Leadership, ideas but principally people who inspired and motivated him. Its a pleasure to welcome as our panel from my left to right, the author of the political life of Abraham Lincoln, volume i, a selfmade man, sidney blumenthal. And Richard Brook hihiser, and finally, the author not only of the recently published american ulysses, the life of ulysses s. Grant but the author of a. Lincoln and an expert in lincolns writings, ronald a. White. Welcome to you all. So our goal today is to hear from you and see if we can evoke some differences of opinion. We will certainly welcome audience participation and questions from our usual microphone. In fact, i will give you a signal in about 20 minutes or so to encourage you to line up and engage with us. The first person i want to talk to in relation to lincolns inspiration are the three sets of parents, really, not one person but three, the three sets of parents in his life. You have all written about them. By the three, i mean the woman he referred to as his angel mother, nancy lincoln, the woman who regarded him as a son, his stepmother, Sarah Bush Johnston lincoln and his father, whose relationship with abraham remained something of a mystery or controversy even today. So of the three, who was influential and who is a negative influence . Why dont we start with sidney . Well, the positive and the negative were about one experience and that was an experience of being in the lincoln family growing up. His stepmother protected him crucially from his father, which enabled his early education, and that was the initial positive spark for lincoln. Lincoln was a bright, inquisitive, naturally intelligent child but he was suppressed by his father. His father himself was an oppressed man. And that had an enormous influence all the way through lincolns life and deeply on his articulate thinking on slavery. Lincolns father, Thomas Lincoln, had been a poor dirt farmer in kentucky. He had been cut out of the family inheritance. His stepbrother had taken it all and wound up being a kind of quasiaristocrat. Thomas had terrible luck. He was reduced to competing for wages with slaves. His dirt farm was expropriated from him, probably through chicanery from a philadelphia banker who owned the land and manipulated it. And he fled kentucky, he fled a slave economy in which he was on the lower rung and fled into the free territory of indiana. From then on, he rented out, abraham as a wage as an indentured servant until the age of 21, which was legal. He took all of his wages and sent him out as a laborer of all kinds. Lincoln was, the opening line of my book is that he was remarkably reticent about his life and understandably so. Lincoln, when he emerged with his identity, his new identity as a republican in 1856, is on the stump and makes a kind of joke but its the kind of joke that is a freudian kind of joke. There was no freud then but its still freudian. He says i used to be a slave. What hes talking about, he says now they let me practice the law, now im a lawyer. What hes talking about is growing up and his father. When lincoln makes whats called the peoria speech against kansasnebraska act, his first great speech, he says slave states are states for poor white people to remove from. Free states are states for poor white people to go to. Thats his idea as well at the root of the struggle between slavery and freedom. Its not simply about the slave. Its also about the free white laborer. Rick, would you i know you have written that perhaps we ignore these subsistence but positive provisions that thomas made for his struggling family that at least they survived. How would you respond on thomas and the women, lets not forget the women. Well, i think sidney puts this all very well, and certainly, thomas himself moved from the slave state to the free state so hes both giving his son the short end of the stick but also showing him the way out that he himself took. But when i wrote founders son i think the book that made the greatest impression on me was herndons informants which is the publication of all the notes he took after lincoln died and he was preparing his biography and he realized theres a lot of stuff that im not aware of, lincoln never told me this, and he did what we would now call an oral history. The most moving single piece in that book is his interview with Sarah Bush Johnston lincoln, the stepmother. She survived her husband, she survived her murdered son, shes an old lady and herndon describes when i first went to interview her i thought i was too late, shes lost it, im not going to get anything out of this. But he sits down and has dinner with her and he must have been a great interviewer. He just gets her talking, talks about the old days. Then she opens up and describes how lincoln learned when he was a boy and how persistent he was and how careful he was and how she observed this. Then she has this amazing sense where she says almost shyly, she says his mind and my mind such as it was were alike. I just read that and i thought lady, your mind was fine. Yeah. You did us all a great service. Moved in the same channels, right . Even though she complained that he didnt like her food. As some mothers will. You cant have everything. You cant have everything. Ron, please. Well, picture this. We now have president elect lincoln, hes in springfield. Everyone is coming to see him. Everyone wants his ear. Many appointments are being made. He slips away from springfield to go visit his stepmother. This says volumes about who she is in his life. This is the trip he wants to make. We dont know exactly what transpired in terms of the conversation but what we have already heard from our two previous persons is how important she is in his life. When the mother died, the family fell into disorder. A comment mentioned about men living by themselves. So he goes back and brings Sarah Bush Johnston into the family. She brings order, but she brings female nurturing to him. So i think its hard to overestimate how important she is in nurturing this boy and he wants to say that back to her. This is the visit he wants. He slips out of town. He doesnt want anybody following him. Nobody following him on this visit. This is a very deep, personal, intimate visit that he must make to his stepmother. Make to his stepmother, and yet, i was always struck that it is a hard visit in february and not easy to move around once you get off of the train in charleston or whatever town is nearest the farm. I was struck by a letter that lincoln gets from dennis in the white house there. Is not much evidence of what lincoln did to support his family, but there is this letter in which dennis says that the 50 that you sent has been appropriated by one of sarahs children, and she is not going to get any benefit of it. And it must have broken his heart, because he is not there to control the meager support. It is a fascinating relationship and quickly, what did you believe from the positive history as well, and why lincoln never introduced his wife and step children to this beacon of a step mo the. And mary writes to her after the assassination, and says you may not know this, but we have a son named after your husband. Different classes maybe. And she writes that mary lincoln did notp approve of lincolns family, and regarded them as lower class, but that is herndon who hated mary, and she would not have and just as he says that she would not allow l lincolns family in the house, she would notal allow herndon in her house. Right. And are regarded him as a problem. Well, herndon was jealous, and you know, who could be closer to my hero than me . He was exactly the closest he thought. But lincoln had a very strained relations all of the way through with his father. Didnt go to his death bed. He was summoned and he had gone earlier when his father was ill and recovered and then when his stepbrother summonned him again and refused to go and wrote a letter to his father saying, you know, that god will take care of thing, and he refused to see his father when he was dying. God will take care of thing, and i wont. And he says something like, if we meet now, it is more painful than helpful and it is a brutal weapon. I think that still felt the wounds of that relationship and it goes back to the stepmother who made possible lincolns education, because the father regarded education as a waste of time. As useless dream iing. You know, in a positive sense, the father may have thought that my son should have been a cabinet maker or the carpenter like i am, and he should have a trade, and he regarded reading books as a complete waste of time in putting him on the wrong road, a road away from making a living, and he used to punish him for reading, and this is pa partly why lincoln escape and he described the father as a poor wandering boy, but it is lincoln who was the poor wandering boy. And who discovered other influences in indiana as a boy. Lawyers who he would discover and start and defriend them in discover i discovering their libraries and read through them. Lets talk psychobabble for a moment. [ laughter ] when we talk about the founders as we must, inevitably we refer back to the lisime address, the first public speech in which he talks about the fathers, and there is much speculation that washington is spotless, et cetera, and is that the moment when he discards his father as the psychobabblists have said and adopted the Founding Fathers at that moment as his true inspiration . Rick, start with you, because you have talked a great deal about this in the your book. Well, the lysem speech, i moon, there are flashes of the great lincoln, and he say s ts silent artillery of time, and this is from the top drawer, but the whole speech is not simply at that level. There is interesting thing, and a lot of the sort of the 19th century padding, i think. There, lincolns problem is that the founders are dead. They are dead and gone and now what do we do in the absence, and how do we make up for the fact that they are no longer here. The lysem speech is 1838. Madison die d in 36, the last sign e of the constitution, and the last one, besides aaron burr if you count him. And so they are all gone, and so in a way, lip conn would find a way to use them and make them living again in the lysem speech, they are gone and he is sort of mourning their absence, and he says in their place, let us set up reason as our guide. What is funny about this, if reason is the guide, why are you talking about the silent ar t artillery of time. That is not like euclid, but like a poet, so you are undercutting your own appeal with your own language, but he is a young man and still figuring it out. Well, i think that the speech is kind of the rite of passage, also. It is the first public address and the Toastmasters Club springfield learning how the speak, and i think of the phrase tis only ours to transmit. As you suggested, yes, there is a sadness. And he is talking about the founder founders, but he is also beginning to ask himself, what is my identity . What is our identity . And a great sadness, there is not a great role to play, and he has not yet discovered what the role is, and this is a very real part of this speech. Although the death of Elijah Lovejoy is back there in the n consciousness, the presbyterian editor of the newspaper in alton who had been killed in the streets, and he is worried about what he calls mobocracy in the speech, so there is a context of great crisis around him, and his speech is really an answer to the crisis, and lincoln is remarkable in always being very, very conscious of the context in which he delivers the speech. It is never just an abstract speech, and never a speech reaching backwards, but always a speech in the present, and the present the death of elijah love joy, and he is trying to answer the question, what do we do in the midst of the mobocracy, and he saying, i am terribly worried about the state of the nation at this moment. On the psychobabble front, the literary critic edwin wilson suggested that in the speech when lincoln talks about a da danger to democracy, coming from an individual who believes that he is a towering genius, and above all others, and will trample down the laws in order to gain the ultimate power, and do it on the basis of what lin h conn uses the word celebrity that somehow according to wilson, lincoln is projecting himself into the future and worried about himself and imagining himself being that individual. But in fact, lincoln is talking about his eternal rival steven a. Douglas. And also, napoleon, dont you think . Napoleon has not died that long ago. Exactly right. And in either case, towering jeepous is a joke. It is rick is bad, the image of napoleon as a dictator who tramples democracy, and ruins the initial revolution, and lincoln had been writing anonymous editorial, and denounced unkcan der the pseudonyms, and denouncing douglas as those sorts of actions. Douglas was enormously dynamic, capable, skillful and demagogic person who was already rising above lincoln and kept rising above him for decades. So lincoln is looking at douglas here. And ron pointed out the lovejoy connection, and this is crucial to the speech, because the background is that Elijah Lovejoy is an abolitionist editor who has been running the newspaper in alton, illinois, and who has this Printing Presses are being destroyed by mobs and thrown in the mississippi river, and in defense of the Printing Press in the warehouse, he is attacked by a mob, and he he brings his own people to protect him, and he refuses to give in, and they have a battle in which he is murdered, and there a trial, and the abolitionists are put on trial, and not the mob. This is completely taking over illinois politic, and lincoln does not use lovejoys name, but it is a editor who is murder and in the context of many other incidents of trampling on the rule of lawp. So lovejoy is very important, and he becomes even more important to lincoln through lovejoys brother, owen lovejoy who swears on his brothers coffin who will avenge himself by dedicating himself to abolition of slavery, and becomes the leader of the Republican Party, and later a great ally of lip conn and vouching for him by to a abolitionists of lincolns true principles. One cannot say too much, and maybe one can, and so we shouldnt about lincolns idealization, and the idolization of George Washington. The mightiest on earth is the civil liberty and the moral reformation and in february of 1861, he leaves springfield for washington and delivers and later refines what i think is the first of his great elegyic speeches which is of course the farewell addresses, and the many layers and the one that i am astonished and continue to be astonished by is that no one seemed to be offended by it was lincoln saying that i have a task before me greater than that which faced washington. That seems to me to be a breathtaking break for his reverence for the founders, and do you agree or am i alone in this conclusion . Ron do, you want to start . Well with, we have to look at the speech, and what people understand is that his task was greater than washington, and in no way is he suggesting that he is greater than washington, but the fact that he references washington is the whole larger p perspective of what the nation is involved in, and so, yes, this is a remarkable speech, and we can argue whether it is spontaneous or not, and i think it is spontaneous, and he write it down on the train, and he hands it to nicklay on the train. And so even though we have what his ttorians would later call a second american revolution, and he has been given the task to step forward to lead that effort. But it is clear that is going to be a civil war which in his day, the revolution was not remembered as being. Of course, it was. Especially in the south, and also in upstate new york, and there was a lot of civil strife during the revolution, but it had been forgotten and smoothed away, and people remembered us against the brits, and so the enemy was foreign, and the enemy was the brits and the others who came over to fight us, and it was not the atlantic, but it was mississippi and alabama and so it was a few train rides or steamboat rides away. So this is a different thing, and this is arguably a worse thing. The enemies are not foreigners, but americans. They are all americans, and that is a terrible thing to k contemplate. Did you want to comment . Well, i think that i agree with ron and rick. It is a daunting task that he faces. A civil war war is more terrible, and he is speaking of washington becoming president. He is not speaking offing washington leading the armies against the british. And making the revolution, and i dont think that he is talking about washington at the constitutional convention. I think that he is talking about washington coming to be president , and that is a different thing. And washington was universally acclaimed and he faced no opponent. He had no real election. And lincoln faces something quite different. He is a minority president. He has a divided country. He is a ak u kuzed of being the source of the division, and he has to come into the country before the civil war and manage the beginning of what will be this great crisis. I will offer that i still think that it is audacious to say with the task before me, and yes, you can parse it and say it is the tax, but he is mentioning the challenge in the same sentence as the most beloved and revered spotless person in american history, but this is interesting interpretation. And also that washington did face a rebellion, and there was a whis can ki rebellion, and so the only rebellion that we had had was that, and of course, that is six counties in pennsylvania, and now we are talking about six states when lincoln sets out, and seven when he gets there. And when he takes the train which lincoln is about to do. And no more. And lincoln is going to be using the very same language that washington uses in the proclamation in the whiskey rebellion, because it comes from the militia act of 1972 or the circumstances under which a president could call up a militia in which the laws cannot be enforced in the reg ular way. So that is the only precedent, but what a small precedent it must have seemed. I was astonish and i will try to drag myself and ourselves away from the washington story as fascinating as it is. But so in 18661 with that side of virginia fairly secure marilyn conn engineers an excursion to mount vernon nfor the lincolns, and they go down in a steamboat and they get out at mount vernon, and mary lincoln is absolutely thrilled. She goes to visit the dilapidated and iconic mount vernon, and she visits the grave of george and martha washington, and she buys the photographs of mount vernon and the tomb which is like buying postcards today, but we dont do those today the either. But 20 years ago, she is all in. And lincoln does not leave the boat which i find fascinating, and it is as if his reverence for people does not extent to