A Self-Made Man: The Political Life of Abraham Lincoln, 1809-1849
By Sidney Blumenthal, Simon & Schuster, 576 pages, $35
Another book about Abraham Lincoln? And this the first of a multivolume biography! The shelves groan with Lincoln studies, and in 2009 the bicentennial of his birth brought us still another load — including two large biographies that together weigh in at nearly 3,000 pages — most of which concern what has come to be regarded as his “political life”. Don’t we need to catch our breath before being presented with yet another?
Sidney Blumenthal does bring special gifts to the task. A longtime scholar of Lincoln or the 19th century he is not. But a close and perceptive observer of contemporary politics — and someone who remains near to the practice and wielding of political power — he is. Blumenthal has written several books on the Clinton and Bush years and the rise of conservatism, and has been on the staff of the “Washington Post” and the “New Yorker”. He is also an influential adviser to Hillary Clinton, as the flap over her Benghazi e-mails made abundantly clear. But what does he have to say about Lincoln and the political world of the early to mid-19th century? And what does a book that takes us through only Lincoln’s first term in Congress have to contribute to our understanding of the 16th president and the history of the United States?
To his credit, Blumenthal has worked hard and dug deep. He has been through most of the relevant secondary and much of the published primary literature and, despite a few stumbles (the Missouri Compromise did not limit “slavery north of the Mason-Dixon line”), shows a nice grasp of the politics of the period. Indeed, Blumenthal is probably at his best in acquainting us with the textures and dynamics of local politics, of the courthouse and statehouse, and the intricate and often explosive alliances and rivalries that took shape there. He is also quite knowledgeable about the personal and political battles of national politics, providing rich portraits of many of the best-known figures of the era, from John C. Calhoun and Henry Clay to Salmon P. Chase and William H. Seward. This is all to the good because Lincoln often drops out of the story; he didn’t have much to do with the important events of these years.
Blumenthal’s main interest is in offering a political and psychological profile that brings Lincoln’s early life into coherence — and perhaps will bring his later life on the national stage into a new light. Not surprisingly, slavery is very much at the centre of Blumenthal’s account, but not entirely in the way we might expect. He opens “A Self-Made Man” with Lincoln’s confession, in 1856, that “I used to be a slave.” Here Lincoln was referring to his own exploitation at the hands of his domineering and uneducated father, who effectively rented him out to rural neighbours in Indiana, and his subsequent escape and re-creation. Such a disclosure was a rarity; Lincoln was extremely reticent about his origins. But Blumenthal seems to view the episode as part of Lincoln’s self-making.
Lincoln very much felt the resonance between the enslavement he claimed to have endured and the slavery that afflicted African-Americans and the country as a whole. Blumenthal shows the many ways in which Lincoln came to hate the institution — the antislavery Baptists to whom he was exposed growing up; his trip as a youth to New Orleans, where he saw slavery and the slave markets of the Deep South firsthand; the murder of the abolitionist Elijah Lovejoy in nearby Alton, Illinois; the plight of fugitive slaves. But, for all that, Lincoln was first and foremost a member of the Whig Party who crossed swords with the Democrat Stephen A. Douglas as early as the 1830s.
“My politics are short and sweet,” he could say at the time. “I am in favour of a national bank. I am in favour of the internal improvement system and a high protective tariff.” These were the fundamentals of Whig economic doctrine. Until he helped establish the Republican Party of Illinois in the 1850s, Lincoln never belonged to an organisation devoted to eliminating slavery.
So where are we as this book draws to a close? Lincoln was elected to Congress in 1846 and pledged not to seek renomination. While in Washington, he did board with antislavery Whigs and was especially influenced by their most prominent member, Joshua Giddings. At one point, Lincoln drew up a bill to abolish slavery in the District of Columbia (with compensation for slave owners at “full cash value”), though it was never introduced. He then failed to get a patronage job he had expected (commissioner of the General Land Office) and, after turning down posts in the Oregon Territory, went back to lawyering in Illinois and “solid middle-class affluence”. As Blumenthal acknowledges, Lincoln did not at all seem destined for the roles we know him in now, not least in the minds of those who knew him then: “Nobody thought he was entering a crucible from which he would emerge as Lincoln,” Blumenthal writes. “Nobody imagined him for great things except his wife.” Stay tuned.
What we have in the political life of Abraham Lincoln as of 1850 is, in Blumenthal’s representation, a man perhaps poised to enter the national spotlight. But self-made? This powerful notion emerged during the first half of the 19th century, although, as Blumenthal undoubtedly recognises, it was the construction and fantasy of a developing middle class rather than a life course anyone could actually chart.
Talented and immensely ambitious as Lincoln was, his story followed the general pattern of social and political mobility in the United States at that time: he caught the attention of local men who had the resources and connections to promote him, and he married into a prominent family (the Todds), finding a wife who was even more politically ambitious for him than he was for himself. Lincoln probably would have guffawed at the very idea of being self-made, knowing as well as anyone how the political world worked. After all, by Lincoln’s own telling, he owed to his “angel mother” “all that I am or ever hope to be”.
The problem, as we look ahead to the future volumes of Blumenthal’s project, is that the ground of both Lincoln’s political life and national politics during the Civil War era has been so amply and painstakingly covered by so many of our most gifted historians that it’s hard to see what he might add. The only compelling reason to write a multivolume political biography of Lincoln at this point (and, frankly, I wouldn’t recommend it) is not that there are riddles to solve or moments that have been underappreciated or misinterpreted (these would require one volume) but that Lincoln might serve as a vital hub around which new perspectives on the 19th century could be devised. This is possible. And Blumenthal may be able to pull it off in the remainder of “The Political Life of Abraham Lincoln”. But I have my doubts.
–New York Times News Service
Steven Hahn’s latest book, “A Nation Without Borders: The United States and Its World in an Age of Civil Wars, 1830-1910”, will be published this autumn.
