturalist party) and join the Whig party. Lincoln was an early supporter of Henry Clay, and he entered the Illinois state legislature as a Whig.
As a state legislator, he gained a reputation for witty and scathing takedowns of his opponents, using both the same folksy, funny stories and dad-jokes he used at trial, and much less jocular, satirical, often mean-spirited attacks on political opponents. Like many public figures did back then, he sometimes wrote letters to the papers published under a pseudonym. When he attacked a prominent Democratic rival named James Shields, Shields demanded to know who the "anonymous" letter writer was, and obtained Lincoln's name. He then hunted Lincoln down and demanded an apology or a duel.
What followed was a sort of comedy of manners, with a grim undertone. Lincoln was morally opposed to dueling, but he was no coward, and more importantly, he knew he could not be seen as a coward. When he and Shields were unable to agree on terms (they went back and forth on who would apologize for what first), Lincoln finally accepted the duel - and as the challengee, chose cavalry broadswords for weapons. Given that he was almost a foot taller than Shields and had much longer arms, this would clearly give him an advantage. Shields's party objected that swords were "barbaric" (the usual weapon was pistols), to which Lincoln replied that duels were barbaric, and anyway, Shields was the one who issued the challenge.
They went out to the dueling grounds (in neighboring Missouri, where dueling was still legal), where the two parties finally came to a satisfactory face-saving agreement and the duel was withdrawn.
One Term Congressman
In 1846, Lincoln was elected to Congress. It wasn't his first attempt at the House, but he served an unremarkable term as Illinois's 7th District representative. During this time, he was most notable for attacking President James Polk over the Mexican War, which Lincoln opposed. This would come back to bite him later; much like the later Iraq War, America's intervention on foreign soil would come to be seen as a manufactured, unnecessary war by some partisans, and a patriotic litmus test by others, and Lincoln would later be accused of having attacked American veterans and disparaged their sacrifice in the war. (Lincoln himself would regret the tone with which he attacked Polk, if not the substance.)
A long-time supporter of Henry Clay, Lincoln didn't think Clay could win the presidency in 1848, so he supported Zachary Taylor instead. This would also be used against him later, when he was accused of "betraying" Henry Clay. (The fact was that Clay tried many, many times to win the presidency, and by 1848, his time had come and gone, he just wouldn't accept it.) Lincoln was not rewarded with the post he wanted (Commissioner of the Land Office), which led to some bitterness. He was offered the governorship of the brand new Oregon Territory, which he might have accepted if not for his wife, who refused to go out to the far western frontier in the middle of nowhere. Mary Todd Lincoln would later take credit for "saving" him from dead-ending his political career.
Rise of the Republicans
Lincoln went back to practicing law. According to Burlingame, he had something of a "mid-life crisis" around this time. His political career had been unremarkable, his legal career was only modestly successful (he was still in debt, and would remain in debt until he entered the White House). He gradually toned down his sharper excoriations of opponents, becoming known as a more genial and affable debater, even at trial.
It was around this time that the Whig Party was imploding. Never a very coherent party in the first place (it was originally founded as purely an anti-Andrew Jackson party), it had held together a shaky alliance of Northerners and Southerners whose views on slavery ranged from abolitionism to actual slave owners. This became increasingly untenable as the slavery issue polarized the country, particularly after the Missouri Compromise, and the Kansas-Nebraska Act which effectively nullified the Missouri Compromise. Slavery and the question of whether new territories would be slave or free or allow their residents to decide caused bloody conflicts, and pro-slavery and anti-slavery Whigs no longer had much to unite on.
The Republican Party began to take shape as the party of Northern Whigs and anti-slavery Democrats, while also pulling in the nativist, anti-immigrant Know-Nothings, which was one reason Lincoln was reluctant to join the new party. Eventually, however, he accepted that the Whigs were effectively done, and in 1858, he ran for the US Senate as a Republican, against Democratic incumbent Stephen A. Douglas.
He accepted the new Republican Party's nomination for Senate with his famous "House Divided" speech.
"A house divided against itself cannot stand. I believe this government cannot endure permanently half slave and half free. I do not expect the Union to be dissolved-I do not expect the house to fall-but I do expect it will cease to be divided. It will become all one thing, or all the other."
The Lincoln-Douglas Debates
Stephen A. Douglas - he was a dick.
Lincoln and Douglas stumped all over Illinois. They had seven debates in total, and Burlingame covers every one of them. He describes what the travel and accommodations were like (generally, miserable). Sometimes appearing before tiny, unenthusiastic crowds, it was a grueling contest.
Stephen A. Douglas, known as "The Little Giant," was a sharp contrast with Lincoln. A short, bellicose man, Douglas was a pro-slavery Illinois Democrat who had opposed the pro-slavery Lecompton Constitution on Constitutional grounds, going against Democrat President James Buchanan. Douglas advocated the doctrine of "popular sovereignty" - essentially, that each new territory should allow its residents to vote on the slavery question, rather than having Congress decide whether slavery would be permitted or not. Lincoln, an anti-slaver, opposed this, and slavery would be the central issue he and Douglas would debate.
Douglas ran on what would today justifiably be called a "white supremacist" platform; he frequently launched racist tirades filled with slurs and vulgar references to blacks that were considered crude even for the time. He was also probably an alcoholic; there were many accounts of his heavy drinking, needing to be carried on and off his campaign railway car by supporters, and even showing up to debates plastered.
This might have contributed to the general opinion, by the end of the campaign, that Lincoln performed far better on the campaign trail and won most of their debates. But Douglas was helped by pro-slavery Democratic newspapers, who would often deliberately mangle or even literally rewrite Lincoln's speeches, making him sound like an idiot.
Douglas won the election, but it turned out to be merely a warm-up for their rematch for the 1860 Presidential campaign.
Lincoln on Slavery
In recent years, Lincoln, once known as "the Great Emancipator," the man who freed the slaves, a man who in his time was almost universally revered by black Americans, has come under criticism for being... well, a white supremacist.
Among the quotes damning him are this one, printed in newspapers during the Lincoln-Douglas debates:
I am not, nor ever have been, in favor of bringing about in any way the social and political equality of the white and black races-that I am not nor ever have been in favor of making voters or jurors of Negroes, nor of qualifying them to hold office, nor to intermingling with white people; and I will say in addition to this that there is a physical difference between the white and black races which will ever forbid the two races living together on terms of social and political equality. And inasmuch as they cannot so live, while they do remain together, there must be the position of superior. I am as much as any other man in favor of having the superior position assigned to the white race. I say upon this occasion I do not perceive that because the white man is to have the superior position the negro should be denied every thing. I do not understand that because I do not want a negro woman for a slave I must necessarily want her for a wife.
This and other quotes are cited as evidence that Lincoln was a white supremacist who didn't really care about negro equality or freeing the slave, and did so only when it could be weaponized against the South.
It is definitely true that Lincoln did not believe blacks and whites were equal. He was "a man of his time" and while there were a few abolitionists who were pushing not just for an end to slavery, but full suffrage and equal citizenship for blacks, this was a very radical position before the war, and Lincoln was not a radical.
Burlingame does cite many other statements, both written and from second-hand reports, throughout Lincoln's life, that provide persuasive evidence that Lincoln really did abhor slavery and was always against it. He said many times that he considered it a moral evil, that the country would be better off without it, and that eventually it would be done away with.
Why, then, did he not issue an emancipation proclamation as soon as it was within his power to do so? Why did he deny negro equality? Why did he repeatedly state that he would defend and protect the legal rights of slave owners?
Lincoln was a politician and a realist. He had many conversations with his cabinet, with abolitionists, with fence-sitters, with black leaders like Frederick Douglass (who was sometimes disappointed by Lincoln but ultimately considered him one of the great men of history). And one of the things that Burlingame's very long biography with extensive, complete accounts of almost every political battle Lincoln ever fought puts in context is the battle against slavery.
Lincoln's statement about being against negro equality was in answer to accusations that he advocated black suffrage and even (gasp!) race-mixing. At the time of the Lincoln-Douglas debates, this was an absolute non-starter with white voters.
His statement about holding the union together was during the war, at a time when he was trying to juggle multiple conflicting interests. The border states could still tip one way or the other depending on whether they perceived the war to be about preserving the union or freeing the slaves. There were hostile Democrats (both "peace Democrats" in favor of ending the war and giving lenient treatment to the Confederates, and "war Democrats" who opposed the Republicans but who thought Lincoln was, if anything, too soft on the rebels).
So to some degree, Lincoln was just playing smart politics. That said, what did he really believe? It's evident throughout this book that Lincoln really was a very honest man, not given to pretending to believe things he didn't or hiding his true beliefs. He wasn't above dodging questions or giving carefully worded statements meant to leave some space for "plausible deniability," but when he said he was against slavery, he meant it. When he said his "paramount object" was to save the Union, he meant it. And when he said he believed whites were superior to blacks, he meant that too.
Today, we talk as if there were people who were for slavery and people who were against slavery. But at the time, there was a entire spectrum of views on slavery. "Ultras" were the most radical abolitionists, who wanted immediate emancipation for all slaves, without compensation for their owners. "Gradualists" had various schemes for ending slavery incrementally, sometimes by using government funds to buy them from their current owners, sometimes by offering incentives to free them. Some wanted to emancipate them and let them become freedmen, some wanted to send them to Africa- there were multiple colonization plans and societies. Many slave owners agreed that slavery was doomed and/or immoral. (Awkwardly, there were many members of abolitionist societies who owned slaves!) It had been a heated political topic - the heated political topic - for generations.
Lincoln was a lawyerly, Constitution-abiding Unionist. He didn't like slavery, but he accepted it as a legal and political reality. He wanted to end slavery, but abolitionists frequently had unrealistic political goals. It was clear early in his political career that he was a "man of his time" who just accepted that blacks would always have to have a subordinate position to whites, but there is a great deal of evidence that by the end of the Civil War, he was moving towards the more "radical" position of full negro equality and citizenship.
Indeed, this is the reason he was killed.
Volume one of this monumental work ends with an extensive postmortem of the Lincoln-Douglas Senatorial race, which Lincoln lost, and a blow-by-blow account of the Republican Convention in Chicago, in which Lincoln ultimately became the Republican candidate for President.
Who was Lincoln's running mate? A Maine abolitionist named Hannibal Hamlin, who was basically a political non-entity who no one remembers. In this 2000 page epic that goes into detail about Lincoln's childhood friends and every speech he ever gave, his first Vice President is only mentioned a handful of times. Hamlin seems to have been a decent enough guy, but he was replaced in the 1864 election because Lincoln needed a running mate who would balance radical Republicans. History probably would have changed for the better had Hannibal Hamlin been VP when Lincoln was assassinated.
Lincoln's chief rival was Senator William Seward of New York, who was a poor loser who spent months sulking before he finally, grudgingly came around to supporting Lincoln in the presidential race. Political boss Thurlow Weed, another opponent of Lincoln, also grudgingly came around. The Republican nomination convention was contentious, but the election of 1860 was more so.
The Election of 1860 - Elections have Consequences
In 1860, Lincoln was up against multiple opponents: the Democrats were split between his old foe Stephen Douglas, and the Democrat preferred by Southerners, John Breckenridge. Douglas and Breckenridge both ran as "official" Democratic candidate. There was also a third (fourth) party candidate, John Bell, representing the Constitutional Union party which had some support in the border states.
Lincoln swept the North, and Breckenridge swept the South. (John Bell won a few border states, and Douglas won some split votes). Lincoln was elected as the 16th President, and the South immediately threatened to secede.
Volume Two - The Secession Crisis
The second volume covers everything that happened after the election.
At first, the "secession crisis" was not really taken very seriously. The South had been threatening to secede for decades now; every time they didn't like the outcome of an election, every time a bill against the interests of the South was passed, or even introduced, in Congress, Southern states would threaten to secede. By now this was seen as political brinksmanship, just a tactic Southern politicians used to get their way. When Senator John Crittenden proposed the "Crittenden Compromise," which would be a Constitutional amendment to make it impossible for Congress to abolish slavery in the future, Southerners were in favor, but Lincoln and the Republicans rejected it. Lincoln said, in effect, "Elections have consequences," which was perhaps the first hint that this gregarious, magnanimous politician who many people underestimated was not going to be rolled.
But no one, including Lincoln, imagined that the secession crisis would lead to a four-year civil war.
Besides detailing all the political maneuvers leading to the opening of the war, Burlingame describes the selection of Lincoln's cabinet.
Wiliam Seward - he was a dick.
Lincoln chose his former rival William Seward as his Secretary of State.
The impression I got from this book is that Seward was a serious asshole.
He was unbelievably full of himself, and believed himself to be far superior to Lincoln. Inexplicably defeated by a lesser man, he nobly agreed to "save the Union" by "advising" the president. In fact, he saw himself as the real leader in the White House, repeatedly tried to run things his own way, and Lincoln, with his characteristic patience and generosity, only occasionally curbed Seward's overreaches. But Lincoln did eventually make it clear that he was the one in charge.
Lincoln's procession to Washington was long. He met with many town councils and gave many speeches. It was exhausting. His wife kept making a bad impression with her pretentiousness and hysteria. In Baltimore, William Pinkerton and others convinced Lincoln there was a serious plot to kill him. He was finally persuaded to change his itinerary and continue through Baltimore on a night train. This proved a costly PR mistake as the entire country mocked him for cowardice.
Meanwhile, negotiations were still ongoing over the secession crisis. After Lincoln's inaugural address (which received mixed responses; some thought it was belligerent and threatening, others thought he was promising everything would be settled peacefully) many still thought war could be avoided. Lincoln spent his first few months dealing with office seekers. At this time, the patronage system was still in full force, and some of the few times Lincoln lost his temper was having to deal with yet another greedy, entitled office seeker or someone who felt they were owed more. (He was confronted by such a man the night after his son passed away in the White House. The office seeker ignored the black mourning drapes and demanded Lincoln give him his attention. There was no Secret Service at the time, but it was a miracle of Lincoln's patience that he only chewed the man out and told him to go away.)
Fort Sumter
Fort Sumter, South Carolina, became the flashpoint of the secession crisis. Sumter was manned by Union soldiers, but surrounded by South Carolina troops. They demanded that Fort Sumter be surrendered to them. Eventually Lincoln had to make a decision: abandon Fort Sumter, or resupply it (which the South would consider an act of war). There was a similar discussion happening about Fort Pickens, in Florida.
Secretary of State Seward sabotaged negotiations with his meddling, and some of the Union officers at both forts were of questionable loyalty. It was a high stakes game played over a very tiny piece of real estate. Lincoln was willing to make a lot of concessions to placate the South (enraging some of his more radical Republican supporters), but he would not withdraw from Fort Sumter. He was very firm that the South did not have the authority or the right to demand that the federal government surrender federal territory. When South Carolina fired on Fort Sumter, the American Civil War began.
Lincoln's General Problems
Starting with the first Battle of Bull Run, the war went badly for the Union at first, largely because of terrible generals.
George McClellan - he was really a dick.
Lincoln put "Old Fuss 'n Feathers," former Whig presidential candidate General Winfield Scott, in charge of the Union army. But Scott was obese almost to the point of immobility, and in poor health, and soon had to retire. So Lincoln gave command to George McClellan.
McClellan was an anti-abolitionist who had no sympathy for slaves, and a lot of sympathy for the South, though his loyalty to the Union was never in question. But he was imperious, arrogant, and held Lincoln and his former commander, General Winfield Scott, in contempt. He was often openly disrespectful to Lincoln (who, as usual, allowed insults and insubordination to pass well past the point where he should have sacked him), and contemptuous of him in private.
McClellan delayed, made excuses, and failed over and over again to launch the offensives Lincoln wanted or to press any advantage when he did win a battle. Burlingame argues that McClellan was not just lazy, but a coward. It took years of grinding inactivity and lack of progress for Lincoln to finally decide that McClellan had to be replaced.
General John C. Fremont (the first Republican presidential candidate, who lost badly in 1856) put Missouri under martial law and declared his very own Emancipation Proclamation, which caused Lincoln so many political headaches he had to revoke it (which enraged his abolitionist supporters) and then remove Fremont from command. A couple of years later, General David Hunter would do the same thing in Florida, Georgia, and South Carolina, forcing Lincoln to once again revoke the emancipation edict.
Since this is a biography about Lincoln and not, per se, a history of the Civil War, Burlingame doesn't cover battles and military movements in great detail, but he does talk a lot about generals (especially Lincoln's generals) and the political impact of battles won and lost. Lincoln was heavily involved in military planning; he started reading up on strategy, familiarized himself with all the units and generals, and probably knew more than some of his generals. Today a President trying to personally direct a war would be called a micromanager, and indeed some of Lincoln's generals resented his interference, but to be fair, Lincoln almost always deferred to them when they disagreed with him (even when they were openly insubordinate, such as the insufferable McClellan).
Everyone has heard of the battle between the Monitor and the Merrimack, the first naval battle between ironclads. Previously I thought this was an interesting historical side note of little real significance at the time, but Burlingame describes the panic the Merrimack caused throughout the North; the Union feared it would be able to lay siege to coastal cities with impunity, and at one point Washington DC was almost evacuated for fear of the Merrimack coming up the Potomac.
Lincoln also had to deal with the Trent affair, in which a Union ship seized a British mail packet, the Trent, which was carrying two Confederate envoys to Britain. This was a major diplomatic incident: Britain had adopted a policy of neutrality with regard to the U.S. civil war (the Confederacy sent their envoys to try to change this), but seizing a British ship was, technically, an act of war. Lincoln's Secretary of State William Seward eventually ordered the two imprisoned Confederates released, and issued a sort of non-apology to Britain.
Yes, the Civil War was about slavery
Why, you might wonder, did Lincoln twice revoke his generals' orders to free slaves when a couple of years later he would issue his own famous Emancipation Proclamation?
Something I appreciated about this book's massive, comprehensive detail is that the complex political situation, which has been detailed throughout the book, makes some of these things understandable from the perspective of the times. Lincoln favored emancipation as an ultimate goal, but he had restive border states who were just barely loyal to the Union, and northern slave owners, and letting his generals set the precedent that the war was actually a war to free the slaves would have been an instant PR disaster. Lincoln took a lot of flack from his more radical abolitionist supporters (and even cabinet members), and some of today's arguments that the Civil War "wasn't really about slavery" came from Lincoln's own statements, when he explicitly tried to convince the North that the war was about holding the Union together and not about slavery.
Although some Confederate apologists argue that the war was about "states' rights" and point out that there were other issues relating to taxes and tariffs and such, almost every objection the South had boiled down to slavery. They feared Northerners were going to free their slaves, they felt insulted by abolitionist arguments ("How dare you say slavery is immoral!"), and they feared (correctly) that if the U.S. kept expanding with more free states than slave states, they would be increasingly outnumbered in Congress. South Carolina's declaration of secession makes it explicit that they believed Lincoln and the Republicans intended to "wage a war against slavery" - the other Confederate states likewise made no bones about why they were seceding.
And yet Lincoln, throughout the war, was trying to balance increasingly strident abolitionist sentiments with concerns from moderates and anti-abolitionists (including "War Democrats") that the war was becoming a war to free the slaves.
My paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union, and is not either to save or to destroy slavery. If I could save the Union without freeing any slave I would do, it, and if I could save it by freeing all the slaves I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing some and leaving others alone I would also do that. What I do about slavery, and the colored race, I do because I believe it helps to save the Union...I have here stated my purpose according to my view of official duty; and I intend no modification of my oft-expressed personal wish that all men everywhere could be free.
His position changed over time, and by the end of the war, there was evidence that he was becoming increasingly "radical" in his sentiments, not just favoring emancipation but full black suffrage.
Burlingame discusses the case of Nathaniel Gordon, the only American ever to be hanged for slave trading. Gordon had been at this business for years, and when he was arrested in New York, he refused a fairly light plea agreement. Unfortunately for him, this happened right at the beginning of the war, and he suddenly found himself facing capital charges. When he was eventually convicted, Lincoln was besieged with requests for a pardon. Gordon's wife came to Washington and found Mary Todd Lincoln sympathetic; her attempt to persuade her husband to issue a pardon is one of the few times Burlingame describes Lincoln flatly telling his wife to shut up and mind her own business.
Lincoln gave Gordon a short stay of execution, but refused to pardon him.
"I believe I am kindly enough in nature, and can be moved to pity and to pardon the perpetrator of almost the worst crime that the mind of man can conceive or the arm of man can execute; but any man, who, for paltry gain and stimulated only by avarice, can rob Africa of her children to sell into interminable bondage, I never will pardon."
Suspension of Habeus Corpus
One criticism many historians make of Lincoln is his suspension of Habeus Corpus during the war. Citing "military necessity," Lincoln allowed newspapers to be closed and editors and politicians and private citizens to be arrested and held without charge, sometimes merely for criticizing the President or the conduct of the war. One of the most famous was Ohio Congressman Clement Vallandigham, who was arrested for his anti-war agitation, tried in a military court martial, and exiled to the Confederacy. (The bemused Confederates initially imprisoned him, and eventually released him, and Vallandigham made his way to Canada where he became a leader of anti-Unionists in exile.)
Even Lincoln admirers generally consider the suspension of Habeus Corpus to have been a blemish on his reputation. Burlingame defends him, perhaps a little too apologetically. He points out that "Copperheads" (the so-called "Peace Democrats") really were stirring agitation and unrest, encouraging people to resist the draft, and in some cases were actually Confederate agents. All of this was true and Lincoln had a (thin) legal pretext to act as he did in a time of war, but even Burlingame admits that at times, Lincoln's suspension of Habeus Corpus resulted in outright suppression of free speech and any kind of dissent with the government (although Lincoln himself never personally ordered anyone arrested).
The Emancipation Proclamation and the 13th Amendment
Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation in January of 1863. It was an Executive Order that freed all slaves in territories not under Union control - in other words, it didn't actually free all slaves. There were slaveholding states who had stayed in the Union.
Like everything Lincoln did, it was political and more complicated than popular history makes it. Lincoln did want to free the slaves; he also, as Burlingame points out repeatedly, mostly wanted to weaken the South and restore the Union. The Emancipation Proclamation wasn't something he issued out of a sudden moral impulse; it was intended to deprive the South of their free labor and encourage enslaved blacks to flee (and secondarily, entice wavering Southern states to come back, since there was a window of time in which they could have ceased rebelling, rejoined the Union, and kept their slaves). It was hailed by abolitionists (although the more radical ones criticized Lincoln for not going far enough) but it once again threatened to paint the war as a war to free the slaves.
The 13th Amendment, which made slavery illegal according to the Constitution, was passed two years later, at the end of the war but (obviously) before the Southern states got to vote again. For such a monumental amendment, it passed with relatively little drama. There was opposition, of course, but Lincoln brought political pressure to bear and put the entire Republican Party behind it.
The Election of 1864
I was surprised to learn that Lincoln's reelection was not a sure thing, and indeed, at one point he was convinced that he was going to lose.
The war was grinding on with little progress (even though it was evident since 1863 that the South no longer had a hope of winning). The Republican Convention replaced Lincoln's VP, Hannibal Hamlin, with Andrew Johnson, a War Democrat from Tennessee. Lincoln's former commanding general George McClellan ran on the Democratic ticket. John C. Fremont briefly made a third party bid.
Lincoln handled his impending defeat with characteristic stoicness. (One thing I noticed throughout this book is that while Stoicism is never mentioned, and there's no evidence that Lincoln ever read the Stoics, much of his attitude could be described as the original Stoicism - not hiding emotions or pretending to be unaffected by hardships, but simply accepting them as things beyond one's control and thus not worth catastrophizing over).
The really remarkable thing about the election of 1864 was that it was carried out, in fairly good order, in the middle of a civil war! The Confederate states, of course, didn't get a vote, which is why Lincoln did end up handily winning both the electoral and the popular vote. But just as he went deep into every one of Lincoln's earlier elections, and all the things said about him by his critics and his friends, Burlingame examines the sides who were for and against Lincoln. Lincoln was by now recognized as a gifted politician and speaker, and a great leader, but not universally so, and many prominent people among both the Republicans and the Democrats called him simple, crude and not fit for his office, not up to the challenge of the times, an imbecilic Kentucky railsplitter full of vulgar stories but no judgment. Lincoln was widely seen by his critics as a buffoon elevated above his station; many people of his time would have been truly astonished to learn that Abraham Lincoln would someday be considered one of the greatest of American Presidents.
Other than that, Mrs. Lincoln, how did you enjoy the play?
"Sic semper tyrannis!" ("Thus always to tyrants!")
- supposedly shouted by John Wilkes Booth after shooting Lincoln
The Confederacy by now was in a situation similar to that of Japan in World War II, almost a hundred years later - having started a war they couldn't possibly win, their best hope now was to negotiate the best terms for peace they could. And like the Allies at the end of World War II, the Union was split between conciliators who were willing to offer relatively generous peace terms, and hardliners who would accept nothing less than unconditional surrender.
Lincoln was initially in a more conciliatory mood. Had the South surrendered a year or two earlier, the Confederate states would probably have been quickly readmitted into the union and possibly even allowed to keep their slaves. He even proposed peace terms (before the passage of the 13th Amendment) that would have allowed the Confederacy to keep their slaves, but his own cabinet voted against it and Lincoln was persuaded to take a harder stance. By 1865, it was clear the South had lost, and the Union didn't have to offer any concessions; Burlingame directly blames Confederate President Jefferson Davis for refusing to accept reality, thinking he could still dictate peace terms, and unnecessarily dragging the war on for months.
In the months after Lincoln's election, and the inevitable surrender of the Confederacy, Lincoln began moving towards what was once considered an "Ultra" position, speaking of giving blacks their rights, which many interpreted as laying the groundwork for full suffrage.
It was talk like this that enraged a Maryland actor and Confederate sympathizer named John Wilkes Booth.
"That means nigger citizenship. ... That is the last speech he will ever give."
As he did with Mary Todd Lincoln's family and many of Lincoln's political opponents over the years, Burlingame devotes an entire chapter to John Wilkes Booth's life, his motivations, and speculations about his mental health. What is known is that Booth hated Lincoln, hated blacks, and had been involved in earlier schemes to try to kidnap Lincoln.
Burlingame laid some foreshadowing earlier by mentioning all the times Lincoln liked to go see plays when he had the time. He describes in great detail the night of April 14, 1865, in which Lincoln and his wife went to the Ford Theater to see Our American Cousin.
John Wilkes Booth actually worked with a group of collaborators who meant to kill not just Lincoln, but Secretary of State Seward and Vice President Andrew Johnson. (There was an earlier plan to also kill the commanding Union General Ulysses S. Grant, who had been invited to attend the play with the Lincolns. Grant declined the invitation and went with his wife to visit some relatives instead - possibly because Grant's wife could not stand Mary Lincoln.) William Seward was attacked in his home but survived; the man who was supposed to attack Andrew Johnson chickened out. John Wilkes Booth shot Lincoln as he sat next to his wife, and then escaped, being tracked down and killed days later. Lincoln went into a coma from which he never recovered. Many remarked that he looked more peaceful and at ease while he was dying than he had in years.
Lincoln's death triggered national mourning. Even some of the defeated Confederates condemned the assassination, and even William Seward, Lincoln's cantankerous long-time frenemy, was moved to tears.
Vice President Andrew Johnson took office, and thoroughly screwed up Reconstruction. But that's for the next book.
Should You Read This Book?
Do you like 2000 page biographies? Do you like reading the nitty gritty details of 19th century Ohio politics? Do you want to know just what a horrible beeyatch Mary Todd Lincoln was? (After her husband's death, she continued to stir drama over his memorial, and reportedly looted the White House of all valuables, making off with crates full of silver and furniture that belonged to the public. Congress quietly paid for this and hushed it up.) Do you want to spend a thousand pages reading about Lincoln's life before you even get to his presidency?
Abraham Lincoln: A Life is a Lincoln scholar's life's work, and he actually had to cut a great deal, but this is a heavy read unless you are a serious POTUS geek. That said, I thought Lincoln deserved a first class treatment, and Burlingame gives him one; hardly any detail is left out and after reading this I have a much fuller picture of the man, his flaws, his virtues, his personality, and the political context of his time. He was an interesting, smart, often funny man, beset by depression and sometimes poor health, who lost two sons while in office, taking shit from all sides. He got used to death threats (which was why he didn't have a heavier guard when he went to Ford's Theater that night), and while many of his critics thought a better man would have ended the Civil War sooner, it's easy to see how a worse man would have either dragged it on, failed to end slavery, or possibly even allowed the South to secede.
If you want the main points of Lincoln's life and presidency, this is probably not your best choice - it's too long, too thick. You probably don't need to know everything that Burlingame devotes pages to. But I enjoyed it. It was deep and informative.
Burlingame is clearly a Lincoln fan, and that shows when, for example, he tries to defend Lincoln against some of his criticisms (e.g., suspending habeus corpus). He also a few times seems to go a little too far in psychoanalyzing his subjects, from Lincoln to Mary Todd Lincoln to John Wilkes Booth.
But if you want the comprehensive Lincoln biography that is everything you can get without reading multiple books about him, then this is the book to read. It's really complete and (to me) it was never boring.
My complete list of book reviews.
John Hopkins University Press, 2008, 2024 pages
In the first multivolume biography of Abraham Lincoln to be published in decades, Lincoln scholar Michael Burlingame offers a fresh look at the life of one of America's greatest presidents. Incorporating the field notes of earlier biographers along with decades of research in multiple manuscript archives and long-neglected newspapers, this remarkable work will both alter and reinforce our current understanding of America's 16th president.
Volume 1 covers Lincoln's early childhood, his experiences as a farm boy in Indiana and Illinois, his legal training, and the political ambition that led to a term in Congress in the 1840s. In Volume 2, Burlingame examines Lincoln's life during his presidency and the Civil War, narrating in fascinating detail the crisis over Fort Sumter and Lincoln's own battles with relentless office seekers, hostile newspaper editors, and incompetent field commanders. Burlingame also offers new interpretations of Lincoln's private life, discussing his marriage to Mary Todd and the untimely deaths of two sons to disease. But through it all - his difficult childhood, his contentious political career, a fratricidal war, and tragic personal losses - Lincoln preserved a keen sense of humor and acquired a psychological maturity that proved to be the North's most valuable asset in winning the Civil War.
In my chronological journey through presidential biographies, I have arrived at the first A-lister since the Revolutionary War: Abraham Lincoln. "Honest Abe." The Rail Splitter. The Great Emancipator.
I've read presidential bios of varying lengths now, but Abraham Lincoln deserved first class treatment, and since I got started down this path of reading presidential volumes with Robert Caro's four-volume magnum opus on Lyndon Johnson, I couldn't justify taking the easy out with some lesser work on Lincoln.
Michael Burlingame is a historian whose life's work is Abraham Lincoln, and after having written several other books about Lincoln, he retired to write this one, which clocks in at 2024 pages in print, 83 hours on audiobook! It's split into two massive volumes, the first covering Lincoln's entire life up to his election as president, the second covering his presidency and the Civil War.
And boy does it cover everything. Most biographies necessarily have to leave out a lot of detail. With over 2000 pages, Burlingame covers every documented year of Lincoln's life, with letters and interviews with childhood friends and family, and deep dives into the fascinating world of 1850s Illinois politics. I think Burlingame tracked down just about everything anyone who knew Lincoln ever said about him. There is coverage of every one of the famous Lincoln-Douglas debates, the maneuvers and political brinksmanship that led up to the Civil War, a thorough examination of Lincoln's attitudes, words, and legislation regarding slavery, how he selected his cabinet, and how all the 19th century political sausage was made.
This isn't a book for someone who wants to speed-run through presidential biographies. It is going to be way too much detail for someone who doesn't care about details. But I wasn't bored. I felt immersed in Lincoln's era and Burlingame goes much deeper than all the things "everyone knows" about Lincoln. He does somewhat fall into the trap most biographers do, which is being so fond of his subject that I sometimes questioned the objectivity of his conclusions. Abraham Lincoln: A Life isn't an extremely opinionated biography (Burlingame doesn't reveal much about his personal politics), but it is opinionated, the author sometimes engages in a bit of speculation ("there is no hard evidence for this, but it seems likely"), and it is definitely favorable to its subject. That said, when the author does speculate, he cites extensive sources to justify it.
The Son of a Dirt Farmer
Volume one starts with Lincoln's childhood. A lot of presidents exaggerated their own personal histories, or their histories were exaggerated for them, sometimes posthumously. In Lincoln's case, there was no exaggeration: he was literally born in a one-room log cabin in Kentucky, the son of a no-account dirt farmer and a decent but uneducated mother. Lincoln's mother was known to be the smarter of the two, but she died when he was nine years old. (Here, Burlingame engages in some of his more dubious speculations about how this impacted Lincoln's psyche and his relations with other women.) His father remarried, and Abraham had a very close and affectionate relationship with his stepmother, who was rather shocked at the rude surroundings in which she found herself and did her best to tidy up and "civilize" the Lincoln family.
Abraham's father, Thomas Lincoln, sneered at young Abraham's "book learning." He became much closer to Abraham's step-brother, who also turned out to be a sort of shiftless no-account like his father. Abraham visited his stepmother regularly right until he left for the White House, but when his father died, he declined to visit him on his deathbed or attend the funeral.
Burlingame's account of Lincoln's early life makes it clear both how rough and violent early frontier society was, and how obviously exceptional Lincoln was. He was recognized at a young age as being unusually smart and good-natured. The man who someday would become president never had more than a few years of formal schooling, and yet he became first a lawyer, then a congressman, then a senator, and then president. But his early life was mostly failures. He started many businesses (shopkeeper, ferry operator, surveyor), most of which failed and left him in debt. Even then, he developed a reputation for honesty, and the moniker "Honest Abe," such as when he ran a general store (which failed because he and his partner didn't have good business sense) and would actually walk to a customer's house when he realized he'd accidentally shortchanged them.
He was also starting to enter local politics. He took time out from his unsuccessful political campaigning and his even less successful business to enlist in the local militia during the Black Hawk War. Lincoln never saw combat, but he did see the grisly aftermath of some combats. He entered as a Captain, and mustered out as a Private, just because of how the militias worked back then.
All of this was actually interesting (it really painted a vivid picture of rural Kentucky society, where people were crude, violent, and low-trust, making it all the more remarkable that it could produce a man like Lincoln), but Burlingame goes into even more detail when he reaches Lincoln's legal career. (This was back in the day when anyone could become a lawyer basically under a sort of informal apprenticeship program; no law school or bar exams required.)
Lincoln the Lawyer
Once, when I was a kid, I read a comic book biography of Abraham Lincoln. I remembered one story in that comic in which Lincoln, like some brilliant 19th century Perry Mason, springs a "gotcha" on a witness who claimed to have seen Lincoln's client kill a man under the full moonlight. Lincoln pulls out a Farmer's Almanac and shows the jury that the moon was barely visible that night. Even as a child, I was sure this was a piece of embellished mythology, like George Washington and the cherry tree.
I think it was this one.
Turns out, not so! People vs. Armstrong was a real case, Lincoln really did that, and his "gotcha" really did get his client (who probably was guilty) acquitted.
Another notable case Burlingame talks about is in re Bryant, also known as the "Matson slave case." This was a case where Lincoln, despite being anti-slavery, defended the property rights of a slave owner. It's a case that has troubled many Lincoln historians. Burlingame argues, with many citations, that this was consistent with Lincoln's extreme devotion to the law as written and his belief that lawyers were morally obligated to "take clients as they come" and provide legal representation to everyone. It foreshadowed some of his later political positions, where despite being anti-slavery, he would hew to "the law as written" even if he didn't like it.
The book details many mixed reports of Lincoln's actual talents as a lawyer. He was known for being honest and diligent in his duties, and he seemed to win a few notably difficult cases. He was also becoming known for telling stories at trial, with folksy, jocular humor, in a way that won over juries the same way he would win over voters later. There are no accounts of him ever being dishonest or sleazy in his law practice. However, apparently not all his fellow lawyers were impressed by him. Some said he was at best a mediocre legal mind, others called him lazy and more interested in kicking back in the law library to read newspapers than actually doing work. Some of the negative accounts of him were almost certainly class prejudice; that he was a backwoods hick from Kentucky would follow him all his life, and on several occasions he was treated very haughtily by big city lawyers, even on his own team. It does seem that Lincoln was a conscientious lawyer, but he didn't exactly hustle for clients or shoot for the big cases, which means had he not entered politics, he probably would have remained a modestly successful if well-regarded small-timer.
Lincoln's Love Life
Lincoln was awkward, gangly, and unhandsome. According to the author, he felt abandoned and mistrustful of women because of his mother's early death. (I am not sure Michael Burlingame, as steeped in Lincoln lore as he may be, is quite qualified to diagnose the man's psycho-sexual issues posthumously.) But he did have several romantic affairs, including Ann Rutledge. Apparently, there is some debate among historians as to whether Ann Rutledge and Abraham Lincoln were ever really sweethearts, let alone engaged, but Burlingame is firmly on Team Ann+Abe, and cites contemporary accounts of both their infatuation for each other, and Lincoln's devastation when she died of typhoid. According to Burlingame, it was one of a couple times in his life when Lincoln fell into a nearly suicidal depression.
He eventually recovered, engaged another woman in a semi-long distance relationship, and then when she got prematurely old and fat, he completely lost all attraction to her. And yet he still proposed to her, because he thought it would have been dishonorable of him not to. He was rather humbled when she turned him down!
And then came Mary Todd Lincoln.
Her Satanic Majesty
In 1842, Lincoln married Mary Todd, a woman who was to make his domestic life “a burning, scorching hell,” as “terrible as death and as gloomy as the grave,” according to one who knew him well.
History has not been kind to Mary Todd Lincoln. Widely regarded now as Lincoln's crazy "hell-cat" wife, there have been some attempts to rehabilitate her reputation, arguing that she suffered a difficult if privileged childhood, and that losing most of her children weighed heavily on her. This is true, but Burlingame documents a lot of the things she actually said and did, in front of witnesses, and, well, Mary may have been a traumatized, grief-stricken mother and later widow, but there was a reason Lincoln's White House staff referred to her as "Her Satanic Majesty."
Mary Todd was ambitious, perpetually dissatisfied with Lincoln's failure to earn to his potential and keep her in the manner she thought she was entitled, and at the same time, she claimed long before he even seriously entered politics that she was going to "make him President."
There are multiple accounts of her screaming at him, physically assaulting him, even throwing hot coffee in his face right in front of guests. In one incident, she literally chased him around their yard with a knife! Lincoln grabbed her (and the knife) and dragged her inside only when he saw that the neighbors were watching.
Burlingame speculates that Mary Todd may have suffered from BPD, among other things, but it's clear that she was, by all accounts, an unpleasant woman who constantly embarrassed her husband, caused a great deal of trouble once they were in the White House, and probably was narcissistic and mentally ill.
(Burlingame goes on to detail the entire Todd family - it turns out that many of them were horrible and/or crazy, and most ended up joining the Confederacy. That the author took time to drag Lincoln's in-laws so thoroughly says something both about his attention to detail and where his sympathies lay.)
Lincoln said, during their engagement, "It would just kill me to marry Mary Todd," and it seems pretty clear that while she was infatuated with him, he probably never loved her and knew he wasn't going to be happy with her. Which leads to the obvious question: why did he marry her? The answer appears to be that like his earlier engagement, having led her to believe that he would propose, he felt obligated to actually do it. It rather reminded me of Pierre marrying Helene in War and Peace - he's just so agreeable that he has a hard time resisting where he's being pushed. Lincoln just went along with what appeared to be his fate. When asked where he was going on his wedding day, he said, "To hell, I suppose."
They did not have a happy marriage, and one of Burlingame's more interesting observations is that, if they had, Lincoln would probably never have become president. By nature, he was a homebody and if he'd had a pleasant home to return to, he'd have been content doing an ordinary day's work and then coming home to sit by the fire with his family. Instead, he actively avoided returning home to Mary Todd, and became a workaholic, even traveling frequently and staying at friends' houses overnight (who apparently figured out that he was avoiding going home to his wife), and this played a large part in his rising professionally and then politically.
Mary, of course, would take credit for this later.
In the White House, her behavior was equally bad. She was haughty, imperious, needed to be the center of attention, and flew into rages if another woman (literally) so much as looked at her husband. There is also a great deal of evidence that she took bribes, embezzled public funds, and was involved in more than one scheme with shady White House employees and DC politicians to peddle influence and favors. Lincoln, when he became aware of some of his wife's misbehavior, would quietly settle any debts and fire any staff who'd conspired with her, but he probably (willfully or not) was never aware of the full extent of her venality.
That Time Lincoln Almost Fought a Duel
Lincoln's entrance into politics was fairly unremarkable. Burlingame argues that it was Lincoln's aversion to his rough upbringing as a farmer, and his disgust at his early exposures to slavery, that caused him to reject the Democrats (at that time, the pro-slavery and agriculturalist party) and join the Whig party. Lincoln was an early supporter of Henry Clay, and he entered the Illinois state legislature as a Whig.
As a state legislator, he gained a reputation for witty and scathing takedowns of his opponents, using both the same folksy, funny stories and dad-jokes he used at trial, and much less jocular, satirical, often mean-spirited attacks on political opponents. Like many public figures did back then, he sometimes wrote letters to the papers published under a pseudonym. When he attacked a prominent Democratic rival named James Shields, Shields demanded to know who the "anonymous" letter writer was, and obtained Lincoln's name. He then hunted Lincoln down and demanded an apology or a duel.
What followed was a sort of comedy of manners, with a grim undertone. Lincoln was morally opposed to dueling, but he was no coward, and more importantly, he knew he could not be seen as a coward. When he and Shields were unable to agree on terms (they went back and forth on who would apologize for what first), Lincoln finally accepted the duel - and as the challengee, chose cavalry broadswords for weapons. Given that he was almost a foot taller than Shields and had much longer arms, this would clearly give him an advantage. Shields's party objected that swords were "barbaric" (the usual weapon was pistols), to which Lincoln replied that duels were barbaric, and anyway, Shields was the one who issued the challenge.
They went out to the dueling grounds (in neighboring Missouri, where dueling was still legal), where the two parties finally came to a satisfactory face-saving agreement and the duel was withdrawn.
One Term Congressman
In 1846, Lincoln was elected to Congress. It wasn't his first attempt at the House, but he served an unremarkable term as Illinois's 7th District representative. During this time, he was most notable for attacking President James Polk over the Mexican War, which Lincoln opposed. This would come back to bite him later; much like the later Iraq War, America's intervention on foreign soil would come to be seen as a manufactured, unnecessary war by some partisans, and a patriotic litmus test by others, and Lincoln would later be accused of having attacked American veterans and disparaged their sacrifice in the war. (Lincoln himself would regret the tone with which he attacked Polk, if not the substance.)
A long-time supporter of Henry Clay, Lincoln didn't think Clay could win the presidency in 1848, so he supported Zachary Taylor instead. This would also be used against him later, when he was accused of "betraying" Henry Clay. (The fact was that Clay tried many, many times to win the presidency, and by 1848, his time had come and gone, he just wouldn't accept it.) Lincoln was not rewarded with the post he wanted (Commissioner of the Land Office), which led to some bitterness. He was offered the governorship of the brand new Oregon Territory, which he might have accepted if not for his wife, who refused to go out to the far western frontier in the middle of nowhere. Mary Todd Lincoln would later take credit for "saving" him from dead-ending his political career.
Rise of the Republicans
Lincoln went back to practicing law. According to Burlingame, he had something of a "mid-life crisis" around this time. His political career had been unremarkable, his legal career was only modestly successful (he was still in debt, and would remain in debt until he entered the White House). He gradually toned down his sharper excoriations of opponents, becoming known as a more genial and affable debater, even at trial.
It was around this time that the Whig Party was imploding. Never a very coherent party in the first place (it was originally founded as purely an anti-Andrew Jackson party), it had held together a shaky alliance of Northerners and Southerners whose views on slavery ranged from abolitionism to actual slave owners. This became increasingly untenable as the slavery issue polarized the country, particularly after the Missouri Compromise, and the Kansas-Nebraska Act which effectively nullified the Missouri Compromise. Slavery and the question of whether new territories would be slave or free or allow their residents to decide caused bloody conflicts, and pro-slavery and anti-slavery Whigs no longer had much to unite on.
The Republican Party began to take shape as the party of Northern Whigs and anti-slavery Democrats, while also pulling in the nativist, anti-immigrant Know-Nothings, which was one reason Lincoln was reluctant to join the new party. Eventually, however, he accepted that the Whigs were effectively done, and in 1858, he ran for the US Senate as a Republican, against Democratic incumbent Stephen A. Douglas.
He accepted the new Republican Party's nomination for Senate with his famous "House Divided" speech.
"A house divided against itself cannot stand. I believe this government cannot endure permanently half slave and half free. I do not expect the Union to be dissolved-I do not expect the house to fall-but I do expect it will cease to be divided. It will become all one thing, or all the other."
The Lincoln-Douglas Debates
Stephen A. Douglas - he was a dick.
Lincoln and Douglas stumped all over Illinois. They had seven debates in total, and Burlingame covers every one of them. He describes what the travel and accommodations were like (generally, miserable). Sometimes appearing before tiny, unenthusiastic crowds, it was a grueling contest.
Stephen A. Douglas, known as "The Little Giant," was a sharp contrast with Lincoln. A short, bellicose man, Douglas was a pro-slavery Illinois Democrat who had opposed the pro-slavery Lecompton Constitution on Constitutional grounds, going against Democrat President James Buchanan. Douglas advocated the doctrine of "popular sovereignty" - essentially, that each new territory should allow its residents to vote on the slavery question, rather than having Congress decide whether slavery would be permitted or not. Lincoln, an anti-slaver, opposed this, and slavery would be the central issue he and Douglas would debate.
Douglas ran on what would today justifiably be called a "white supremacist" platform; he frequently launched racist tirades filled with slurs and vulgar references to blacks that were considered crude even for the time. He was also probably an alcoholic; there were many accounts of his heavy drinking, needing to be carried on and off his campaign railway car by supporters, and even showing up to debates plastered.
This might have contributed to the general opinion, by the end of the campaign, that Lincoln performed far better on the campaign trail and won most of their debates. But Douglas was helped by pro-slavery Democratic newspapers, who would often deliberately mangle or even literally rewrite Lincoln's speeches, making him sound like an idiot.
Douglas won the election, but it turned out to be merely a warm-up for their rematch for the 1860 Presidential campaign.
Lincoln on Slavery
In recent years, Lincoln, once known as "the Great Emancipator," the man who freed the slaves, a man who in his time was almost universally revered by black Americans, has come under criticism for being... well, a white supremacist.
Among the quotes damning him are this one, printed in newspapers during the Lincoln-Douglas debates:
I am not, nor ever have been, in favor of bringing about in any way the social and political equality of the white and black races-that I am not nor ever have been in favor of making voters or jurors of Negroes, nor of qualifying them to hold office, nor to intermingling with white people; and I will say in addition to this that there is a physical difference between the white and black races which will ever forbid the two races living together on terms of social and political equality. And inasmuch as they cannot so live, while they do remain together, there must be the position of superior. I am as much as any other man in favor of having the superior position assigned to the white race. I say upon this occasion I do not perceive that because the white man is to have the superior position the negro should be denied every thing. I do not understand that because I do not want a negro woman for a slave I must necessarily want her for a wife.
This and other quotes are cited as evidence that Lincoln was a white supremacist who didn't really care about negro equality or freeing the slave, and did so only when it could be weaponized against the South.
It is definitely true that Lincoln did not believe blacks and whites were equal. He was "a man of his time" and while there were a few abolitionists who were pushing not just for an end to slavery, but full suffrage and equal citizenship for blacks, this was a very radical position before the war, and Lincoln was not a radical.
Burlingame does cite many other statements, both written and from second-hand reports, throughout Lincoln's life, that provide persuasive evidence that Lincoln really did abhor slavery and was always against it. He said many times that he considered it a moral evil, that the country would be better off without it, and that eventually it would be done away with.
Why, then, did he not issue an emancipation proclamation as soon as it was within his power to do so? Why did he deny negro equality? Why did he repeatedly state that he would defend and protect the legal rights of slave owners?
Lincoln was a politician and a realist. He had many conversations with his cabinet, with abolitionists, with fence-sitters, with black leaders like Frederick Douglass (who was sometimes disappointed by Lincoln but ultimately considered him one of the great men of history). And one of the things that Burlingame's very long biography with extensive, complete accounts of almost every political battle Lincoln ever fought puts in context is the battle against slavery.
Lincoln's statement about being against negro equality was in answer to accusations that he advocated black suffrage and even (gasp!) race-mixing. At the time of the Lincoln-Douglas debates, this was an absolute non-starter with white voters.
His statement about holding the union together was during the war, at a time when he was trying to juggle multiple conflicting interests. The border states could still tip one way or the other depending on whether they perceived the war to be about preserving the union or freeing the slaves. There were hostile Democrats (both "peace Democrats" in favor of ending the war and giving lenient treatment to the Confederates, and "war Democrats" who opposed the Republicans but who thought Lincoln was, if anything, too soft on the rebels).
So to some degree, Lincoln was just playing smart politics. That said, what did he really believe? It's evident throughout this book that Lincoln really was a very honest man, not given to pretending to believe things he didn't or hiding his true beliefs. He wasn't above dodging questions or giving carefully worded statements meant to leave some space for "plausible deniability," but when he said he was against slavery, he meant it. When he said his "paramount object" was to save the Union, he meant it. And when he said he believed whites were superior to blacks, he meant that too.
Today, we talk as if there were people who were for slavery and people who were against slavery. But at the time, there was a entire spectrum of views on slavery. "Ultras" were the most radical abolitionists, who wanted immediate emancipation for all slaves, without compensation for their owners. "Gradualists" had various schemes for ending slavery incrementally, sometimes by using government funds to buy them from their current owners, sometimes by offering incentives to free them. Some wanted to emancipate them and let them become freedmen, some wanted to send them to Africa- there were multiple colonization plans and societies. Many slave owners agreed that slavery was doomed and/or immoral. (Awkwardly, there were many members of abolitionist societies who owned slaves!) It had been a heated political topic - the heated political topic - for generations.
Lincoln was a lawyerly, Constitution-abiding Unionist. He didn't like slavery, but he accepted it as a legal and political reality. He wanted to end slavery, but abolitionists frequently had unrealistic political goals. It was clear early in his political career that he was a "man of his time" who just accepted that blacks would always have to have a subordinate position to whites, but there is a great deal of evidence that by the end of the Civil War, he was moving towards the more "radical" position of full negro equality and citizenship.
Indeed, this is the reason he was killed.
Volume one of this monumental work ends with an extensive postmortem of the Lincoln-Douglas Senatorial race, which Lincoln lost, and a blow-by-blow account of the Republican Convention in Chicago, in which Lincoln ultimately became the Republican candidate for President.
Who was Lincoln's running mate? A Maine abolitionist named Hannibal Hamlin, who was basically a political non-entity who no one remembers. In this 2000 page epic that goes into detail about Lincoln's childhood friends and every speech he ever gave, his first Vice President is only mentioned a handful of times. Hamlin seems to have been a decent enough guy, but he was replaced in the 1864 election because Lincoln needed a running mate who would balance radical Republicans. History probably would have changed for the better had Hannibal Hamlin been VP when Lincoln was assassinated.
Lincoln's chief rival was Senator William Seward of New York, who was a poor loser who spent months sulking before he finally, grudgingly came around to supporting Lincoln in the presidential race. Political boss Thurlow Weed, another opponent of Lincoln, also grudgingly came around. The Republican nomination convention was contentious, but the election of 1860 was more so.
The Election of 1860 - Elections have Consequences
In 1860, Lincoln was up against multiple opponents: the Democrats were split between his old foe Stephen Douglas, and the Democrat preferred by Southerners, John Breckenridge. Douglas and Breckenridge both ran as "official" Democratic candidate. There was also a third (fourth) party candidate, John Bell, representing the Constitutional Union party which had some support in the border states.
Lincoln swept the North, and Breckenridge swept the South. (John Bell won a few border states, and Douglas won some split votes). Lincoln was elected as the 16th President, and the South immediately threatened to secede.
Volume Two - The Secession Crisis
The second volume covers everything that happened after the election.
At first, the "secession crisis" was not really taken very seriously. The South had been threatening to secede for decades now; every time they didn't like the outcome of an election, every time a bill against the interests of the South was passed, or even introduced, in Congress, Southern states would threaten to secede. By now this was seen as political brinksmanship, just a tactic Southern politicians used to get their way. When Senator John Crittenden proposed the "Crittenden Compromise," which would be a Constitutional amendment to make it impossible for Congress to abolish slavery in the future, Southerners were in favor, but Lincoln and the Republicans rejected it. Lincoln said, in effect, "Elections have consequences," which was perhaps the first hint that this gregarious, magnanimous politician who many people underestimated was not going to be rolled.
But no one, including Lincoln, imagined that the secession crisis would lead to a four-year civil war.
Besides detailing all the political maneuvers leading to the opening of the war, Burlingame describes the selection of Lincoln's cabinet.
Wiliam Seward - he was a dick.
Lincoln chose his former rival William Seward as his Secretary of State.
The impression I got from this book is that Seward was a serious asshole.
He was unbelievably full of himself, and believed himself to be far superior to Lincoln. Inexplicably defeated by a lesser man, he nobly agreed to "save the Union" by "advising" the president. In fact, he saw himself as the real leader in the White House, repeatedly tried to run things his own way, and Lincoln, with his characteristic patience and generosity, only occasionally curbed Seward's overreaches. But Lincoln did eventually make it clear that he was the one in charge.
Lincoln's procession to Washington was long. He met with many town councils and gave many speeches. It was exhausting. His wife kept making a bad impression with her pretentiousness and hysteria. In Baltimore, William Pinkerton and others convinced Lincoln there was a serious plot to kill him. He was finally persuaded to change his itinerary and continue through Baltimore on a night train. This proved a costly PR mistake as the entire country mocked him for cowardice.
Meanwhile, negotiations were still ongoing over the secession crisis. After Lincoln's inaugural address (which received mixed responses; some thought it was belligerent and threatening, others thought he was promising everything would be settled peacefully) many still thought war could be avoided. Lincoln spent his first few months dealing with office seekers. At this time, the patronage system was still in full force, and some of the few times Lincoln lost his temper was having to deal with yet another greedy, entitled office seeker or someone who felt they were owed more. (He was confronted by such a man the night after his son passed away in the White House. The office seeker ignored the black mourning drapes and demanded Lincoln give him his attention. There was no Secret Service at the time, but it was a miracle of Lincoln's patience that he only chewed the man out and told him to go away.)
Fort Sumter
Fort Sumter, South Carolina, became the flashpoint of the secession crisis. Sumter was manned by Union soldiers, but surrounded by South Carolina troops. They demanded that Fort Sumter be surrendered to them. Eventually Lincoln had to make a decision: abandon Fort Sumter, or resupply it (which the South would consider an act of war). There was a similar discussion happening about Fort Pickens, in Florida.
Secretary of State Seward sabotaged negotiations with his meddling, and some of the Union officers at both forts were of questionable loyalty. It was a high stakes game played over a very tiny piece of real estate. Lincoln was willing to make a lot of concessions to placate the South (enraging some of his more radical Republican supporters), but he would not withdraw from Fort Sumter. He was very firm that the South did not have the authority or the right to demand that the federal government surrender federal territory. When South Carolina fired on Fort Sumter, the American Civil War began.
Lincoln's General Problems
Starting with the first Battle of Bull Run, the war went badly for the Union at first, largely because of terrible generals.
George McClellan - he was really a dick.
Lincoln put "Old Fuss 'n Feathers," former Whig presidential candidate General Winfield Scott, in charge of the Union army. But Scott was obese almost to the point of immobility, and in poor health, and soon had to retire. So Lincoln gave command to George McClellan.
McClellan was an anti-abolitionist who had no sympathy for slaves, and a lot of sympathy for the South, though his loyalty to the Union was never in question. But he was imperious, arrogant, and held Lincoln and his former commander, General Winfield Scott, in contempt. He was often openly disrespectful to Lincoln (who, as usual, allowed insults and insubordination to pass well past the point where he should have sacked him), and contemptuous of him in private.
McClellan delayed, made excuses, and failed over and over again to launch the offensives Lincoln wanted or to press any advantage when he did win a battle. Burlingame argues that McClellan was not just lazy, but a coward. It took years of grinding inactivity and lack of progress for Lincoln to finally decide that McClellan had to be replaced.
General John C. Fremont (the first Republican presidential candidate, who lost badly in 1856) put Missouri under martial law and declared his very own Emancipation Proclamation, which caused Lincoln so many political headaches he had to revoke it (which enraged his abolitionist supporters) and then remove Fremont from command. A couple of years later, General David Hunter would do the same thing in Florida, Georgia, and South Carolina, forcing Lincoln to once again revoke the emancipation edict.
Since this is a biography about Lincoln and not, per se, a history of the Civil War, Burlingame doesn't cover battles and military movements in great detail, but he does talk a lot about generals (especially Lincoln's generals) and the political impact of battles won and lost. Lincoln was heavily involved in military planning; he started reading up on strategy, familiarized himself with all the units and generals, and probably knew more than some of his generals. Today a President trying to personally direct a war would be called a micromanager, and indeed some of Lincoln's generals resented his interference, but to be fair, Lincoln almost always deferred to them when they disagreed with him (even when they were openly insubordinate, such as the insufferable McClellan).
Everyone has heard of the battle between the Monitor and the Merrimack, the first naval battle between ironclads. Previously I thought this was an interesting historical side note of little real significance at the time, but Burlingame describes the panic the Merrimack caused throughout the North; the Union feared it would be able to lay siege to coastal cities with impunity, and at one point Washington DC was almost evacuated for fear of the Merrimack coming up the Potomac.
Lincoln also had to deal with the Trent affair, in which a Union ship seized a British mail packet, the Trent, which was carrying two Confederate envoys to Britain. This was a major diplomatic incident: Britain had adopted a policy of neutrality with regard to the U.S. civil war (the Confederacy sent their envoys to try to change this), but seizing a British ship was, technically, an act of war. Lincoln's Secretary of State William Seward eventually ordered the two imprisoned Confederates released, and issued a sort of non-apology to Britain.
Yes, the Civil War was about slavery
Why, you might wonder, did Lincoln twice revoke his generals' orders to free slaves when a couple of years later he would issue his own famous Emancipation Proclamation?
Something I appreciated about this book's massive, comprehensive detail is that the complex political situation, which has been detailed throughout the book, makes some of these things understandable from the perspective of the times. Lincoln favored emancipation as an ultimate goal, but he had restive border states who were just barely loyal to the Union, and northern slave owners, and letting his generals set the precedent that the war was actually a war to free the slaves would have been an instant PR disaster. Lincoln took a lot of flack from his more radical abolitionist supporters (and even cabinet members), and some of today's arguments that the Civil War "wasn't really about slavery" came from Lincoln's own statements, when he explicitly tried to convince the North that the war was about holding the Union together and not about slavery.
Although some Confederate apologists argue that the war was about "states' rights" and point out that there were other issues relating to taxes and tariffs and such, almost every objection the South had boiled down to slavery. They feared Northerners were going to free their slaves, they felt insulted by abolitionist arguments ("How dare you say slavery is immoral!"), and they feared (correctly) that if the U.S. kept expanding with more free states than slave states, they would be increasingly outnumbered in Congress. South Carolina's declaration of secession makes it explicit that they believed Lincoln and the Republicans intended to "wage a war against slavery" - the other Confederate states likewise made no bones about why they were seceding.
And yet Lincoln, throughout the war, was trying to balance increasingly strident abolitionist sentiments with concerns from moderates and anti-abolitionists (including "War Democrats") that the war was becoming a war to free the slaves.
My paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union, and is not either to save or to destroy slavery. If I could save the Union without freeing any slave I would do, it, and if I could save it by freeing all the slaves I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing some and leaving others alone I would also do that. What I do about slavery, and the colored race, I do because I believe it helps to save the Union...I have here stated my purpose according to my view of official duty; and I intend no modification of my oft-expressed personal wish that all men everywhere could be free.
His position changed over time, and by the end of the war, there was evidence that he was becoming increasingly "radical" in his sentiments, not just favoring emancipation but full black suffrage.
Burlingame discusses the case of Nathaniel Gordon, the only American ever to be hanged for slave trading. Gordon had been at this business for years, and when he was arrested in New York, he refused a fairly light plea agreement. Unfortunately for him, this happened right at the beginning of the war, and he suddenly found himself facing capital charges. When he was eventually convicted, Lincoln was besieged with requests for a pardon. Gordon's wife came to Washington and found Mary Todd Lincoln sympathetic; her attempt to persuade her husband to issue a pardon is one of the few times Burlingame describes Lincoln flatly telling his wife to shut up and mind her own business.
Lincoln gave Gordon a short stay of execution, but refused to pardon him.
"I believe I am kindly enough in nature, and can be moved to pity and to pardon the perpetrator of almost the worst crime that the mind of man can conceive or the arm of man can execute; but any man, who, for paltry gain and stimulated only by avarice, can rob Africa of her children to sell into interminable bondage, I never will pardon."
Suspension of Habeus Corpus
One criticism many historians make of Lincoln is his suspension of Habeus Corpus during the war. Citing "military necessity," Lincoln allowed newspapers to be closed and editors and politicians and private citizens to be arrested and held without charge, sometimes merely for criticizing the President or the conduct of the war. One of the most famous was Ohio Congressman Clement Vallandigham, who was arrested for his anti-war agitation, tried in a military court martial, and exiled to the Confederacy. (The bemused Confederates initially imprisoned him, and eventually released him, and Vallandigham made his way to Canada where he became a leader of anti-Unionists in exile.)
Even Lincoln admirers generally consider the suspension of Habeus Corpus to have been a blemish on his reputation. Burlingame defends him, perhaps a little too apologetically. He points out that "Copperheads" (the so-called "Peace Democrats") really were stirring agitation and unrest, encouraging people to resist the draft, and in some cases were actually Confederate agents. All of this was true and Lincoln had a (thin) legal pretext to act as he did in a time of war, but even Burlingame admits that at times, Lincoln's suspension of Habeus Corpus resulted in outright suppression of free speech and any kind of dissent with the government (although Lincoln himself never personally ordered anyone arrested).
The Emancipation Proclamation and the 13th Amendment
Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation in January of 1863. It was an Executive Order that freed all slaves in territories not under Union control - in other words, it didn't actually free all slaves. There were slaveholding states who had stayed in the Union.
Like everything Lincoln did, it was political and more complicated than popular history makes it. Lincoln did want to free the slaves; he also, as Burlingame points out repeatedly, mostly wanted to weaken the South and restore the Union. The Emancipation Proclamation wasn't something he issued out of a sudden moral impulse; it was intended to deprive the South of their free labor and encourage enslaved blacks to flee (and secondarily, entice wavering Southern states to come back, since there was a window of time in which they could have ceased rebelling, rejoined the Union, and kept their slaves). It was hailed by abolitionists (although the more radical ones criticized Lincoln for not going far enough) but it once again threatened to paint the war as a war to free the slaves.
The 13th Amendment, which made slavery illegal according to the Constitution, was passed two years later, at the end of the war but (obviously) before the Southern states got to vote again. For such a monumental amendment, it passed with relatively little drama. There was opposition, of course, but Lincoln brought political pressure to bear and put the entire Republican Party behind it.
The Election of 1864
I was surprised to learn that Lincoln's reelection was not a sure thing, and indeed, at one point he was convinced that he was going to lose.
The war was grinding on with little progress (even though it was evident since 1863 that the South no longer had a hope of winning). The Republican Convention replaced Lincoln's VP, Hannibal Hamlin, with Andrew Johnson, a War Democrat from Tennessee. Lincoln's former commanding general George McClellan ran on the Democratic ticket. John C. Fremont briefly made a third party bid.
Lincoln handled his impending defeat with characteristic stoicness. (One thing I noticed throughout this book is that while Stoicism is never mentioned, and there's no evidence that Lincoln ever read the Stoics, much of his attitude could be described as the original Stoicism - not hiding emotions or pretending to be unaffected by hardships, but simply accepting them as things beyond one's control and thus not worth catastrophizing over).
The really remarkable thing about the election of 1864 was that it was carried out, in fairly good order, in the middle of a civil war! The Confederate states, of course, didn't get a vote, which is why Lincoln did end up handily winning both the electoral and the popular vote. But just as he went deep into every one of Lincoln's earlier elections, and all the things said about him by his critics and his friends, Burlingame examines the sides who were for and against Lincoln. Lincoln was by now recognized as a gifted politician and speaker, and a great leader, but not universally so, and many prominent people among both the Republicans and the Democrats called him simple, crude and not fit for his office, not up to the challenge of the times, an imbecilic Kentucky railsplitter full of vulgar stories but no judgment. Lincoln was widely seen by his critics as a buffoon elevated above his station; many people of his time would have been truly astonished to learn that Abraham Lincoln would someday be considered one of the greatest of American Presidents.
Other than that, Mrs. Lincoln, how did you enjoy the play?
"Sic semper tyrannis!" ("Thus always to tyrants!")
- supposedly shouted by John Wilkes Booth after shooting Lincoln
The Confederacy by now was in a situation similar to that of Japan in World War II, almost a hundred years later - having started a war they couldn't possibly win, their best hope now was to negotiate the best terms for peace they could. And like the Allies at the end of World War II, the Union was split between conciliators who were willing to offer relatively generous peace terms, and hardliners who would accept nothing less than unconditional surrender.
Lincoln was initially in a more conciliatory mood. Had the South surrendered a year or two earlier, the Confederate states would probably have been quickly readmitted into the union and possibly even allowed to keep their slaves. He even proposed peace terms (before the passage of the 13th Amendment) that would have allowed the Confederacy to keep their slaves, but his own cabinet voted against it and Lincoln was persuaded to take a harder stance. By 1865, it was clear the South had lost, and the Union didn't have to offer any concessions; Burlingame directly blames Confederate President Jefferson Davis for refusing to accept reality, thinking he could still dictate peace terms, and unnecessarily dragging the war on for months.
In the months after Lincoln's election, and the inevitable surrender of the Confederacy, Lincoln began moving towards what was once considered an "Ultra" position, speaking of giving blacks their rights, which many interpreted as laying the groundwork for full suffrage.
It was talk like this that enraged a Maryland actor and Confederate sympathizer named John Wilkes Booth.
"That means nigger citizenship. ... That is the last speech he will ever give."
As he did with Mary Todd Lincoln's family and many of Lincoln's political opponents over the years, Burlingame devotes an entire chapter to John Wilkes Booth's life, his motivations, and speculations about his mental health. What is known is that Booth hated Lincoln, hated blacks, and had been involved in earlier schemes to try to kidnap Lincoln.
Burlingame laid some foreshadowing earlier by mentioning all the times Lincoln liked to go see plays when he had the time. He describes in great detail the night of April 14, 1865, in which Lincoln and his wife went to the Ford Theater to see Our American Cousin.
John Wilkes Booth actually worked with a group of collaborators who meant to kill not just Lincoln, but Secretary of State Seward and Vice President Andrew Johnson. (There was an earlier plan to also kill the commanding Union General Ulysses S. Grant, who had been invited to attend the play with the Lincolns. Grant declined the invitation and went with his wife to visit some relatives instead - possibly because Grant's wife could not stand Mary Lincoln.) William Seward was attacked in his home but survived; the man who was supposed to attack Andrew Johnson chickened out. John Wilkes Booth shot Lincoln as he sat next to his wife, and then escaped, being tracked down and killed days later. Lincoln went into a coma from which he never recovered. Many remarked that he looked more peaceful and at ease while he was dying than he had in years.
Lincoln's death triggered national mourning. Even some of the defeated Confederates condemned the assassination, and even William Seward, Lincoln's cantankerous long-time frenemy, was moved to tears.
Vice President Andrew Johnson took office, and thoroughly screwed up Reconstruction. But that's for the next book.
Should You Read This Book?
Do you like 2000 page biographies? Do you like reading the nitty gritty details of 19th century Ohio politics? Do you want to know just what a horrible beeyatch Mary Todd Lincoln was? (After her husband's death, she continued to stir drama over his memorial, and reportedly looted the White House of all valuables, making off with crates full of silver and furniture that belonged to the public. Congress quietly paid for this and hushed it up.) Do you want to spend a thousand pages reading about Lincoln's life before you even get to his presidency?
Abraham Lincoln: A Life is a Lincoln scholar's life's work, and he actually had to cut a great deal, but this is a heavy read unless you are a serious POTUS geek. That said, I thought Lincoln deserved a first class treatment, and Burlingame gives him one; hardly any detail is left out and after reading this I have a much fuller picture of the man, his flaws, his virtues, his personality, and the political context of his time. He was an interesting, smart, often funny man, beset by depression and sometimes poor health, who lost two sons while in office, taking shit from all sides. He got used to death threats (which was why he didn't have a heavier guard when he went to Ford's Theater that night), and while many of his critics thought a better man would have ended the Civil War sooner, it's easy to see how a worse man would have either dragged it on, failed to end slavery, or possibly even allowed the South to secede.
If you want the main points of Lincoln's life and presidency, this is probably not your best choice - it's too long, too thick. You probably don't need to know everything that Burlingame devotes pages to. But I enjoyed it. It was deep and informative.
Burlingame is clearly a Lincoln fan, and that shows when, for example, he tries to defend Lincoln against some of his criticisms (e.g., suspending habeus corpus). He also a few times seems to go a little too far in psychoanalyzing his subjects, from Lincoln to Mary Todd Lincoln to John Wilkes Booth.
But if you want the comprehensive Lincoln biography that is everything you can get without reading multiple books about him, then this is the book to read. It's really complete and (to me) it was never boring.
My complete list of book reviews.