To make a monetary contribution to the Abraham Lincoln institute to fund next years symposium. You can see any board member of the ali to make a donation. We are wearing these badges. Or, you can visit our website to donate. Toonline lincolninstitute. Org, and you can look for the date of our next symposium. Wish you a safe ride home, whether your journey as long or short, and look forward to seeing you next year. We will reassemble across the street at 5 30. Thank you all for coming. [applause] you dont have to invite me. Earlier this month, fords theater hosted a symposium on the life and legacy of president Abraham Lincoln. Coming up on American History tv, we will hear from Sidney Blumental, the author of a selfmade man. Then remarks from edna greene medford. Later, we will hear from the author of mary lincoln, southern girl, northern woman. Cspans washington journal, live every day with news and policy issues that impact you. Coming up thursday morning, sarah warbalo, legal director for the human rights campaign, and tim schultz, president of First Amendment partnership will discuss religious freedom laws in several states and the pushback from opponents who view laws as discriminatory. Then alex rogers with the National Journal will be on to talk about the gop president ial candidates efforts to woo unbound delegates, a process that could determine whether republicans will need to go past a first ballot at a president ial nominating convention for the first time in more than 70 years. Be sure to watch washington journal beginning live at 7 00 a. M. Eastern thursday morning. Join the discussion. Next, author and former political adviser Sidney Blumental talks about his book. He spoke at fords theater in washington. Sidney blumental, our first speaker, is a native of chicago, a ba degree and write for i alternative newspapers. He has been here since 1985. A journalist with the washington post, covering president s with reporting. He was bureau chief and contributed for the guardian and served as Senior Editor at new republic. He served as assistant and Senior Adviser to bill clinton from 1997 to 2001. His jobs included advising the president on communications and Public Policy and researching information inle immedia lned. After leaving the white house, he wrote the clinton wars, 2003 about his time in president ial service. The book has praised for its insight into the political process. Our speaker was a political consultant for the Emmy Award Winning series tanner 88. As the son of illinois, it might be hope that he would at some point turn his attention to lincoln. He will and his lincoln life will be multivolume will examine the origins of lincolns personality and slave reviews, intellectual dimensions, awkward efforts with the opposite sex, lincolns reading, fierce ambition and other interesting feature of the extraordinary 16th president. The first volume was published may 10th of this year. Im sure its a coincidence thats john wilkesbooths birthday. Sidney grew up in illinois. He practices journalism and worked at the white house and set his hand to chronicle the history he experienced. Im not sure he cant go better. Sidney has played lincoln last summer as a matter of fact i saw Sidney Blumentals lincoln on stone hill farm in virginia. I was president and can attest he was most president ial. Had a stovepipe hat to prove it. We have an interesting and wellrounded speaker. Ladies and gentlemen, Sidney Blumental. [ applause ] thank you. I appreciate those kind comments. I especially appreciate terrys guidance in my scholarship. He is a wonderful scholar and has won an written an Award Winning book on john wilkes booth. Im honored to be here at the Abraham Lincoln institute to be able to speak about my new book and honored to speak before you. I hope that there will be time for questions. If there arent, you can always come up to me afterwards. There will be a panel in the afternoon. I will be happy to answer any questions. In an age of antipolitics, i am here to speak of a career politician, a party stallworth and partisan who conducted his own Permanent Campaign for elected office from the age of 23 onward when he was not serving his corporate clients. After the founders was the greatest revolutionary figure in American History. Perhaps its a good thing Abraham Lincoln is not available to run for office this year. Especially in the party he helped to found. Though he was familiar with being the target of negative attacks, as a religious infidel, an aristocrat, corrupt, unpatriotic, tie ran cal, possibly black, and a proponent of ma south nation, abraham as a notorious campaign pamphlet dubbed him, but the charge against him from beginning to end was that he was a vulgar village politician. As the New York Herald described him in 1860. When lincoln was 28 years old, he tried out the word politician as an accusation against his opponents. He rose on the floor of the legislature in defense of the state bank which he proposed to fund vast public works. The politician he said by unholy means is endeavoring to blow up a storm that he may ride upon and direct. Mr. Chairman, although lincoln could would have said cheerman in his kentucky voice, this movement is exclusively the work of politicians, a set of men who have interests aside from the interests of the people. And who to say the most of them are taken as a mass at least one long step removed from honest men. And then he added, i say this with a greater freedom because being a politician myself none can regard it as personal. A politician myself, this was one of young lincolns earliest selfdescriptions. After lincolns assassination in this very place, lincoln underwent a transfigure rags. Elevated into a saint and a martyr. Cannonized and romanticized through his death he became unrecognizable from how he was known in life. But as William Henry seward, lincolns secretary of state, among the most cunning politicians of his time, remarked about the framers of the constitution, the saints were not sages and the sages were not saints. Seward had an understanding of hamilton long before the musical. Together, lincoln and seward played by the rules of the day and vindicated their principals. It was how they got the 13th amendment abolishing savory. Thats not folklore. Lincolns life as a politician has been rediscovered in every era. When david donald, the lincoln biographer, wrote lincoln reconsidered in 1956, calling one chapter a lincoln politician describing his background as a wig party stallworth, it was regarded as something of a revelation. Richard current, the lincoln scholar, followed in 1958 with the lincoln nobody knows, entitling one chapter, the ma massachusetm master politician. Since then many historians have plumed this area, not to mention steven spielberg. But there is much more to be learned about americas greatest political genius. As the campaign of 2016 demonstrates, demonstrates to use one of lincolns favorite words that he gained from his reading, a campaign of Political Party chaos filled with incitement to violence, driven by an irrepressable conflict over questions of race and nativism revealing a house divided, the lincoln theme we learn again is never exhausted. From the start, i sought to use my own experience having served closely with a president in the white house as a journalist in washington and involved in campaigns and elections. To think anew about lincolns home life and world, from this angle of vision, i have explored aspects of lincoln that i hope will enlarge and deepen our understanding of the springs of American History and politics. Lincoln lived in a time of selfmade men. Henry clay, who rose from rags to nearly the presidency, and coined the phrase a selfmade man to apply to himself was lincolns ideal as lincoln put it. In the first half of the 19th century, possibilities opened up for men of humble origins to transform themselves into new people, assuming identities that were previously unimagined and which defined democracy. Many men of lincolns generation were selfmade, but lincoln was uniquely selfmade. His selfcreation involved his immergs in Party Politics as part of the first generation of professional politicians in america. His selection of a socially prominent and unusually political wife and his engagement with the realities and politics of slavery, which summoned him forward as Thomas Jefferson prove if i sighed for the fashion. Lincoln cannot be understood apart from the background of Party Politics. It cannot be overstated that lincoln was a party politician. And that background cannot be separated from the issue of slavery. Lincolns entire life, his selfmaking, from its beginning, was shaped by the struggle over slavery. Nor can his religion and understanding of religion be grasped apart from the development of his ideas of democracy and slavery. Nor can his personal story be filtered from slavery. The first time Abraham Lincoln spoke openly about his origins was the year he assumed his new identity as a republican. Until then, he had been remarkably reticent about the facts of his personal life. He was one of the best known political figures in illinois. Yet he kept an essential part of himself mysterious. In 1856, he had been a professional politician on public view for 24 years. More than half his lifetime a stallworth member of the wig party. It was as a wig that he had climbed rapidly in its ranks. At the age of 27, he was elected to his second term in the legislature and his peers chose him as the wig floor leader. He was dubbed the chieftain, head of the socalled springfield hunto that directed the state party and coeditor of the newspaper writing many of its editorials anonymously. He was the manager of wig president ial campaigns in the state. And a president ial elector to the electoral college. He was the prime mover behind installing the Convention System that selected candidates, enforcing Party Discipline and using that system to drive out a competitor and make himself congressman. It was the first time when he did that that he used the phrase, a house divided. He was referring to the wig party. He had always campaigned on the wig platform for economic development, federal and state financing of massive Infrastructure Projects and the tariff to protect and encourage manufacturers. He emphasized that he was one of the people, not the aristocracy and felt hurt he was accused of being part of the upper class because of his marriage to mary todd. Who belonged to the edwards todd family, the most distinguished in springfield living on aristocracy hill. Projecting himself as a selfmade man, he believed himself to be and wanted to be seen as rising from the common clay. He was determined to leave his past behind. Even to bury it as if hiding his humiliation, his impulse was to protect himself from revelations about his origins. As for the actual details of his early existence, he had been stone silent. It was at a Campaign Event in 1856, after he had become a republican, that the man who had been extraordinarily reluctant about discussing his pass, sensitive about his social inferiority, blurted out a startling confession. I used to be a slave said lincoln. He did not explain what prompted him to make this incredible statement. Why he branded himself as belonging to the most oppressed, stigmatized and untouchable cast, far worse than being accused of being an abolitionist. Illinois, while a free straight, had a dra conian black code. Why would lincoln announce that he was a former slave . The bare facts he did not disclose to his audience were these. Until he was 21, lincolns father had rented him out to neighbors in rural indiana at a price of 10 to 31 cents a day to labor as a rail splitter, farm hand, hog butcher and ferry operator. The father collected the sons wages. Lincoln was an incidedentured servant. He regarded his father as domineering and himself without rights. Thomas lincoln, who had led a harsh and unfair life wanted his son to learn an honest trade as a laborer. Perhaps trained as a carpenter like himself, considered formal education a waste of time. And sought to suppress any larger ambition as useless dreaminess. It was only when the selfmade man finally identified himself as a republican that he felt free to reveal himself as a slave. And then lincoln completed his story. And now i am so free that they let me practice law. Lincolns humor drove home his point about the getaway but masked the scar. Calling himself a slave was not a slip of the tongue. It was not just another of his funny stories. Though he made it into a joke. He truly considered himself to have been held in bondage and escaped. Lincoln rarely if ever talked about his feelings, even to his closest friends who tried to discern the sides. He hid his depths beneath his simplicity. His authenticity was not deceptive but a veneer nonetheless. He was simple in his dress, manners, in his approach and his presence recalled william herndon, his law partner. He was a man of quite infin it silences and was deeply secretive, uncommunicative and close minded as to his plans, wishes, hopes and fears. I venture to say that he never opened himself to mortal creature. Well, it was no wonder. His captivity as a boy he felt was humiliating and degrading. Imprisonment in a world of neglect, poverty and ignorance. It was at the root of his fierce desire to rise. If he was angry with his father, he also knew that his father had been reduced to a dirt farmer and compelled to flee kentucky to escape from slavery. Slave states are places for poor white people to remove from not to remove to. Lincoln said in 1854 in opposition to steven a. Douglas nebraska act. New free states are the places for poor people to go to and better their condition. Lincoln had been oppressed by a man who was himself oppressed. By crossing the ohio river into indiana, his father had made his own escape. Lincoln was a fugitives son and a fugitive himself. Even more startling than lincolns selfdescription as chattel, as human property, was his subsequent selfidentification as a particular kind of slave, a fugitive slave, a runaway. In one of two interviews he granted, this one intended for circulation in support of his Senate Candidacy in 1858, lincoln offered this physical description of himself. If any personal description of me is thought desirable, it may be said i am in height 64 nearly, lean in flesh, weighing on an average 180 pounds, dark complexion, coarse black air, gr hair, no other marks or brands recollected. Many might have missed lincolns allusion. At the end of his seemingly bland selfportrayal, what did it mean . No other marks or brands recollected was not another of his amusing jokes. But the exact language slave owners used to describe runaway slaves in newspaper ads. Lincoln had, therefore, identified himself not only as one of the fugitives but also mocked their owners. This was more than sympathetic projection. He believed he had his own fugitive experience and emancipated himself. He was an oppressed and stunted boy who achieved his freedom. If with his disadvantages he could do it, it could be done. When he became a republican and identified himself as a slave, he had begun emerging as the Abraham Lincoln identifiable in history. Four years later, at the Illinois State convention, he would be given another identity. The rail splitter, the legendary ax wielding laborer, common man of the people, establishing one of the most enduring icons of American History. Those to the private lincoln who chuckled at the image making by party handlers, it was a picture of himself from the time when he thought of himself as a slave. Like other runaways, he had remade his identity and never took it for granted. Despite his standing for years among the illinois wigs, few people spotted him for greater things other than as a provincial figure, except perhaps his wife. Lincolns marriage was indispensable to his rise. His sense of destiny and his equal inyum. He was an almost comically awkward suitor who had a nervous breakdown over his inability to deal with the opposite sex. One socially superior woman to whom he proposed rejected him for having the manners of a bumpkin. Mary todd, daughter of henry clays Business Partner and political ally, from lexington, kentucky, a southern belle, was a rare woman of the southern upper class who loved politics and was described as a child as a violent little wig. She did not hesitate to offer her strong opinions at a time when women were supposed to remain silent and deafer enshall on the subject. If anything, she was more ambitious for her ambitious husband than he was. His alliance with her gave him more than the social standing he desired. She steadied him, pushed him forward, defended him and never lost faith in his star. She referred to their union as our lincoln party. Mary was high strung, threw temper tantrums and made scenes. She gave lincoln a family, respectability, a proper home and passion ately believed in him. Herndon hated her calling her a she wolf. She would never invite him into the lincoln home in springfield calling him a dirty dog. Lincolns Young Private secretaries, john hey referred to her as the hell cat. There would have been no lincoln without mary. And he knew it. He remained smitten and in wonder that she had selected a poor nobody. Before the eyes of those who dismissed him, even if they did not see it, the selfmade man was constantly transforming himself through selfeducation and relentless political aspiration. Politics were his heaven and his hades m hades metaphysics. He was a selfmade man as a professional politician, a new profession. The partisan regular in a newly competitive and disciplined two party system. Lincoln was one of the first men in the f