Transcripts For CSPAN2 Wrestling With His Angel 20170520 : v

Within your means please pot buy books at the book tent. This festival is free to all of us, but book sales are important because it helps publishers and convinces them to send their authors to the book festival and we would like to continue to make this festival grow. Its now my great privilege to introduce our speaker, Sidney Blumenthal was the former assistant and Senior Advisor to president bill clinton and Senior Advisory to Hillary Clinton and began his career as a journalist and has been an National Staff reporter for the washington post. Washington editor and staff writer for the new yorker and Senior Writer for the new republic as well as contributor to many other publications. He has also written several bestsellers, the clinton wars, rise of the counter establishment and the Permanent Campaign and has worked in television and film was executive producer for the Academy Awards taxi to the dark side. He is here with us today to talk about his newest book, wrestling with his angel the political life of Abraham Lincoln. It is the second in a four volume series. He was here last year to talk about the first book. The power of this series is the detailed analysis, not only of the president to lincoln, but the decisions that were made that affect the course of our history. So often those details are left out of the history books or at best just a footnote, but to fully understand the complexities of major historical events such as the movement to end slavery or the seemingly inevitable decision for one fraction number country to take up arms against another part of the country, those decisions and those details, we need to look at those more deeply in terms of political climate, what the personality is involved, the alliances made and betrayed along the way so we can only fully appreciate those details when we look more deeply as mr. Blumenthal has done. We have to wait for the train. Excuse me. Its one of the beauties of gaithersburg is that you get the train going by ever so often. So, when we think about him or her when we think about Abraham Lincoln we think of him as a fully formed a leader that brought our country back after the civil war in this book along with the first volume gives us a detailed account of how lincoln actually becomes lincoln, the leader who we now envision. 150 years from now someone is going to write a book about the 2016 election. [laughter] lets hope the writer is as committed to telling the full story of the 45th president as Sidney Blumenthal has so doubtfully given as number 16. Thank you. [applause]. Thank you very much for that kind introduction. Im delighted to be here at the gaithersburg book festival, which is a terrific events, not only for gaithersburg and maryland, but for the entire washington area. Its a really unique event and im glad you are all here. I was here last year in torrential rainstorm and there were a lot of brave souls who still came and i delighted that you are here now to hear a few words about our 16th president , Abraham Lincoln. This is the second volume in my four volume series on the political life of Abraham Lincoln. This a volume takes lincoln from the entrance of his political wilderness to his emergence as the man who we can see is Abraham Lincoln and i like to read and this is my poor imitation of charles dickens. Since i have a captive audience i will read a little and then i will take any questions you might have hurt i find your questions more interesting than anything because people often have the important insights into our politics and questions about lincoln. The more time i have spent with Abraham Lincoln and i have never been i have been right now, for about 10 years and the more i have come to understand that his words and actions with a careful result of his intense selfdiscipline. The silences that his law partner and friends described as his melancholy were also a masks massacres concentration, intellectual absorption and focus. His depression and other feelings deepened his selfawareness and spurred his selfeducation. Lincoln, after all, had only a few weeks of a formal education and the bad informed his acute understanding of human nature and politics. Even when his life seemed to have been reduced to insignificance he was scamming the herat scanning the horizon and interpreting its assigns. The Young Lincoln in his first formal speech as a springfield illinois in 1838 could see a crisis to come. At what point, then is the approach of danger to be expected, he said. I am certain if it ever reach us, its a must spring up among us and cannot come from abroad. If destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its authors and finisher. My book, wrestling with his angel, which is a title taken from the biblical story of jacob who wrestled through a long night and found himself at the end and assumed a new name, the name israel. Describe lincoln dark night of his soul, lincoln coming to his revelation of a house divided from which he emerged as the recognizable lincoln of history and he would be that man until his assassination. Actor Abraham Lincolns one term in congress where he lived in a boarding house that is now the site of a library of Congress Facing the capital and his return to his law office in springfield he stared into the distance for long periods of time. His partner, William Henry herndon recalled him breaking one of his prolonged silences with the cry of anguish, the political world was dead herndon road. Things were snagged that and ill hope for progress in the light of freedom seemed to be crushed out. Lincoln was speculating with me about the deadness of things and the despair which arose out of it and deeply regretting that his human strength and power were limited by his nature to rouse and stir of the world. He said gloomily, despairingly, sadly oh, how hard it is to die and leave at once country know better if one had never lived for it. The world is dead to hope. Death to its own death struggle. May know by universal cry, what is to be done, is anything to be done . Who can do anything and how is it to be done . Did you ever think of these things . And so lincoln in the depths of his depression almost as soon as lincoln return it to springfield , his wife mary todd lincoln, sent him around back on a mission to her hometown of lexington, kentucky, to serve as the cocounsel to recover the todd family fortune, which was considerable. Lincoln found himself thrust into the vortex of his native states politics in 1849, which were turned into a Mortal Kombat between proslavery and anti slavery forces. The lawsuits and the politics were intertwined, so if you will follow these threads now. For nearly a decade marys father, john asked todd, henry clays Business Partner and political ally had tried to rest the todd estate from robert woodcliff who would marry a cousin of john todd named polly todd. She had held that the state, but passed away. Woodcliff inherited the todd estate, all the land, all the money. Woodcliff also was not so incidentally the leader of a proslavery movement in kentucky. John todd ready for the state senate against that movement, though he was a slaveholder himself was demonized as an abolitionist. In the mill of the campaign in july 1849 he died of cholera. Lincoln arrived to pursue the familys case in october. Just in time to observe the proslavery movement triumphantly rewrite the state constitution to eliminate the kentucky law prohibiting the slave trade within the state. Lincoln lost the case and the todd family as the estate to woodcliff. At the very same moment that the political legacy of henry clay lincolns early though i did have a and marys fathers legacy were destroyed. If of those events were not sufficiently invigorating, there was another factor profound but concealed and lincoln certainly knew it was. From memoirs journals and pamphlets at the time, a mystery underlines the child todd are casey merges. It was the todd family secret. There was in fact a living error year, polly todds grandson, the only child of her son who had died and at a relatively young age. This error was not legally a person under the law because he was, in fact, a slave. He had been emancipated and shipped to liberia. In 1878, many years later this former slave, the invisible man of the story whose name was Alfred Francis russell was elected the Vice President of liberia. In 1883, he became its president mary todds second relation to become a president. Back in illinois, from kentucky lincoln spoke with john todd stewarts, his first law partner and early political mentor who was a conservative old whig. The time would sue, in which we must be democrats or abolitionists said stuart and stewart would eventually join the democrats. When that time comes my mind is made up can replied. The slavery question cannot be compromised. Lincoln added that stewart added that lincoln spoke in an emphatic tone. Lincoln further expressed to many of his friends his anger at the writing slave power he had observed in kentucky. He was livid that an anti slavery whig lawyer he knew there, Samuel Miller have been driven out of the state for his views. Lincoln would appoint him to the supreme court. Lincoln described young, thoughtless, giddy slaveholders with slaves trudging behind them the most glittering ostentatious and displayed property in the world. Lincoln would get excited on the question, said one of his friends, and believed the tendency of the times was to make slavery universal. He told another friend in a few years we will be ready to accept the institution in illinois and the whole country will adopt it. The todd are case with its Hidden History left lincoln smoldering in private until he stepped onto the public stage five years later, but the time for lincoln to step forward had not come, not yet. Lincoln would remain a whig. The whig party was the party of lincoln. For several more years before finally deciding that he had to become Something Else or disappear along with the whigs. His own political prospects were dimming while those of his rival , senator stephen a douglas were lighting up the sky. Lincoln was not an abolitionist. But, he was and as he insisted naturally antislavery. His deepening understanding of slavery in its full complexity as a moral, political and constitutional dilemma began in his childhood among the primitive baptist anti slavery discontents in backwoods kentucky in indiana whose churches his parents attended. As a boy he wrote row down the Mississippi River to new orleans where the open air emporium of slaves on a gaudy display shocked him. As a congressman, he lived in a boarding house known as abolition house. He experienced the invasion of slave catchers coming to seize one of the waiters as a fugitive slave. Undoubtedly, lincoln knew the secret of the house where he lived across from the capital that it was a station in the underground railroad. He denounced the mexican war as fraudulently started and voted numerous times against the expansion of slavery in the new western territories that had been seized in the war. With the quiet assistance of the leading abolitionist in the congress he drafted a bill for a massive patient in the district of columbia which never received even a single hearing in the house of representatives and then he came home to an obscurity that seemed as though it would never end. Suddenly in 1854 the once and future rivals of lincoln come mind to go to smithereens the cornerstone of political peace. Senator douglas, seeking a gesture that would carry him to the democratic president ial nomination combined with secretary of war under Franklin Pierce Jefferson Davis of mississippi. Are two slaveholding wealth and the de facto acting president of the United States operating behind the week lane president pierce. They converged in their collaboration on the kansas nebraska act. That act repealed the missouri compromise that forbidden slavery north of the line of a middle latitude through the country that it prohibited slavery towards its north and now its repealed made possible the extension of slavery to the west. In a stroke, the old political order cracked apart. We were thunderstruck and stunned and weaver yield and fell another confusion, said lincoln, describing the atmosphere of the early resistance, but we each rose fighting, grasping whatever he could first reach aside, a pitchfork, chopping ax orbiters cleaver, we struck in the direction of the south. In two brief autobiographies that lincoln put out during his 1860 president ial campaign he depicted himself in this wilderness period as strangely content in a kind of internal exile, becoming nearly indifferent to politics, immersed in his legal practice. He told the Chicago Tribune in 1854, his profession meaning lincolns profession as a lawyer had almost superseded the thought of politics in his mind when the repeal of the missouri compromise aroused him as he had never been before. It was at about this juncture in lincolns career that herndon, his law partner wrote of his partners ambition. That man who thinks lincoln calmly said down and gathered his robes about him waiting for the people to call has a very erroneous knowledge of lincoln. He was always calculated and always planning ahead. s ambition was a little engine that knew no rest. Now, lincoln still clung to the home of the sinking whig party that broke into northern and southern wings. He held onto it longer than some others, but he also knew that a new Coalition Must be organized. In this period of party chaos he cast himself into the world when he studied. He disciplined himself. He read and then he wrote a long speech. He sequestered himself in the library of the state capital as he drafted the speech against the canned the kansas nebraska act. Stepping under the podium to speak in the illinois hall of representatives on october 4, 1864, he never again left the stage of history. Lincoln, the defender of the declaration of independence and this idea that all men are created equal invoked the blood of the revolution, the american revolution. Lincoln, the shakespearean pointed to the moral wrong of slavery quoting from macbeth like the bloody hand you may wash it and wash it. The red witness of guilt still sticks and the stairs horribly at you. Now, in this chaotic period many movements swirled across the landscape, movements born against slavery, against immigrants and against liquor. These many movements compounded the development of one big antislavery coalition. Lincoln felt that he could not then draw it all together. Some people in the Abolitionist Movement understood that a more proficient and gifted political figure was required to draw the elephants together that brought them to ask lincoln to lead them , but he dodged them. He went out of town on a long case. In retrospect, his closest contemporaries lincolns whole life was a calculation of the vase of the forces and ultimate results. The question of cause and effect reflected his friends the illinois lawyer and fellow whig member, he believed the results to which certain causes tended would certainly follow. He did not believe that those results could be materially hastened or impeded. His whole political history, especially since the agitation of the slavery question has been based upon this theory. Another man who knew lincoln very well, john w bone, a springfield merchant who happened to find lincolns campaign, there was a lot of Campaign Fundraising even then. Judge lincoln, unique among politicians. Lincolns entire career proves that it is quite possible for a man to be a droit and skillful and effective in politics without in any degree sacrificing moral principles. Little man try to do the same thing he did and make very bad work of it. They lack the high moral inspiration that animated lincoln. For the years lincoln had turned over in his mind the menace of slavery to democracy until in 1855 he envisioned the prospect of what might come. I think that there is no peaceful extinction of slavery and prospect for us. He wrote the cocounsel in the tidier case, a kentucky judge named robertson, lincoln and on the single failure of henry clay another good and great men in 1849 to affect anything in favor of gradual emancipation in kentucky together with a thousand other signs distinguishes that hope utterly. At the same time, another complicating factor entered into the equation between 1845 in 18543000000 immigrants arrive on these shores. The first great wave of immigration about 40 were poor irish plane the potato family. About 40 were germans fleeing the failed liberal revolution of 1848. Conservative protestants view the irish especially as a source of crime, corruption and poverty. Both the irish and germans were beer drinkers. A habits that aroused temperance crusaders to condemn them as drunken, lazy and sinful. A new party arose. It was called the know Nothing Party pick the know nothing gave their name because they were a secret lodge and when anyone who is a member was asked if they were if they belonged to the know nothings they were to reply i know nothing. It sprang from a small anti immigrant native sect in new york city called the order of the starspangled banner. Within months after the 1852 election it attracted an estimated membership of more than a million. Its program held one that only nativeborn protestants could hold Public Office in the United States. Its slogan, americans only shall govern america. As the crisis deepened lincoln wondered how he could be effective in fighting slavery while maintaining his identity in the crumbling whig party and all of these various movements were swirling around him. On august 24, 1855, lincoln wrote his intimate friend joshua speed with whom he had shared