Wei Wei /Translated by Du Hua/Proofreader
Between 2016 and 2019, Sidney Blumenthal, a well-known American journalist and writer, published three volumes of Lincoln's biography, A Self-Made Man: The Political Life of Abraham Lincoln, 1809–1849, Simon & 1849 Schuster, 2016), Wrestling With His Angel: The Political Life of Abraham Lincoln, 1849-1856, Simon & Schuster, 2017), All Powers on Earth: Lincoln's Political Life, 1856-1860 (All the Powers of Earth: The Political Life of Abraham Lincoln , 1856-1860, Simon & Schuster, 2017)。 This article is a book review written by Matthew Carp, associate professor of history at Princeton University, for the first two volumes, the original text was published in National magazine, with the author's permission, translated by Wei Wei of Wuhan University, and proofread by Associate Professor Du Hua.
Lincoln worked to reshape the center of [political power]—not to succumb to it.
—Matthew Karp
Lincoln
Abraham Lincoln's life was filled with a great deal of contradictions. Born in an obscure and desperate impoverished home in Kentucky, he died a world icon. The emperors from Brazil to Turkey sounded the death knell for him. Later, even Japanese sugar workers in Hawaii and anti-colonial activists in Ghana saw him as an inspiring spiritual leader. Throughout his life, he was plagued by a lack of education. By middle age, he was a member of the state legislature, but still spelled the word "Very" with two "Rs." But to this day, Lincoln is often hailed as the most literary president in our history, a poet who wrote about the American spirit in a concise and natural language.
Lincoln's life was full of personal tragedies. He lost his mother at the age of 9, his only sister at the age of 19, his fiancée at the age of 26, and two more children in middle age. Lincoln had strong tendencies to be depressed. Still, he adhered to a political philosophy that could only be called extreme optimism, characterized by a conviction for the coherence between moral development and material progress, and an optimistic belief that the "central idea" of American life was "equality for all." He has dedicated much of his career to dusty village courts and mediocre local politics. Eventually, he led the greatest political revolution in American history, and the great social revolution that followed. This bloody change has transformed 4 million Americans from private property to human beings.
From a basic dramatic point of view, Lincoln's life is the material that many biographers dream of. WorldCat lists nearly 24,000 books on Lincoln, more than the total number of books on George Washington and Adolf Hitler. But writing about his personal life also presents a huge challenge: how to strike a balance between his authentic and appealing mundaneity and his extraordinary career. As Walt Whitman put it, "A man who has an extraordinary career experiences the most mundane of life." For the first 45 years of his life, Lincoln left behind many images: a poor farm boy in Indiana, a hardline Whig politician in Springfield, and a hot railroad lawyer at the Illinois Circuit Court. But strictly speaking, these characters have little to do with the drama that tore apart the Federation and made Lincoln a symbol of human liberation in world history.
A Self-Made Man: 1809-1849 and Wrestling With His Angel: 1849-1856 are the first two books of Sidney Blumenthal's four-volume study of Abraham Lincoln's political career. They cleverly solve these difficult problems with a sophisticated strategy. His study of Lincoln is not a pure biography, but more like what readers of 19th-century American history understand as "life and times": a comprehensive account of the pre-War politics of the United States, in which our hero Lincoln played only intermittently and importantly. While other biographers have recently been digging inward, or exploring the social world of central Illinois, or looking for Lincoln's complex inner world, Blumenthal has been constantly jumping outwards, providing detailed images of major events in political life at the state and national levels: the ification crisis of 1832; the annexation of Texas in 1845; and the compromise in 1850. Lincoln's main rival in Illinois, Democratic leader Stephen Douglas, was sometimes given almost equal weight (in Blumenthal's pen); Lincoln's rivals or allies, from William Seward to Jefferson Davis, received extra attention.
This profound context is important to Blumenthal because the guiding point of his biography is that Lincoln, as a great statesman, and Lincoln, as an insignificant politician, are the same person. In fact, there is a myth in Lincoln's research that draws a line between upright Abel (Lincoln's nickname) and dirty everyday politics, but Blumenthal has no patience for this. He wrote in the book: "Lincoln never believed that politics would corrupt him. He has always believed that politics is the only way to realize his principles. Blumenthal argues that if we want to understand Lincoln, we must understand the pre-American Civil War world of political conflict: chaos, hostility, unemployment, corruption, but it is still an arena for a major struggle for America's future. Blumenthal explained: "Without the statesman Lincoln, the great liberator Lincoln would never have existed. ”
Of course, in a way, this can be seen as Blumenthal's self-aggrandizing interpretation of 19th-century America: politicians before the American Civil War rarely match the author's credentials as an insider. Since the 1990s, Blumenthal's career has been characterized by proximity to the centers of power, big men like Bill Clinton and Hillary Clinton. As a reporter for the New Yorker, an adviser to the White House, and a newly high-paying employee of the Clinton Foundation (though mission unclear), Blumenthal has been the most aggressive and talkative loyal supporter of Bill and Hillary —half attendant and half commander.— He often uttered a few compliments or thrown out mouth-watering suggestions in the Courtyard of the White House, relying in most cases on his image as a staunch, but perhaps not overly cautious, defender of the Clinton camp to gain a foothold.
Blumenthal relished political struggles and often used harsh quips to describe them. He gave a brief portrayal of the alleged weak participants in the political struggle and broadly divided them into four categories: Gerrit Smith, a well-known American politician and abolitionist whose three presidential bids ended in failure, were dismissed as "delusional ... Millard Fillmore (the thirteenth president of the United States, indifferent to slavery, who later commented on it as mixed) was "surprisingly boring" and gave the impression of "an incompetent man" whose "vanity outweighed mediocre qualifications"; and the obese and unimaginative Democrat Lewis Cass (former secretary of war and ambassador to France, U.S. Senator and U.S. Secretary of State, who held an anti-slavery stance and was defeated in 1848 as a Democratic candidate, was described as "inert and unresponsive."
But what really sets Blumenthal's analysis apart is that he sees politics as a relentless war on public opinion. In 1844, for example, Congressman John Quincy Adams rushed to the State Department and accused Secretary of State John C. Calhoun of misusing census data in order to include pro-slavery rhetoric in his official documents. Blumenthal scathing remarked: "Adams' merciless humiliation of Calhoun exposed his intellectual and political inferiority to a crowd consisting mainly of his supporters, though he himself was touched and relieved... But it didn't resonate with the public. For Blumenthal, this moral and intellectual manifestation has absolutely no effect on the masses, or even political action.
Thus, Blumenthal praised Lincoln's oratory not because of its sheer philosophical power, but because of the political effect it achieved. Unlike John Quincy Adams, Blumenthal's Lincoln "was always strategic and strategic." He was thoughtful, methodical, meticulous, careful, and every word he uttered was intended to have a political impact."
To describe Lincoln's mastery of popular rhetoric, Blumenthal offers a large number of vivid interpretations of Lincoln's speech and writing, many of them insightful and profound. In almost all interpretations, Blumenthal places context before the text. For example, in a famous 1838 Speech at Springfield College, the young Lincoln worried about whether a "remarkable genius" might subvert American democracy. Blumenthal interpreted it as an ironic warning that the five-foot-tall Stephen Douglas could become Napoleon of the Illinois Democratic Party. Lincoln gave his first major anti-slavery speech 15 years later, also at Springfield. Blumenthal noted that the speech was not only an ethical argument for human equality or a constitutional case of the restriction of slavery, but also a fundamental "strategic" effort to "blend" the different factions that held views against slavery into a coherent and practical opposition.
Blumenthal's approach has its advantages as well as its drawbacks. His focus on context sometimes belies the deeper ideological competition in political struggles: we know a lot about tactics and layout, but less about the world different fighters are trying to build. In addition, he created a narrative mode that intermittently and quickly travels through scenes of American history in the mid-19th century. In addition, in each of Blumenthal's first two books, one chapter deviates from the subject; each chapter has a passage off the subject; and each paragraph is interspersed with parentheses that deviate from the subject. Some of these off-topics are worth it, such as Blumenthal's use of legal disputes over The Inheritance of Mary Tood to recount the tragic demise of anti-slavery politics in Kentucky before the Civil War. Other off-topics, including sensational reports of Mormon political activity in Illinois, are mostly derived from outdated second-hand sources and are less appealing. Blumenthal's endless parentheses are crammed with quirky fragments of the political genealogy that ultimately exhaust the reader's patience.
Sometimes, the accumulation of narratives makes the reader feel less like he's drawing nourishment from a masterpiece of American politics than being held down in the corner of a smoky room by an excited, manic, rambling party leader, and in between sipping whiskey, he might delight his audience with a story about how Kentucky's abolitionists sheathed their pistol bullets and then cut off the attacker's ears. But it's also possible that he told you for the third time about a surprising act behind the scenes that led Millard Fillmore to replace Abbott Lawrence as the Whig candidate in 1848.
The bigger problem is that a biography of Abraham Lincoln, no matter how widespread, can easily cover the areas that Blumenthal really wanted to explore: the collapse of the American party system and the emergence of large-scale anti-slavery political organizations. The problem is that Lincoln didn't make the Republican Party; it's closer to the truth that the Republican Party made Lincoln. In a way, Blumenthal's detailed account of Lincoln's political career before 1854 illustrates this view with great clarity.
From the moment he entered politics at the age of 23 as a candidate for the Illinois Legislature, Lincoln devoted himself to opposing Andrew Jackson's Democrats. Early in his political career, Lincoln's style was very eccentric. Friends recalled that he was a "clumsy- and rough-looking guy" whose pants were six inches above his shoes. This style is even more impressive than his specific political views. But Lincoln's politics was always full of partisan and ideological character. He was first and foremost an assistant to Henry Clay, and for a full twenty years he was a loyal and zealous Whig. As leader of the state legislature in the 1830s and leader of the Illinois Whig Party in the 1840s, Lincoln dedicated the best of his youth to the Whigs' economic plans: defending banks, tariffs, railroads, and canals, and opposing Jackson's attempts to subvert them.
To be sure, Lincoln silently fostered more radical convictions. "I've always hated slavery," he told an audience in Chicago in 1858, "and I think as much as any abolitionist." Blumenthal valued this personal belief, tracing the impact of anti-slavery ideas on the Lincoln family's emigration from Kentucky and convincingly arguing that Lincoln's experience as a teenager as a indentured farm worker in Indiana fueled his "irrepressible hatred" of this particular system.
However, for the first 45 years of Lincoln's life, the gap between personal and political life was difficult to widen. Lincoln's hatred of slavery may not have been stifled, but it must have been suppressed under the weight of Whig principles. Although the young Lincoln found some sporadic opportunities to highlight his anti-slavery leanings, he became more involved in national political activities that necessarily involved attacks on abolitionists, sometimes accusing his opponents of supporting "black suffrage" or similar intimidation measures, as he had done in the 1840 presidential campaign.
The Whigs were a national political organization, which meant that slave owners in the South formed a key group of Whig voters and an important faction of the Whig leadership. Lincoln's "ideal statesman" Henry Clay, the Whig hero, was a slave owner. Clay was known as a great compromiser who crafted regional bargaining agreements that saved the Union from disintegration time and time again. Clay's approach to the problem was based on the exclusion of slavery from national politics. But there was one group with whom Clay never compromised, and that was the abolitionist group. He declared in 1850 that abolitionists were striking the sacrosanct foundations of private property with "crazy, reckless, hateful theories."
Perhaps the most dramatic event in Lincoln's Whig party career occurred in 1842, when Hames Shields, an auditor for the Democratic Party in Illinois, proposed a duel to Lincoln. Lincoln chose the broadsword as his weapon and chose Albert Taylor Bledsoe, a Whig-born in Kentucky, as his assistant. Bledsoe later moved to Mississippi and became a major slave advocate. The duel was eventually canceled, but before that, Lincoln spent several afternoons practicing swordplay with the future Confederate War Assistant. The great goal that brought Lincoln and Bledsoe together— and the question that initially raised the challenge — was the common belief of the Whigs that paper money issued by the Illinois Bank should be used to pay state taxes. Although the enslaved population of the United States doubled between 1820 and 1850, these financial arguments, rather than the fundamental question of man as property, occupied most of Lincoln's Whig political career.
In his narrative, Blumenthal seems to be tired of the political timidity of Lincoln's protagonist, so he fast-forwards time to the future from time to time. The Story of The Self-Made Man: 1809-1849 ends in 1849, but it quotes extensively from Lincoln's later, greater periods, namely, Lincoln's remarks as a Republican in the 1850s or Lincoln's struggle against slavery with the Union Army in the 1860s, rather than Lincoln's remarks as a Whig in the 1840s. As a Whig, Lincoln's anti-slavery sentiments did not determine his political activities, and could only decorate them on certain occasions. Radical change is therefore necessary to change this situation.
This political revolution is the subject of Blumenthal's second book. Blumenthal imitated Lincoln's favorite writer Shakespeare, placing a large number of theatrical characters in front of each book. But his lengthy book is less narrative than Macbeth or Hamlet, but more like the American Civil War version of Game of Thrones. Running through the text is the different factions of the Jackson and Clay families vying for power in the capital, even as a more desperate, fundamental struggle — about the future of slavery and freedom on the North American continent — has begun to take shape.
Blumenthal presented his second book in this way: "Shocking deaths, deadly compromises, devastating defeats, corrupt deals, shameless betrayals, reckless ambitions, these precursors of civil war are all woven into the clamor of political upheaval." The ups and downs of the commanders... On the western plains, a primitive battlefield was cleared, democracy was trampled under the guise of popular sovereignty, and mobs and pilgrims were armed to fight slavery to the death. "You can almost hear the flapping of the dragon's wings.
Objectively speaking, when asked to describe the war between slavery and freedom, Lincoln himself preferred to use this primary language. "The days of compromise are over," he told his legal partner William Herndon, "and these two great ideas were separated by the most ingenious means." They are like two beasts, visible to each other, but locked apart by chains. Someday, one of these two deadly rivals will break the connection between them, and then the problem will be solved. ”
The political changes of the 1850s unshackled the two beasts and opened a struggle. This struggle shattered the party system, sparked civil war, and ultimately destroyed slavery itself. However, as Blumenthal explains, the events that sparked the revolution began with the ambitions of politicians, not the incitement of radicals. Stephen Douglas wanted to unite and control the divided Democratic Party, which prompted him to push for a bill establishing Nebraska territory in 1854. At the instigation of slave leaders in Washington, D.C., Douglas agreed to use the Kansas-Nebraska Act to repeal the Missouri Compromise and essentially remove all legal restrictions on the westward expansion of slavery. He knew the bill would spark a "hellish storm," but to Douglas's surprise, the storm was more violent than expected— it destroyed the Whigs in the North and provoked cautious men like Lincoln to join the new Republican Party.
Of course, that's only half the story. Why would opponents of slavery make the most of the Kansas-Nebraska Act and the ensuing atrocities? As Blumenthal acknowledges, this part of the narrative focuses not on loyal party supporters like Lincoln, but on bolder, more experimental anti-slavery politicians like Salmon Chase in Ohio and Henry Wilson in Massachusetts. As Lincoln struggled under the banner of the Whigs, these third-party radicals developed constitutional theories and political tactics that equipped anti-slavery forces to help them launch the Republican Party in 1854 and control mainstream politics.
Since the early 1840s, as a member of the Liberty Party, a small abolitionist party, Chase has struggled to reorient American politics around the fundamental issue of slavery. Chase and his allies argued that most Northerners were opposed to the expansion of slavery in the West and could build an anti-slave-owning party on the basis of this firm and silent majority. They believed that a commitment never to expand slavery could help an anti-slavery party win the vote, overthrow Washington's so-called Slave Sovereign power (Salve Power), and prepare for a political struggle against slavery in the South.
While Blumenthal discusses the political tactics of these abolitionist movements, unfortunately his view of the broader Struggle against Slavery in the United States is narrow. He described some of the most dramatic quilombone controversies that plagued the North after the Federal Fugitive Slave Act of 1850. But he did not see the fugitives themselves, or the black and white abolitionists who helped them, as important political players. Blumenthal ridiculed the "absolutism and sectarianism" of radicals like William Lloyd Garrison and Frederic Douglass, indulging in the naïve view of the relationship between social movements and political change by sophisticated Politburo insiders. He also ignores recent academic research that underscores the widespread democratic commitment of abolitionists and the important role they played in mobilizing and sustaining a pre-civil war anti-slavery view in the pre-Civil War period. Blumenthal makes a senseless contrast between Lincoln's unpretentious realism and the "high-profile moral preaching of abolitionists." In fact, he ignores precisely what set the 1850s apart most was the rare and profound agreement between political radicals and radical social activists: this is what Charles Sumner meant by what he called the larger "anti-slavery cause," which extended from Lincoln to Frederick Douglas.
It is a political history of politicians. For the politicians themselves, however, Blumenthal did what he said. Although Lincoln did not initiate a large-scale abolitionist movement, when it arose in 1854, he soon became one of the indispensable leaders of the movement: "At first he avoided them," Blumenthal writes, "but then he began to lead them again." Lincoln's historical task was to grasp the constitutional edifice constructed by Chase and others, to strengthen the democratic forces it needed, and to forge the new majority they envisioned. To this end, he gave a series of splendid speeches in which he drew on all the rhetorical and strategic resources he had accumulated during his pre-civil war political career. Lincoln selectively, but effectively, roamed through history to prove that "our revolutionary forefathers" did indeed fight to end slavery. He cloaked philosophical principles in plain language: "What I will say is that no man is good enough to rule over others without their consent." Above all, he linked the struggle against the slave-owning class to the broader cause of mass democracy. The expansion of slavery, as Lincoln wrote, "deprived the first few of the many who later had the right to exercise their autonomy freely."
In the pre-American Civil War situation, this was a revolutionary political project. Republicans sought to curb slavery and eventually isolate or even end it. As Lincoln put it in 1858, slavery was put on the path of "eventual demise." In the decades leading up to the Civil War, this commitment to abolition existed only in the political factions of the far left in the United States (as recently as 1852, the Free Land Party with a similar abolitionist program attracted only 4.9 percent of the national vote). However, as Blumenthal points out, with the new Republican Party, "issues that were once on the fringes and periphery may be brought into a new political center."
This is worth emphasizing in the light of Blumenthal's own political career. In the 1850s, the centrist position was straightforward: the Missouri Compromise was restored unchanged, without adding any empty words about overthrowing slave power or stopping slave expansion. For The pre-Civil War Dick Morris or Mark Penn, the road is obvious, and the path to electoral victory is clear. But Lincoln worked hard to reshape the political center — even under its unshakable weight. On the question of the future of slavery, Lincoln became a great uncompromising man.
"Lincoln," Blumenthal wrote, "always wanted to win. However, as this set of writings shows, after 1854, he did not want to win simply by being elected president. He hopes to win by changing the world— affirming what he calls "slavery itself is a great injustice" and expelling the slave-owning aristocracy that rules the United States.
The tedious art of partisan politics helped Lincoln lead the Republican Party, but it couldn't explain why the Republican Party was so focused on slavery and so stubbornly opposed to compromise. For Republican Lincoln, political victory did not mean embracing the ideas of opponents or developing a "third way" to gain power between abolishing or preserving slavery; rather, it meant rallying a democratic majority based on a possible idea of sharing. This requires change, not left and right. Eventually, it sparked a revolution.
Editor-in-Charge: Yu Shujuan
Proofreader: Yijia Xu