BOSS LINCOLN

Portrait of a hard-nosed wheeler-dealer.

Historian Pinsker, author of Lincoln’s Sanctuary: Abraham Lincoln and the Soldiers’ Home, dismisses the view that the 16th president was an obscure local politico who became a presidential candidate only because important men deadlocked. In 1832, at age 23, he lost his first attempt for the Illinois state House but won two years later, quickly impressed his colleagues, became floor leader for the Whig caucus, and served four terms before leaving voluntarily in 1841 as a leading Illinois political figure, a position he never surrendered. By the 1840s, both Democrats and Whigs appeared to be out of touch and dithering until the roof fell in after 1850 when the Kansas-Nebraska Act repealed the Compromise of 1820 and seemed to open western territories to slavery. This destroyed the Whigs but only split the Democrats. Lincoln worked hard to establish the new Republican Party, which would have won the 1856 presidency if Millard Fillmore of the Know Nothing Party hadn’t siphoned away votes. He organized a vigorous campaign for the 1860 nomination, came in second on the first convention ballot, and won on the third. Entering familiar territory, Pinsker keeps his focus on Lincoln’s leadership, largely ignoring the battlefield. Although it was a minority view at the time, he did almost everything right. Making appointments for purely political reasons, he included powerful rivals but kept his own counsel, and his cabinet was never “a happy team of loyal advisors.” Historians fill volumes explaining why Lincoln fended off abolitionists until the very end, but it was simply a matter of votes. Most northerners found the Confederates obnoxious and unpatriotic yet shared their racist views. By war’s end, few objected to eliminating slavery, but giving Black people equal rights remained a niche view until the 20th century.

A Lincoln biography that’s more perceptive than many.