Madison among the rest, Pouring from his narrow chest, More than Greek or Roman sense, Boundless tides of eloquence.
Interestingly enough, it was James Madison who prompted my interest in reading presidential biographies. Early in the blog’s history, I happened upon Founding Rivals, a history of the dynamic between Madison and Monroe: both were members of the Revolutionary generation, both were Virginias who later became president, but they were often rivals. I’ve since read one other book on Madison, but it was closely focused on his connection to the creation of the Constitution; this is the first proper biography I have tried of him. I found it a readable if sometimes overly casual review of Madison’s political life, if not the man himself.
Brookhiser’s account skips past Madison’s upbringing, though we find this modest planter quickly found himself running in the best of circles through his intelligence and obsessive work ethic. Not even a fifth of the way into the biography, we find Madison already in the role we expect to find him — the politician, serving Virginia in various capacities from the Governor’s Council to the Philadelphia Convention that created the Constitution. Madison formed close friendships with Washington, Jefferson, and Hamilton — though he and Hamilton would fall out over Madison’s opposition to the big-government policies adopted by the Federalists. (Brookhiser refers to Madison’s criticism of Hamilton as ‘nuts’, which brought out my John Adams glare of disdain. Call me a snob, but I dislike that sort of informality in a history book.) Brookhiser names Madison as the creator of America’s first political party, the Republicans — sometimes called the Democratic-Republicans to differentiate them from the modern party that was created in the mid-19th century. In their opposition to consolidated government, these Republicans were not unlike Jacksonian Democrats. I have to admire Madison as a man of principle: in the Federalist papers he and Hamilton argued in theory that there need be no fear of the state becoming overmighty, but when the Constitution went into effect Madison took the evidence before his own eyes seriously and struck back against it. He was author of the Virginia Resolution, with along with Jefferson’s Kentucky Resolution argued that the States were the ultimate arbiters of constitutionality. This was written in response to the Alien and Sedition acts of the Adams administration; when president himself, Madison exercised the power of the veto to strike down bills he regarded as unconstitutional. Probably the most memorable part of his presidency is the eruption of the War of 1812, which Brookhiser argues Madison planned poorly for. After leaving office to another Virginian, Monroe, Madison stayed up with politics, sharing opinions with his peers and eventually outliving all of the other founding generation.
This was a fair read; Brookhiser is an accessible author, but as mentioned the focus is entirely on Madison’s political life — as founder, framer, party organizer, public servant — with comparatively little about the man himself. Potential readers may take that as they will: I found it a useful review of the Founding generation’s attempts at working out govenment.
Quotations
Heroes can aspire to perfection, especially if they die young, through the purity of an action, or a stance. But the long haul of politics takes at least some of the shine off almost everyone.
We pay much less attention to James Madison, Father of Politics, than to James Madison, Father of the Constitution. That is because politics embarrasses us. Politics is the spectacle on television and YouTube, the daily perp walk on the Huffington Post and the Drudge Report. Surely our founders and framers left us something better, more solid, more inspiring than that? They did. But they all knew—and Madison understood better than any of them—that ideals come to life in dozens of political transactions every day. Some of those transactions aren’t pretty. You can understand this and try to work with this knowledge, or you can look away. But ignoring politics will not make it stop. It will simply go on without you—and sooner or later will happen to you.
As Madison read, he wrote down his own thoughts, first by copying thoughts he liked into a commonplace book—“The Talent for insinuating is more useful than that of persuading. The former is often successful, the latter very seldom” (Cardinal de Retz, a seventeenth-century French politician). As he grew older, he wrote essays that digested what he had learned. Writing extended Madison’s bookish discussions—it was a form of talking with himself.
I solemnly swear I will not write this review lovingly mocking Will!iam SHATner’s cadence. But an understanding reader will grant me at least the title? Yesterday I finished listening to Together Tonight, an audio play in which the writings of Mssrs Burr, Hamilton, and Jefferson were used to create a fictional conversation between men who in real life were sharp rivals. After discovering that it was a contemporary recording of a play called No Love Lost, which ORIGINALLY featured William Shatner, Jack Lemmon, and Martin Landau (!!), I had to see if the original recording was out there. It is. And it’s fun. The level of acting talent here is both a blessing and a curse: it’s MARKEDLY easier to tell who is speaking and who! is not, but at the same time my familiarity with Lemmon and Shatner disrupted immersion. However, the sound design in general is far easier for a listening audience, with a narrator describing things that cannot be heard. The script was more streamlined, through, only 2/3rds of Together Tonight, and the voice actors were distractingly…old. I could not listen to “Burr” talk without seeing Jack Lemmon sitting at the table in Twelve Angry Men, his white hair shining, rustling through papers. At the time of this conversation, the narrator informs us these men were all in their forties — but they sound like the silver haired retirees who gather in my city diner every morning to drink coffee, flirt with the waitress, and discuss the affairs of the world. Ultimately, I much prefer the modern Audible version, even if its versions of Hamilton and Jefferson take more time to tell apart — their actors do not overwhelm the roles, and the Audible version had some elements I enjoyed (like the characters’ interior thoughts) that were not present in this one.
Jefferson: I think the whole commerce between master and slave is despotism on the one hand, and degrading submission on the other. Burr: But don’t you own slaves yourself? Jefferson: I do. Burr: No inconsistency there? Jefferson: Not at all. I do not treat my slaves like a despot, nor are they degraded by me. Hamilton: In fact, you love your slaves, don’t you? ….some more than others?
After listening to The Rivalry, a play based on the Lincoln-Douglas debates and delivered with aplomb by the Los Angeles Theater Works Productions company, I wanted to experience more of LATW. Then I saw this, another play based on debate and dialogue. Together Tonight draws on the writings of Thomas Jefferson, Alexander Hamilton, and Aaron Burr to put the men into direct debate together, moderated by a Mr. Pickering. Corwin originally titled this No Love Lost, and such a name is warranted: Jefferson and Hamilton were archrivals, and Burr was commonly regarded as a craven opportunist, dismissed by his peers. The initial topic of discussion is relations with France, the “Quasi-War” — but the conversation wanders all over the place. Hamilton even remarks on it — “Remarkable! One minute we are talking about the Masons and principles and children’s books, and the next about the variations in the vegetable and mineral kingdoms! ?”. One potential issue is that it is sometimes difficult to pick out who is speaking, at least between Hamilton and Jefferson: it took me about twenty minutes before I could reliably tell them apart. They’re both good voices — lots of gravitas — but the differences are subtle to an untuned ear or a casual listener. Aaron Burr was easier: he sounded exactly like a weasel.
The conversation’s life was quite good, to my ears, flowing naturally — hence some of the randomness — and Corwin smartly engineers space for intermission by having the chatter shift to an issue on which Alexander Hamilton takes such offense that he demands a moment to cool down. (At one point, Hamilton is so furious with Burr that I wondered if the historic challenge to duel — which killed Hamilton and excised Burr like a cancer from the body politic — would be issued there and then.) There is, in fact, an extended discussion on the merits of dueling — one that would surely have anyone with knowledge of how their relationship ended sitting on the edge of their seats with an anticipatory grin. Blessed are those with foreknowledge, for they shall be rewarded. While not as stellar as The Rivalry, this history major was thoroughly entertained by it. I may have to give that curr Burr a fair shake — there’s an interesting book called Fallen Founder I can take a look at.
Additional Note: When “No Love Lost” was originally performed, it featured WILLIAM SHATNER AND JACK LEMMON.
The Rivalry proceeds from an ambitious and fascinating idea for a play. The Lincoln–Douglas debates of 1858 led to Douglas being elected to the Senate, but they also allowed for a sustained public debate over slavery—and gave Lincoln far more name recognition than the Illinois lawyer had previously enjoyed. These debates were long affairs, typically consisting of hours of back-and-forth speeches. It is a testament to the nineteenth-century attention span that debates and lectures of this sort were popular entertainment. (Robert G. Ingersoll, for example, used to deliver lectures three hours long—and spoke to standing-room-only crowds.) The central issue in these debates was popular sovereignty—the doctrine that territories could choose for themselves whether to permit slavery. To Douglas, this was a perfectly sensible approach that made national policy on slavery unnecessary. To Lincoln, it opened the door to slavery’s expansion and relied on the idea that the worth of some people could be decided by the mass opinions of others.
Norman Corwin takes some of the most historically potent moments from these debates and reshapes them into a series of far shorter exchanges between the two men. These are punctuated by brief scenes in which a Republican Party leader announces events, or Lincoln encounters Douglas’s wife, Adele, on a train and they converse. These interludes are not fluff: in Lincoln’s conversation with Adele Douglas, I recognized many of the same historic arguments Lincoln made to the Little Giant himself, though delivered in a much different way — casually, rather than caustically. They also serve to give Lincoln a definite sympathetic advantage, as virtually all of Douglas’ screentime is when he is arguing (and generally on propositions current readers would object to), whereas Lincoln gets to ruminate with Adele and entertain her and the audience with his folksy stories. (Said stories are entertaining, as are his ripostes. It would be interesting to pit Lincoln against Reagan in joke-off.)
Both Paul Giamatti and David Strathairn are superb presences, and Lincoln’s humor is smartly worked in—and well delivered. I enjoyed this very much, though I have been reading about this era for several months now and am a fan of both actors; in fact, I watched films led by each of them shortly before listening to this. As someone who has encountered the debates in books such as 1858 and And There Was Light, I thought Corwin’s adaptation—rendered in a form intelligible to the modern listener—was particularly well done. While the focus remains firmly on the debates themselves, the production includes ambient effects such as cheering crowds, music, and cannon fire. While I imagine this kind of production has a small audience, it’s VERY well done. I must say, I’m loving Los Angeles Theater Works productions, and evidently I’ve enjoyed two of their prior works without realizing they were the source.
WHAT have you finished reading recently? And There Was Light, Jon Meacham. A biography of Abraham Lincoln.
WHAT are you reading now? I am listening to The Rivalry, a play composed by Norman Corwin. It turns the Lincoln-Douglas debates into a two-hour performance delivered by Paul Giamatti (Stephen A. Douglas) and David Straitharn (Abraham Lincoln). I began this on the heels of watching Lincoln, in which Straitharn plays Secretary of State Seward against Daniel Day-Lewis’ Lincoln. I was listening to a dramatization of The Hobbit but needed a break from the goblin/monster voices in general.
WHAT are you reading next? I need to read something that’s not history, but I am looking at both In Defense of Andrew Jackson by Brad Birzer and The Real Lincoln by Thomas DiLorenzo as followups to my Meacham biographies. I also ordered With Malice Towards None, a much-hailed Lincoln biography.
….this is the first time one person has captured my WWW post. Darn you, rail-splitter!
And now, today’s prompt from Long and Short reviews, which is….”funny titles”. I’ve done this twice before , at five-year intervals, and will follow the same approach I did at my last interval. I’ll take the ‘current winning’ list and see if anything I’ve read in the last five years can unseat the current champions! As it turns out, there was only one change: Hurricane Lizards and Plastic Squid replaced Don’t Hurt People and Don’t Take Their Stuff.
Today’s TTT is books we’re anticipating being released this year, but I did that last Wednesday, so I’m going to offer a preview of what this year’s Science Survey might constitute. But first, a tease!
Hurrying means that you miss out on many things. Riding a train will take you far, but it’s a misconception to think that this will give you more insight. Flowers in the hedgerow and birds in the treetops are accessible only to the person who walks on their own two feet. – THE CAT WHO SAVED BOOKS
Cosmology and Astrophysics To Infinity and Beyond, Neil deGrasse Tyson
Local Astronomy When the Earth Had Two Moons
Geology, Oceanography, and Natural History Turning to Stone: Discovering the Subtle Wisdom of Rocks
Chemistry and Physics Ten Drugs: How Plants, Powders, and Pills Have Shaped the History of Medicine
Cognition, Neurology, and Psychology: Reader, Come Home: The Reading Brain in a Digital World – A Neuroscience and Education Exploration of Empathy, Attention, and Our Future
Biology Pump: A Natural History of the Heart
Flora and Fauna Weeds: In Defense of Nature’s Most Unloved Plants
Archaeology and Anthropology A Hunter-Gatherer’s Guide to the 21st Century: Evolution and the Challenges of Modern Life
Weather and Climate The Secret World of Weather: How to Read Signs in Every Cloud, Breeze, Hill, Street, Plant, Animal, and Dewdrop
Ecology Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds & Shape Our Futures
Thinking Scientifically Books do Furnish a Life, Richard Dawkins
Wildcard: (Science Biography, History of Science, Science and Health, or Science and Society) Crossings: How Road Ecology Is Shaping the Future of Our Planet
Simon Latch is a seasoned attorney in a dead marriage who struggles to make ends meet, even as he sleeps on a cot in his office. When an elderly woman approaches him for some estate work and mentions that she has $16 million in stocks between Wal-Mart and Coca-Cola, his heart can’t help but skip a beat. “Miss Netty” could keep him from complete insolvency. As Simon goes to work preparing a will that will keep her and her late husband’s money from being devoured by the locusts at the IRS, he also begins making himself into Miss Netty’s friend, treating her to dinners every week, and gently prodding her to take her end-of-life care more seriously. Then, she dies – and Simon finds himself being accused of murder. While I do have a large gripe with this novel, The Widow was largely better than most of the potboilers Grisham has churned out in the last twenty years – not a great challenge, to be sure. I enjoyed it until close to the end, when the supposed whodunit gets an ending from out of left field: it’s not a mystery that allows the reader to participate in the conclusion of, let’s say. I liked the relative intimacy of the novel, as we’re dealing with only a few characters, and Simon is a delicate mix of pathetic and morally…muddy. He’s not a bad guy by any means, and I’d argue that his client is taking as much advantage of him as he hopes to take of her – she’s milking him for food and all manner of services, legal and otherwise, while he waits for the penny-pinching woman to start paying him for his time. His being accused of murder and placed on the wrong side of the bar was a fun change, but I found the resolution rushed and unsatisfying. Still, it kept me safe from the blue glow of a computer screen for a few hours!
I thought it would be amusing to do a history short round after realizing I’d read two books in which Jon Meacham focuses on Kentucky-born presidents who became icons and who dealt with secession crises. First up, Andy Jackson!
Andrew Jackson is a singularly American figure; no other nation could have produced him. Just over two hundred and eleven years ago, he won a flabbergastingly improbable victory over the British at New Orleans, making a war that had already ended in a grudging truce into an roaring victory in American memory. Jackson – who had led men on his own through the wilds of the ‘old southwest’, bearing the pain of duels past as they trudged toward New Orleans – became a folk hero and went on to transform national politics and become the President. Although today he’s only associated with Indian removal, Meacham points out that his policies there were perfectly in line with other politicians of the period, like William Henry Harrison. Jackson is a tough old bird, resilient both physically and emotionally. Raised practically an orphan, he nevertheless forged a path for himself in the military and law. Raised in the southern honor culture, he had a tendency to get into duels and would carry the debris of several with him. He wasn’t just a violent hillbilly, though — he could conduct himself with grace that surprised his opponents in Washington. He had many, too, because he viewed the Washington elite as just that, an elite who were unresponsive to the needs of the people. In an age of increasing suffrage, the people had louder voices — and Jackson not only heard them, he marshalled their energy. Interestingly, although Jacksonianism was avowedly opposed to elitism and centralism in government — one of the reasons Jackson constantly attacked the National Bank, seeing it as a tool of eastern bankers to keep the country in hoc to them — Jackson in office was not a protolibertarian icon. He was heavy-handed, both with the bank and with South Carolina after the palmetto state threatened secession if the tariff of abominations — which sheltered northern industry at the expense of southern consumers — was not scotched. In this Jackson is not an exception: many who criticize the use of power find it strangely intoxicating when the One Ring is on their own finger. This was an engaging and fair take on one of early America’s more complex and fascinating figures.
Next up, Abraham Lincoln.
Lincoln is usually rated alongside George Washington in terms of ‘great American presidents’; and perhaps that’s fitting in one way. Just as Washington was first to preside over the Union created by the Constitution – a new approach to Republic from the previous Articles of Confederation Republic — so did Lincoln effectively create a new Union in his attempt to save Washington’s from sectionalism and dismemberment. And Then There Was Light takes a fairly obvious tack towards Lincoln, hailing him not only as the man who kept the Union together, but in the process recognized that this was the moment to finally destroy the noxious institution of slavery, and labored to do so. It’s fairly hagiographic, at least as much as a modern writer can admit that anyone who died before us can have a shred of virtue. Meacham’s attitude is that while Lincoln was not the saint moderns might wish him to have been, he was all the saint it was possible to be in his time and circumstances. As such, the even-handedness from the Jackson biography is absent here: any opponent of Lincoln’s is a nogoodnik. Even the anti-war northern democrats, who protested the war in general and especially war measures like conscription and the like, are simply dismissed as allied with his enemies, and when listing the states that seceded Meacham does not bother to point out that the second wave, which would include many of the men who would frustrate the Union for years, did not happen until Lincoln called for troops to suppress the rebellion. (In the text they come off as being summoned to defend the Capital, surrounded as it was by hostile Maryland and Virginia.)
Fortunately for Meacham, his subject is inherently interesting: a poor Kentuckian turned Illinois rail-splitter was struck by ambition to be not only known, but unforgettable. Lincoln had a gift of gab — a quick wit and a sense of humor that made him both a good lawyer and an excellent political booster. According to Meacham, it was Stephen Douglas’ Kansas-Nebraska act that lured Lincoln fully into politics: he was so opposed to the potential for slavery’s expansion that he felt compelled to enter the arena. Although my libertarian politics do not allow me to give many laurels to Lincoln — he is one of the principle figures of the the Republic’s transition into the Dominion of DC — I cannot help but sympathize with him. I admire any man who shoots up from nothingness into national prominence through dogged hard work and ambition, and Lincoln served under the most dismal of circumstances. Not only did he inherit a country at war, but he was struggling with his own inner demons and would lose children in the process — and, when he’d finally neared the dawn of potential peace, a bitter actor shot him. Lincoln is a marvelously complex fellow, and I will not settle for just one book on him.
Do not be surprised to see Mr. Meacham again; I fully expect to read his biography of George H.W. Bush, which will be interesting since Bush Sr was my “childhood” president, and his face is the first that comes to mind when I think of The President — just as Queen II is always The Queen and John Paul II is always The Pope.
COMING UP: John Grisham’s The Widow and a radio adaptation of The Hobbit, if its obnoxious renderings of goblins and other monsters do not drive me to stop listening to it.
He looked at her the way all women want to be looked at by a man….
As ifThe Great Gatsby needed more drama! LA Theater Works’ The Great Gatsby is a condensed audio adaptation (2 hours) of Fitzgerald’s original that focuses primarily on the relationships between Nick Carraway, Jay Gatsby, Jordan Baker, Tom Buchanan, and — of course — Daisy Buchanan. It features an ensemble cast, with at least one recognizable name in Rufus Sewell. If you do not know his name, you probably know his face: he’s good at characters who stand partially in shadow and menace, like Alexander Hamilton in John Adams and John Smith in The Man in the High Castle. Here, he features as Jay Gatsby himself. My experience with this was conflicted: while it’s been nearly five years since I read the actual book, I did see the movie only a few months ago and retained a lot of familiarity with the characters and stories. I was thus mostly listening for the voice acting and sound design, both of which were quite good. I especially liked the atmospheric sound effects, like jazz music playing in the background of party scenes, highball glasses clinking when one character is prepping drinks, and phone conversations sounding like phone conversations. The Great Gatsby, for those unfamiliar, is the story of a young man named Nick who moves in next door to an eccentric and fabulously wealthy chap named Jay Gatsby; Gatsby has a little advanced knowledge of Nick in that he knows Nick has a cousin named Daisy. Gatsby, as it turns out, is madly in love with Daisy and dated her some years ago, only to lose her between war and his own poverty. Now he’s loaded, and he wants a second chance. Only problem? Daisy’s married. Drama ensues! I enjoyed this audio production, though I cannot say why the story haunts me so: most of the characters are horrid, but that’s the charm of art. Sometimes it resonates in ways and layers we can’t readily identify.
“So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”
Before the last month or so, my awareness of Stephen Douglas was that he had sparred against Abraham Lincoln in the Lincoln-Douglas debates. I did not realize until reading 1858 that these debates were not part of the 1860 presidential election, but were instead part of a Senate race. Douglas would win, but their very public debates gave Lincoln a larger stage — and they would be part of the wind that bore him towards Washington, along with Douglas’ inability to keep his increasingly polarized party on the same track. When Douglas learned that Lincoln had beaten him in the presidential race, he said — “I must go South.” Not because he wished to join the southern democrats in seceding, but to try to argue them out of it. In retrospect, that seems like a doomed mission: the South arrived at its Democratic convention spoiling for a split with their northern brothers — first in the party, and then in the union. “Three cheers for the Independent Southern Republic!”, they cried as they walked out of the convention hall and paraded down the street into another hotel. Chorus of the Union is a deep dive into Lincoln and Douglas’ history, and how (two-thirds of the way in) Douglas put his own politics aside in a last-ditch effort to prevent the breakup of the union and the possibility of civil war.
Stephen Douglas and Abraham Lincoln both made their political fortunes in Illinois, but were not native sons of the west; Douglas came west from Vermont, and Lincoln’s family from Kentucky — but they were part of a third generation in American politicians, and followed closely on the heels of prominent westerners like Henry Clay and Daniel Webster. The two knew each other from their young adult days, debating politics in the back rooms of stores — but Douglas sought political office and won great acclaim, while Lincoln served for a brief time to return to working as a lawyer. Interestingly, it was the one who made the other’s career. Lawyer Lincoln, raised by anti-slavery Baptists and deeply bothered by his few encounters with slave parties being transported along the river, was resolutely against the institution, and when Douglas championed an act — the Kansas-Nebraska act — that would effectively allow for its continued expansion, Lincoln rejoined politics as an active campaigner. The two would run against one another in 1860, but Douglas would be running against the disintegrating factions of his own party to boot. “The Democracy” had split first into northern and southern parties, and then into still other groups, to the effect that Lincoln would ultimately win despite only claiming 39% of the popular vote. After Douglas realized his candidacy was lost, he journeyed into the South hoping to argue against secession — and, McClelland marks, he took that danger far more seriously than the Republicans themselves. Lincoln and Douglas had made their careers in Illinois, a place that was divided itself between commercial and agricultural interests: Illinois’s southern third was commonly called Egypt for its rich river deltas that had attracted plantation culture early in its history. Both men were used to having to balance competing interests — but Douglas, unlike Lincoln, knew how ornery southerners could be.
The resulting third goes a long way to redeeming Douglas, I think. For most of the book, it is extremely easy to sort the two men into two very different buckets. Lincoln is the pragmatic idealist who hates slavery on moral grounds, is determinedly hopeful that it will die, but acknowledges that it cannot be done within the grounds of political reality. Douglas, however, is politics first: he may dislike slavery in an abstract way, but didn’t truly care about it one way or another. His focus was on maintaining the Democratic party — or The Democracy, as it was often known at this time — despite the fire and fury of abolitionists and secessionists alike. After the election, that shifted naturally to a fervent desire to maintain the Union. Douglas in this moment is not playing politics; he is traveling, arguing, and contending for his country, in a way that pushes him nearer to self-sacrifice than readers have yet seen. In his visits South, he denounced Lincoln and all the Republican party stood for, but maintained that the election of any one man could not justify the destruction of the Union. The Constitution itself, the powers of the States, would diminish Lincoln’s ability to act even if he entered office with a mission against the South. The South’s chances of preserving its interests are greater inside the Union than out, he said — and this proved to be true, since Northern states passed a great many laws (from intense protective tariffs and infrastructure bills to playing around with fiat currency) that would have never passed a Congress in which Southern states had a voice. Amusingly, while in Nashville Douglas crossed paths with the arch-fire eater Yancey, who had just been visiting the North to dissuade them from voting Lincoln! Douglas ventured even into Montgomery, Alabama, Yancey’s stomping grounds and the first home of the southern Confederacy: there, his carriage was pelted with eggs, though he did give a speech before departing downriver to Selma. He returned to Washington to help argue for legislation that might pacify the fears of the South, though nothing was able to be passed before Congress’s session ended. After the war began in earnest, Douglas traveled through the north, admonishing his fellow citizens to rally around the president — and in the summer of 1861, his health spent in his impassioned pleas to Americans north and south, he died in his hotel room while still on the mission.
This was quite the book. I’d gotten into it because I was intrigued by the notion of Douglas standing by his former opponent. This is not that unusual in politics — John Quincy Adams and Henry Clay both backed Jackson against the French when they were being obnoxious deadbeats, and those dons hated Old Hickory — but given the stakes involved I wanted to read more about it. Having read a few other books in this subject in the last few months made the revisit somewhat laborious at first — especially the level of detail that McClelland gets into with the Debates — but seeing Douglas really come into his own in the last third made the march worth it. This is also as close as I’ve gotten (so far) to a proper biography of Lincoln, though one will follow this, and it made me more appreciative of Lincoln’s gift for humor — though his constant jokes about Douglas’ height make him seem a little mean-spirited at times. What I liked most about it beyond Douglas rising to the occasion beyond the pettiness of party politics was getting a rare look into political goings-on during the “secession winter” in which the US government as it stood, and Lincoln’s slowly-forming team, pondered what course to take following South Carolina & company’s decision to start singing a new descant. This is slightly wonkish at times, but serious students of the period will delight in the detail, and more casual ones can still endure given McClelland’s accessible writing style.
Quotations
“You can’t overturn a pyramid, but you can undermine it,” Lincoln told Locke, “that’s what I have been trying to do.”
Lincoln was not yet Douglas’s equal as a political operator, but the debates had proven he was Douglas’s intellectual superior. Lincoln was better read, for one thing. Not only had he read more widely than Douglas, he knew how to read. When Douglas studied history—as he had done for the first time while researching the Harper’s essay—he sought only to validate his own beliefs.
“The gentleman forgets to tell the ladies that he is a bachelor,” Thomas Craig of Missouri ribbed Cochrane. The proceedings broke up for several minutes, as the entire hall burst into laughter. “I was about to inform the ladies,” Cochrane said, attempting to defend himself. Craig had another riposte ready. “Oh, no matter! There is no need to volunteer the announcement, for the looks of the gentleman are a sufficient guarantee that he has not been, and never can become a married man.”
“Mr. Lincoln is the next president,” Douglas told his secretary, James B. Sheridan. “We must try to save the Union. I will go south.”
“I reply that if they elect Mr. Lincoln, on their heads rests the responsibility,” Douglas blustered. “No man on Earth has exerted his energies so much to defeat Lincoln’s election as I have. No man on Earth would regret his election more than I would. I regard him as the head of a party, the whole principles of which are subversive of the Constitution and the Union. I would regard his election as a great public calamity, but not as a cause of breaking up this government. e election of no man on Earth by the people, according to the Constitution, is a cause of breaking up this government.”
As Lincoln held court, in an armchair too commodious for even his gangly frame, a visitor from New York asked whether the South would secede if he were elected. “They might make a little stir about it before,” Lincoln said, still uncomprehending of the passion his candidacy had aroused in the South, “but if they wait until after the inauguration and for some overt act, they will wait all their lives.”
While Douglas’s support was broader than any candidate’s, nowhere was it as deep. In 1860, the electorate was polarized between Northerners who wanted to stop the spread of slavery and Southerners who demanded its expansion. Douglas, who based his campaign on the principle that the federal government should not take either side, was rejected by majorities in both sections.
“It is not of your professions we complain,” James Seddon told Lincoln. “It is of your sins of omission—of your failure to enforce the laws—to suppress your John Browns and your Garrisons, who preach insurrection and make war upon our property!” “I believe John Brown was hung and Mr. Garrison imprisoned,” Lincoln retorted.
“Civil war must now come,” the Richmond Enquirer editorialized the morning after. “Sectional war, declared by Mr. Lincoln, waits only the signal gun from the insulted Southern Confederacy, to light its horrid fires along the borders of Virginia.”
Reading Freely 