Dan Snow's History Hit - Abraham Lincoln with Sidney Blumenthal

Episode Date: November 19, 2020

Sidney Blumenthal joined me on the podcast to talk about the political life of Abraham Lincoln and what his legacy means today.

Hi there everybody, welcome to Dan Snow's History. I'm very excited about this pod. I've got someone who's served at the pinnacle of journalism, government and now history. He's Sidney Blumenthal. He was a very senior political journalist. Then he jumped ship, poacher turned gamekeeper, went to work for Bill Clinton in the White House. He was senior advisor to the president from 97 to 2001. He was a close advisor to Hillary Clinton during her attempts to win the presidency. And now he's embarked on a massive one million word project, a gigantic set of biographies, multi-volume biography, Abraham Lincoln. Today, the date of the first broadcast of this podcast, the 19th of November, 2020, we've got lots goingth of November 2020. We've got lots going on

in the world. We've got Donald Trump refusing to accept the results of the election, aided and abetted by many Republican politicians and officials. But as importantly, today is the anniversary of the Gettysburg Address, a very short speech that is one of the best known and one of the most important speeches in the history of the English language. When Abraham Lincoln gives quite a succinct history lesson and effectively refounds the American political project. If you want to watch documentaries about US history, listen to other podcasts. We have got a TV channel. It's like Netflix, but just for history. We cover everything from the Stone Age to the Nuclear Age to the present day. We got it all. You can go to historyhit.tv. If you use the code POD1, P-O-D-1, you get a month for free, and you get your second month for just one dollar, one euro, one pound, one whatever.

That takes you through to the new year. That takes you through to the Biden presidency for just a buck, for a quid, for a year. I'm not sure what the slang for a euro is. There we go. In the meantime, everyone, here is Sidney Blumenthal. Enjoy. Sidney, thank you so much for coming on the podcast. Pleasure.

Glad to be here. America is famous for the size of its presidential biographies, and you are writing the largest presidential biography of them all. Why Lincoln? I've been completely fascinated and obsessed with Abraham Lincoln since I was a boy. I grew up in Illinois, in Chicago, where Lincoln was a household god when I was a child. I was taken on a pilgrimage to Springfield by an older cousin of mine when I was young, and it made a tremendous impression upon me. It was the beginning of my understanding of the presidency, of leadership, and of American politics. So for me, everything begins with Lincoln, and it appears that it ends with Lincoln,

too. Lincoln refounds the nation through its greatest crisis when it is being ripped apart. And had Lincoln failed, the Union, as it had in its original form, would not have existed. And Lincoln reset it completely, not on a different basis, but on a basis that he felt related to the founding. In particular, he always believed that the Declaration of Independence and that phrase in it, all men are created equal, was the heart of the Constitution, and that the two were not separate. And that was the essence of his democratic constitutionalism and anti-slavery constitutionalism. And he reset the country on that basis. It's apparent in all of his eloquent, great speeches, particularly in the hard, crystalline prose distilled to ultimate succinctness of the Gettysburg Address, in which he says there's a new birth of freedom. And that is the refounding of the country.

What about Lincoln's journey? How much of that has become mythologized, this man from the cabin almost on the frontier? I mean, what was the reality of his upbringing? Well, of course, Lincoln's life has been one of the most mythologized of any figures in American history, as much as anyone's since George Washington. But there's a great deal of reality to it, particularly about the poverty of his early life. His father was a poor dirt farmer who was essentially driven out of Kentucky, dispossessed, forced to compete for wages with slaves, fled across the Ohio River to Indiana. And the father did not want Lincoln to read. He felt that this was a waste of time. It was a form of dreaminess, and he should learn simply a trade. Lincoln was an oppressed boy. His father rented him out

as an indentured servant. Lincoln said later in his life, I was a slave. He made a joke about it, but he meant it. And he always felt that way and was deeply resentful about it. And his perspective was altered by his upbringing. And it's the beginning of his politics. At the end of the war, he appears at a hotel before an Ohio regiment. And the war is won. It's almost over. And Lincoln says to them, here I am. I stand here as proof that any of you could stand in my place.

And that's what this war is about. It is a vindication of democracy that any man from any background may rise. So he's very conscious of this. At the beginning of the war, he declares it a people's contest in his first annual message to the Congress. He defines the point of government in the American experiment. It is to lift the artificial burdens placed on people off of their backs so that they may have an equal opportunity to rise and that they then can fulfill the principle of the Declaration of Independence, all men are created equal. That's what the war is about. And he understands that he is fighting a deep, powerful current that also exists in America, opposed to that in the form of a slave republic. Lincoln strikes me as such a prickly intellectual, one of those great American presidents, perhaps a little bit more like Obama, perhaps a little bit more like Wilson, who are just a force of intellect. Is that fair? That's one. And on the other hand, there's also a mythology about Lincoln as a kind of hayseed, a rube coming from a poor background. And there's something to this. But here's the thing about Lincoln. Lincoln is a consummate politician. He was a professional politician from the earliest age. He ran for office from the age of 22 on and never stopped. He learned every aspect of politics, and particularly the tactile aspects of politics, as well as the transactional ones. He was also a partisan. He was a party man. He built a political party, the Republican Party. He was, for most of

his life, a member of a party that disintegrated beneath his feet. He knew every aspect of politics, and he could hold a room of men. He was a jokester. He liked to talk politics. He stayed up late with people holding forth about politics, and he was not seen by people as a distant, cold intellectual. If anything, he was seen and underestimated from time to time as a provincial lawyer from the prairie. That he was conscious of too and used to his advantage. He is deeply engaged in the popular aspects of American culture of the mid-19th century. Did Lincoln know that by winning office, by winning the presidency, that he was have to remember the order of secession that takes place for South Carolina and then the other, what are called Gulf states, bordering the Gulf of Mexico,

the lower South. And Lincoln thought that somehow he could hold Virginia in. Tennessee and Kentucky, they fought and kept them in. They were slave states and remained within the Union. Lincoln thought he could keep Virginia because he had been an old Whig and thought that there was a residual Whig allegiance politically within Virginia. He miscalculated. And as soon as the firing on Fort Sumter took place in Charleston Harbor and Lincoln enlisted men into the Army. Virginia seceded and aligned itself with the other southern states. So Lincoln did think that, and he also thought the war might not be long, that it might be just one great battle. But after the battle of Bull Run was lost at the beginning of the war, the first great battle, it slowly dawned on

people that this was going to be a long protracted bloody conflict. Can you explain why Lincoln's election as president represented such an existential threat to the slave-owning interest of the South that they dissolved the union rather than deal with him? And he was a symptom of that dysfunction, presumably, rather than a sudden cause. Lincoln's election itself was the precipitating cause of the union dissolving. The fact that he was elected. So that's a really important question. Why was that so?

He was the first anti-slavery president ever elected in the United States. And the Southerners believed that while Lincoln did not have a plan for overall emancipation, he would destroy slavery. destroy slavery. Lincoln himself, in his House Divided speech, said the country will become either all one thing or all the other, and that he intended to put slavery on the course of ultimate extinction. So what did that mean? It meant when you had power, political, federal power. You had control over all the federal patronage. And they believed that Lincoln would, one, create emancipation in the District of Columbia, which was the only federal territory. Lincoln, as a congressman, one of his most notable acts was to propose a bill for emancipation in the district.

That would be a signal that he was for emancipation throughout the South. He would prevent the extension of slavery in all of the territories of the United States, particularly those territories that had been gained, the Western territories and those gained from the Mexican War. Did he place emancipation over the integrity of the Union, or did he believe this was an issue worth fighting over? Well, if you look at the first inaugural address, which is now famous because everyone cites the phrase in it about the better angels of our nature. And there's another phrase in it where Lincoln appeals to the mystic chords of memory that unite us. appeals to the mystic cords of memory that unite us. Lincoln says, don't be afraid. Don't intend to abolish slavery where it exists locally. Of course, he intended to prevent slavery from being extended to the territories. And so they felt that was an existential threat. There's a balance

of power in the country, and it's tilting against the South in the Congress and in terms of control of the executive branch and the presidency, and then the courts and the Supreme Court. It's much like today. The South had controlled the federal government all the way through. But now Lincoln is elected, and the North is a growing region of the country. The industrial revolution is taking place. It's increasing in manufacturing. It's increasing in population. There are waves of immigration coming in. The North is a vital part of the country. The South is being overwhelmed, and it has become a minority. So how do they maintain that balance?

They can't. And they know that Lincoln is tilting the balance even further towards the free states and limiting them and then waging war around their edges. So they can't tolerate it anymore. And it's a fundamental political and economic calculus for them to stay in the union or not. Land a Viking longship on island shores, scramble over the dunes of ancient Egypt, and avoid the Poisoner's Cup in Renaissance Florence. Each week on Echoes of History, we uncover the epic stories that inspire Assassin's Creed. We're stepping into feudal Japan

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So therefore, we can assume that they were the favorites to win the Civil War. And yet we also say that Lincoln played a kind of decisive part. If it hadn't been for him, the Union might have been ruptured permanently. How are those two reconcilable? Would the North eventually have won under any leadership? In the mythology of the Lost Cause, created by Southern apologists after the war, one of the chief arguments was that the North had overwhelming material advantages and overpowering manpower. It could always call up more men for its army. But the war was touch and go at many points. And had certain things gone the wrong way, depending upon contingency, the war could well have been lost. And don't forget what the South was playing for. It was playing for British recognition.

sympathy among the landowning class, among some of the great manufacturers who were tied to the cotton industry. And even a British reformer like Gladstone was sympathetic to the Confederacy. And there were many people in the British ruling class who would have been quite happy to see the United States divided and reduced in power, particularly as a democratic example to the world. So it was touch and go for great parts of the war. And had there been a certain decisive battle and it had gone the wrong way, it's entirely possible that the war could have been lost, could have been prolonged. Even as late as 1864, Lincoln thought he was going to lose a reelection and that the whole cause would have been lost at that point. And he wrote a secret letter that he made the cabinet sign unseen and glued it saying he would lose and what

he would do to try to save the union in the transition. We're in a transition now in the United States, a difficult one, maybe one of the most difficult ones since that potential time. Lincoln was envisioning what would happen when someone did not believe in the cause of the United States as a democratic force, as he understood it, and how he might save it and also continue emancipation. So it was touch and go. It was only when the Battle of Atlanta was won by General William Tecumseh Sherman, and he sent his famous telegram, Atlanta is ours and fairly won, that the tide turned towards Lincoln. But otherwise, he thought it was lost. And interesting today, you know, Atlanta's ours and fairly won. What was Lincoln's contribution to victory on the civilian side? He looked for the right commander in the field.

He found that team in Grant and Sherman. But why did he win that war? And many other politicians may well have failed in his position. Lincoln won the war for several reasons. One, Lincoln managed the politics. He was under enormous pressure from abolitionists early on to declare emancipation. And yet the war had not been won in the West, and Kentucky was still a battlefield of whether or not it would stay in the Union and whether or not,

if there was emancipation, remember, it's a slave state, it would give a tremendous number of troops to the Confederacy. And he took a lot of criticism for that. So that's one reason. But then there's another reason that people don't credit or understand. And that is that Lincoln was a man of science and that he was a modern man. Lincoln is the only president to hold a patent. Lincoln created the National Academy of Sciences. Lincoln was directly involved in the development of the most advanced weaponry, including the monitor line of battleships. He tested himself repeating rifles, the most advanced ones. He understood science. He believed in science, another contrast to today. And he understood how to marshal it using the resources of the federal government. That was another major reason. In the Gettysburg Address, this podcast is being broadcast on the

anniversary of the Gettysburg Address. Why is that now one of the most famous speeches of the English language? What do you see as its particular genius? Battle of Gettysburg takes place in early July. It is Lincoln's second invasion of the North. And he is repulsed at a small town in Pennsylvania. It's an incredibly bloody battle. And Lee retreats. Lincoln is enraged at the conduct of General Meade in charge of the Union forces and not following Lee and destroying his army afterwards, and wrote a furious note to him that he destroyed

and didn't send when he had second thoughts about revealing his temper. He comes in November to the town of Gettysburg to dedicate a national cemetery to the Union dead. And what he does is rededicate the nation and explains that there is a new birth of freedom based on the original concept of the Declaration of Independence, all men are created equal. He explains how the human cost has been for the preservation of the nation and its resurrection into a new form based on enduring democratic ideals, but now meeting new circumstances. And he does this in very few words. He is preceded on the platform by a speaker who talks for hours. Lincoln gets up, speaks for a couple of minutes, a few minutes, and sits down. The crowd is sort of stunned at his brevity. And yet it is probably the single greatest presidential speech in history. What was it like writing these books over the last few years? I started this project at the beginning of the Obama presidency. And so it was a very different atmosphere. And yet

Obama was embattled as well. So that gave me some insight into the quandaries and conflicts and crises that Lincoln faced. And then came Trump. How does Lincoln deal with racism and race in confronting slavery and the use of race as a political weapon against him? It is thrown against him time and again. He's constantly trying to deal with these smears, the innuendo, and what he calls the debauchery of public opinion, which we have seen extensively under Trump. Does what is going on at the moment feel like quite a radical break with the past? Or as you've said, are recent manifestations of something that's been around for your whole career and longer? Well, my understanding of writing about Lincoln

has been informed by my own experience as a journalist, but also as somebody who worked closely with the president in the White House. I see a lot of continuity here. In the Clinton White House, there were a lot of people who didn't understand what was going on. They didn't understand the rise of the right wing. They didn't understand the reactionary forces. They didn't understand the extent to which they would go to try and damage a presidency, even at the expense of the country. Different presidents understand power differently. President Clinton felt that a lot of Democrats shied away from power and were afraid of it. And that's undoubtedly true. And they're those who, you know, substitute moralizing rhetoric for an understanding of political power, which doesn't mean that those who exercise power lack principle.

Although clearly we're seeing many examples of that today. I think Trump has figured out through the chaos that he creates and his, I mean, his malignant narcissism, his performative art, but he's figured out his interest, maintaining control of the Republican Party and its base, of his own future, the Republican Party and its base, of his own future, his enormous overhang of personal and corporate debt, certainly more than the $421 million that's already known. One thing that we always know about Trump is that he will attempt to monetize whatever the situation is for his own self-gain. Lincoln gave a speech about this, actually, and it was his first major speech. He was a young man. He was still in his, he was, I don't think, even 30 years old.

And in this speech, he warned of a tyrant who might arise who would trample upon the founders and believed in his own fame and genius. Lincoln said that the greatest danger to the United States doesn't come from abroad, that there was no power that could invade the United States. He said the danger comes from within, and the real danger from the United States came from a kind of suicide in which we would kill our own democracy. How optimistic are you feeling as you look ahead with all of your historical, journalistic and political experience beyond this transition to the state,

to that vision laid out by Lincoln in terms of in the Gettysburg Address, that government, can it endure? It can and will endure. I think we can get to the other side of a lot of this, but there's not simply a lot of damage left over. We have to deal with a very divided country. And it's not simply that, you know, people have mistaken ideas. There are very powerful forces out there determined to undermine what amounts to the only force that's moving forward for American democracy against what has been an almost unprecedented effort at subversion and treachery on the part of Donald Trump.

Well, thank you so much for joining us, being so generous with your time. We should say there are five volumes of Lincoln. The most recent one is out now and is called... All the Powers of Earth, The Political Life of Abraham Lincoln, 1856 to 1860. Thank you very much indeed for coming on the podcast. Thank you, Dan. My pleasure. I hope you enjoyed the podcast. Just before you go, a bit of a favour to ask. I totally understand if you don't want to become a subscriber or pay me any cash money, makes sense. But if you could just do me a favour,

it's for free. Go to iTunes or wherever you get your podcast. If you give it a five-star rating and give it an absolutely glowing review, purge yourself, give it a glowing review, I'd really appreciate that. It's tough weather,

the law of the jungle out there and I need all the fire support I can get. So that will boost it up the charts. It's so tiresome, but if you could do it, I'd be very, very grateful. Thank you.