History with David Rubenstein

(theme music playing) RUBENSTEIN: Hello, I'm David Rubenstein and I'm gonna be in conversation tonight with Steve Inskeep, uh, who is NPR co-host of Morning Edition and its popular, uh, podcast, Up First. He is the author of, "Differ We Must: How Lincoln Succeeded in a Divided America," which is his fourth book.

And tonight we are at uh, the New York Historical Society and at the Robert H. Smith Auditorium.

So most people who study Lincoln come away saying they admire him more after they completed their work than they did before.

Are you in that category?

INSKEEP: I always admired him.

So I don't know if I admired him more, but I feel that I understand him better.

It's strange given that there are thousands of books, given that he is so famous, that he is, I think, to many of us a little bit foggy.

He was deliberately a mysterious character.

He said what he wanted to say and did not reveal a lot about himself, didn't live to write a memoir, didn't give a lot of interviews, so to speak, um, didn't do an oral history, and so he's always been a little bit mysterious, and he is surrounded by myths and legends.

I felt that in this research I understood how it was that he was successful, how it was that he tried to manage people, how it was that he built political coalitions in a supremely divided time over an issue where you could not have gotten a majority for any particular point of view and how he managed to keep the country together when there was a Civil War.

RUBENSTEIN: Well, let's go through a couple of the key parts of his life and then we'll go into some of the key ways you addressed him in the book.

INSKEEP: Sure.

RUBENSTEIN: So, um, he's born in Kentucky, goes to Indiana.

Why does his family go from Kentucky to Indiana, then later to Illinois?

INSKEEP: It's a story of the difficulties of the frontier.

His father lived in Kentucky at a time when there were many disputes over land titles, which is a story almost too complicated to get into, but the bottom line for the Lincoln family was that three times the family lost land that they were farming and had to move.

And Thomas Lincoln finally picked up the family and migrated westward or northwestward across the Ohio River to Indiana at a point that was then the frontier.

It was a brand new state that had just been wrested from the Indians for which it was named.

And there, uh, Thomas Lincoln claimed new land, gave his seven-year- old son an ax and said, "It's time to help me chop down the trees."

RUBENSTEIN: Now in his recent book on, uh, Lincoln, uh, Jon Meacham suggests that maybe Abraham Lincoln's father, Tom, was not actually his biological father.

INSKEEP: I've heard that and, uh, it's, it's really interesting.

The whole question of illegitimacy runs through Lincoln's story.

Lincoln's friend, William Herndon, recounts something that Lincoln himself said as a grown man.

He said, "My mother was born out of wedlock.

And I think people who are born illegitimate are hardier and stronger than other people.

And I believe that she passed on her traits to me."

This to me is a remarkable turn of mind because Lincoln takes this thing that is supposed to be a disgrace and a matter of shame and turns it into a story that gives him strength.

RUBENSTEIN: Right.

His biological mother dies when he's relatively young.

INSKEEP: Before 10, before he's 10.

Yeah.

RUBENSTEIN: So his father goes back to find a new wife.

INSKEEP: Yes.

RUBENSTEIN: Comes back with a stepmother.

Does Lincoln get along well with a stepmother?

INSKEEP: Uh, apparently so.

Sarah Bush Lincoln, uh, encouraged his reading, encouraged what little education he got, and did seem to, to love him.

In later years, Abraham, I don't know if estranged was exactly the right word, uh, for his... with his father, but they didn't see each other much, and Lincoln, in fact, missed his father's funeral, but he remained close, uh, relatively so, to Sarah Bush Lincoln.

RUBENSTEIN: He didn't go to sc-school of any type, did he?

INSKEEP: He, uh, by his own count, had something less than one year of formal education.

INSKEEP: But he was always conscious of not being formally educated.

It was part of the humility that he projected almost as a self-image as a man of the people.

Um, he did become relatively well-read, but not supremely well-read.

RUBENSTEIN: And he decides to become a lawyer.

Uh, did he go to law school, or how did he become a lawyer?

INSKEEP: No, and I should mention that it was relatively rare for lawyers to go to law schools, and there weren't that many law schools in, in those days.

The way that you would commonly become a lawyer was study with an actual lawyer, and in Illinois what you ultimately had to do the equivalent of the bar exam was go talk to a judge and convince the judge that you knew enough law.

RUBENSTEIN: Is he a successful lawyer?

INSKEEP: He is a reasonably successful lawyer.

Now, we don't have a lot of trial transcripts so-called.

Um, he's become a brilliant lawyer in legend.

And it is said that in a courtroom, he was great at conceding all irrelevant points but holding on to the one thing that was most vital, which is a kind of metaphor for how he later served as president, really.

RUBENSTEIN: So how did he get into politics?

Did, did he decide to run for the state legislature?

INSKEEP: Yes.

RUBENSTEIN: How did that work?

INSKEEP: He was interested in politics from a very young age.

And he decided to run for the state legislature from the area around New Salem from the county, Sangamon County that it was in.

Uh, he was a long-shot candidate, but he managed to gain the votes of his neighbors in both political parties, the Whigs and the Democrats at that time.

He was so well-liked and also so good at appealing to people that he got virtually all the local votes.

Wasn't well enough known to win overall, but ran again a couple of years later and did win and went on to spend a number of years in the legislature.

RUBENSTEIN: Alright, later he ran for Congress and he served two years.

INSKEEP: Yes.

RUBENSTEIN: And then he decides he's gonna run for the Senate.

INSKEEP: Yeah.

RUBENSTEIN: And the Senate then is selected by the state legislature, it's not direct vote, right?

INSKEEP: Right.

RUBENSTEIN: So he then, um, runs for the Senate first against Stephen Douglas the first time?

INSKEEP: Well, it's a little more complicated than that.

He ran against an ally of Stephen Douglas.

In a way, in 1854, he was running against Stephen Douglas, um, because slavery had become the major national issue.

Stephen Douglas was in the middle of it, had pushed through Congress something called the Kansas-Nebraska Act, which would make it much easier for slavery to spread into the American West.

Lincoln was opposed to that, and that had become the single national issue, even in the state elections in Illinois.

And Lincoln campaigned against the Douglas Democratic senator in effect, campaigned against the Democrats who controlled the state legislature who would decide the senator and then, uh, he prevailed, his side prevailed, and then Lincoln went before that legislature as a candidate but ultimately lost which is itself a fascinating story that says a lot about Lincoln.

RUBENSTEIN: And, later, he runs directly against, uh, Douglas.

Is that right?

INSKEEP: In 1858.

Yeah.

RUBENSTEIN: In 1858, and that's when the famous Lincoln-Douglas debates occur.

INSKEEP: Yeah.

RUBENSTEIN: After the debates are over, the state legislature decides, um, who to pick for the Senate and who did they pick?

INSKEEP: Yeah.

Yeah, they ultimately picked Douglas because it was a legislative election.

Um, Lincoln did well.

It is believed that his side received a majority of the votes across the state, but not all the seats in the legislature were up for election and Democrats barely retained a majority.

So they voted for their guy, Stephen Douglas on a party vote.

RUBENSTEIN: Okay.

So this is a question that everybody is always wondering about Lincoln.

All right, he loses the election in which Lincoln-Douglas debates occur.

INSKEEP: Yeah.

RUBENSTEIN: That's 1858.

Two years later, after having not been a senator, he was a member of the House just for two years.

INSKEEP: Yeah.

RUBENSTEIN: How does he become the nominee of a relatively new Republican Party for president?

INSKEEP: When you have lots of qualifications as Lincoln's rival William H. Seward did, it sometimes gets in your way, and we can think of modern examples of that.

You have a long record that people can pick apart and we get excited about the person who is new, who is different, and in Lincoln's case, the person who is relatable.

RUBENSTEIN: So Lincoln, uh, loses that Senate seat.

He doesn't have a, uh, seat.

He's back practicing law.

Does it just happen that people come to him and say, "You should be president of the United States," or does he kind of really work behind the scenes to make himself the nominee?

INSKEEP: The answer to that either-or I think is yes.

I mean there was excitement about Lincoln.

He was considered a great public speaker.

The Lincoln-Douglas debates had been reprinted like transcripts or partial transcripts in newspapers across America.

People were following this guy, uh, and they also knew that he seemed to be able to get a lot of votes in an important state that this new party, the Republican Party, would need to win.

So there was momentum from the outside.

But Lincoln also had something to do with it.

He was not a purely accidental candidate.

He did a number of things, starting with a great speech here in New York City, uh, in early 1860, a kind of campaign swing through New England, and various, uh, actions to prepare his side for the Republican Convention where the nominee will be decided.

RUBENSTEIN: This is at Cooper Union.

INSKEEP: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

RUBENSTEIN: Famous Cooper Union speech.

INSKEEP: Exactly.

RUBENSTEIN: Okay.

So the Republican Convention is held in Chicago, conveniently Chicago, and does he get the nomination on the first ballot?

INSKEEP: No, takes three ballots.

Um, his main rival is William Henry Seward, this great senator who considered himself the leader of the Republican Party, this new anti-slavery party.

Uh, and Seward had the money behind him, had the organization behind him, but nobody had a majority on the first ballot.

Uh, Lincoln pulled ahead on the second ballot, gained some on the second ballot, and, uh, won on the third ballot when a few votes were switched, uh, from the Ohio delegation to put him over the top.

RUBENSTEIN: Okay.

INSKEEP: At which point they made it unanimous.

RUBENSTEIN: Alright.

So he gets the nomination of the new, relatively new Republican Party.

INSKEEP: Yeah, yeah.

RUBENSTEIN: Who's the nominee of the Democratic Party?

INSKEEP: So the, the Democratic Party then is the more established party, had been the dominant party for a generation.

And Stephen Douglas of Illinois got the nomination, uh, but not without great difficulty and great, uh, division.

The Democratic Party, in fact, divided over slavery.

Uh, this gets really complicated, but the Democrats were in many ways, essentially a pro-slavery party, a southern-based party.

And Stephen Douglas was their great northern advocate, who would give positions that were compatible with slavery, but that you could sell in the north where people were at least notionally against slavery.

Douglas finally got the nomination, but the party split apart because for Southern Democrats, he was not extreme enough.

Southern Democrats went off, held their own convention, nominated John Breckinridge of Kentucky who was more to their liking and there was even a fourth candidate, this kind of nativist, know-nothing candidate.

RUBENSTEIN: Okay.

So Lincoln says, "Um, the Constitution says slavery is permitted in the states that existed when the Constitution was set up."

INSKEEP: Yeah.

RUBENSTEIN: "So I'm not gonna get rid of slavery in all the states that already existed."

So why did the southern states, uh, so fear him and they seceded before he even became president?

INSKEEP: You know, I'm glad you asked that, David.

We understand slavery is obviously a right and wrong question and it's obviously wrong, but there were a million different positions, uh, at that time and Lincoln was trying to work within the constitutional fr-framework.

He didn't say, "I'm not gonna mess with slavery."

Uh, I mean, he did say that, but what he meant was, "I have no power to do this under the Constitution.

I have no power to touch slavery where it is.

Uh, I want to restrict it where I can."

Um, this today can make him seem kind of like almost morally wrong, like, "Why are you not a firebrand against slavery?"

He was trying to do what he could.

And he said one thing that I think southern pro-slavery advocates could not abide.

He said, "I acknowledge your constitutional right to do this, but it is wrong.

It is fundamentally wrong, and, uh, my opponents will do anything but admit that it is wrong."

And ultimately, that sentiment made him radical, put him on the side of eliminating slavery whenever it could be done.

And I don't think that, that southern extremists, so-called, were entirely wrong to fear him because that was his point of view.

RUBENSTEIN: One of the other issues I think is worth commenting on is that, uh, as the country was expanding, the issue was are the new states gonna be, uh, allowing slavery or not?

And I think the South feared that if the new states did not have slavery, eventually there would be more non-slave states and eventually the South would shrink in, in its significance in Congress.

INSKEEP: Yeah.

RUBENSTEIN: And that's why a lot of this pro-slavery people in the South wanted to have slavery in the other states so they wouldn't be outvoted in Congress eventually.

INSKEEP: Yeah.

RUBENSTEIN: So in those days, the election is held in November and the inauguration is in March.

INSKEEP: Yeah.

RUBENSTEIN: And so you have a fair amount of time to get ready.

Uh, what does Lincoln do between, um, November and March?

Is he sitting around Springfield?

What is he doing?

INSKEEP: It's utterly fascinating, David.

He, uh, was given a room in the Illinois State House, and he would open the door himself and receive visitors and hundreds, if not thousands, of people, random people, powerful figures, anybody who wanted would come and see him.

And he would chat amiably and tell stories and jokes with all these people while constantly avoiding, uh, any mention of what he intended to do as president as this crisis was building across the country.

RUBENSTEIN: So he has the inauguration, and in the inau-inaugural address he says, "I support slavery."

He supports an amendment to the Constitution that James Buchanan had proposed, the 13th Amendment, the Constitution, was supposed to be an amendment that in, in effect said, "We're not gonna change slavery."

INSKEEP: Um, he had said in conversation with a friend of his, Duff Green, before the inauguration, that he did not support changing the Constitution, but that he would not be able to stand in the way if somebody did.

And there in fact were discussions that involved some members of his Republican Party about this southern proposal.

They said, "We just need to compromise over slavery and all we have to do to compromise over slavery is for you to pass an amendment to the Constitution to enshrine slavery in the Constitution forever and then pass another amendment that says you can never repeal that amendment and also do some other things for us and then we're cool."

And, um, Lincoln actually had a discussion during his transition with a guy who brought him that proposal.

The thing about the 13th Amendment, this is an amazing fact, there were, uh, discussions in Congress of a 13th Amendment to the Constitution which would have enshrined slavery, of course, that didn't happen and the 13th Amendment when it came was the one that abolished slavery.

RUBENSTEIN: So, um, he's commander in chief.

Does he really have the experience to run a military operation?

And why was it thought that the operation would be so successful that people just went to the first battle in Bull Run and just as a spectator sport, they thought the Union would win so easily.

INSKEEP: Oh, it's incredible.

No, he did not have the experience to be commander-in-chief.

In fact, uh, David Herbert Donald, one of his great biographers, notes that he at some point checked out a book on tactics from the Library of Congress.

So you imagine him like reading to try to figure out what to do.

Um, but I wanna say a couple of things about that.

First, there's a reason that the military is supposed to be under civilian authority.

And there is a political dimension to war and to conflict that he came to understand very well.

And he did have a keen strategic mind.

He deployed that same skill that we described him having in the courtroom of letting go of the unimportant things and holding on to the one important one, which was destroying Robert E. Lee's army.

RUBENSTEIN: Alright, so the war goes on for four years.

Nobody had originally expected that.

Uh, when Lincoln, uh, is often importune to free the slaves during the war, what does he say and why does he wait so long to issue the Emancipation Proclamation?

INSKEEP: Yeah.

Uh, Frederick Douglass, who of course had escaped from slavery and was a great activist, wrote very early in the war that, "War for the preservation of slavery must be met with war for the destruction of slavery."

But Lincoln was reluctant.

And it's pretty clear from some things that he wrote at the time and things that he did at the time.

He was trying to make sure that he had a majority on his side, which you need in a democracy, and you also need, in a war, you wanna have a bigger army.

And that meant that he even wanted the support of people who still supported slavery.

There were slave states where slavery was practiced that had not tried to secede or leave the Union, including his home state of Kentucky where he'd been born, and he wanted them to remain... because he didn't think they could win otherwise.

RUBENSTEIN: So he finally issues it, uh, on January 1, 1863, and the reason is he thinks that it will free up, um, former slaves to work and fight for the Union, is that right?

INSKEEP: Yes.

Yes.

Lincoln kept talking about the double advantage of emancipation.

Each man freed from slavery was a laborer taken away from the Confederates, and he could be enlisted as he often was in the Union Army and became one more soldier in the Union, Union Army and part of the Union's numerical advantage that is the fundamental reason that they won the war and that we still have one country.

Uh, this was a moral act, but he linked it with this very pragmatic cause, which is the thing that Lincoln is constantly trying to do in his politics.

He understands that he needs to appeal to the interests of his voters and he needs to act in the interests of the United States, although he would like to mesh that with a moral goal when he can.

RUBENSTEIN: Okay, so in your book, you have 16 individuals who you say came into... and you're right, they came into contact with Lincoln, and Lincoln figured out how to work with them even though they might have been rivals in some respects.

One of them is William Seward.

INSKEEP: Yeah.

RUBENSTEIN: He was Secretary of State, and as you pointed out, he was thought to be the likely Republican nominee in 1860.

Lincoln later offers him Secretary of State.

How did they bond and how did they get along?

INSKEEP: Lincoln understood that Seward was gonna be a challenge, that he'd be a difficult character to deal with, but also understood that he needed Seward.

He needed Seward's fame.

He needed Seward's mind.

He also needed Seward's political organization, which dominated the Republican Party in New York.

At one point when the election seems to be going well, he sends this letter to Seward that uses the word we.

"It looks like we are going to win."

He's like already putting Seward onto the team.

He offered Seward the Secretary of State's position and then asked for his advice immediately.

Upon reaching Washington, gave him a printed copy, a typeset copy of the, uh, inaugural address and said, "Can you give me some advice on this?"

Uh, Lincoln had shown it to a lot of people who changed a word.

Seward wanted to change everything.

He said, "I have three problems, the beginning, the middle and the end."

And, uh, really he did, and, uh, and Lincoln took a lot, not all the advice, but a lot of the advice and understood that part of his challenge was to keep Seward on board.

RUBENSTEIN: So another person you write about is the famous George McClellan... INSKEEP: Yes.

RUBENSTEIN: Who is the general, who seemed to be very, um, unwilling to, to recognize Lincoln as the president of the United States?

Can you go through how McClellan got the job and why he didn't ever wanna march on anybody.

INSKEEP: Yeah, McClellan was a prodigy from Pennsylvania, from an elite family in Pennsylvania, got through the University of Pennsylvania by the time he was like 15, uh, then went off to West Point where they waived the 16-year-old requirement to let him in a few months early, was really good at West Point and hung out with a lot of elite southerners there and absorbed their view of slavery and of society even though he remained loyal to the country.

When the Civil War started, he was a young commander who was moderately successful when others were failing and Lincoln immediately reached out to this handsome young impressive guy and promoted him.

Um, McClellan, I think, was a fundamentally insecure guy.

And when he got the compliment of these great promotions, he immediately developed contempt for the people who would think he was qualified for the job.

He wrote in a letter to his wife, "The president is an idiot."

Um, and he would prepare an army very capably for battle.

He was a great organizer, but at the moment of battle, he couldn't get his very powerful brain around all the details, couldn't take it, and began demanding reinforcements.

RUBENSTEIN: Now, the most, uh, prominent, uh, I guess, order against slavery in those days, a former slave, was, uh, was Frederick Douglass.

Where did Frederick Douglass come from, and what was his relationship with Lincoln?

INSKEEP: It's, it's incredible.

Uh, Douglass, at the end of his life, said, "I think that Lincoln related to me because we both came up from the bottom in the, of the world," which is true, but also very generous of Douglas because his upbringing was so much even worse than Lincoln's.

He was born, uh, into slavery, in Eastern Maryland, had, uh, very little memory or contact with his mother, um, ended up in Baltimore as a young man.

There was a White woman, uh, master or mistress, who began to teach him to read, and her husband said, "Stop that, they're not supposed to be allowed to read.

There was a reason that's dangerous, uh, for slaves to be allowed to read."

Douglass' account in his memoir is that he persuaded other children, White children, to teach him bits and pieces here and there and he educated himself.

He ultimately, uh, with the help of a woman who became his wife, uh, escaped on a train to the north and connected with anti-slavery activists in New England and became an orator and became a writer, um, and became a really significant political figure who, uh, unlike other abolitionists, who felt that the American system was so corrupted by slavery that they should not participate in it, they should not even vote, he decided, "I wanna be engaged in politics."

And he ran a newspaper and he voted in New York State where Black men could vote, not on equal terms with White people, there was a property requirement, but he seized what he could to try to affect the, the, the, the system.

And he spoke out in election after election.

And he became super famous partly because of pro-slavery editors who would constantly write about him and pro-slavery politicians who would constantly talk about him.

RUBENSTEIN: So when did he first meet Lincoln?

INSKEEP: He first met Lincoln in August of 1863.

It was after the Emancipation Proclamation that Lincoln had issued at the f- beginning of that year.

It was after Black men had begun serving in the Union Army by the thousands.

Frederick Douglass became a recruiter of Black men and said, "Join the army, you may have some trouble, you may have some prejudice, but you're gonna get equal pay, you're gonna get equal benefits, and you're gonna be fighting for equality."

Um, and then he felt that Lincoln had made a liar out of him because his administration did not provide equal pay, did not provide promotion to officer rank for Black men, did not provide other things that they needed.

And he tried to resign his recruiting position.

And his boss, uh, essentially said, "I can't lose this prize recruiter, go to the president and make your case there."

RUBENSTEIN: And how did Lincoln receive him when he went there?

INSKEEP: Uh, the fact that Lincoln received him at all is remarkable because Douglass, although he had been supportive of Lincoln, also had been fiercely critical of Lincoln in public, in his newspaper all the time, had said that he represented negro hatred, that he'd been very slow to do the Emancipation Proclamation, that it was a great thing, the greatest act in history, but that it was obvious that this should have been done a long time ago.

And in spite of what Douglass had written and said about him, some of which Lincoln knew, Lincoln said, "Send him right in," and had a real conversation with this man, uh, about the shortcomings in treatment of Black soldiers and what Lincoln felt was the political reality that made it difficult for him to provide equality at that moment, even though he was still working on it.

RUBENSTEIN: So when Douglass left, was he satisfied with the answer?

INSKEEP: Douglass said that Lincoln's explanation was quote "reasonable" and resumed supporting the war effort.

Uh, and Lincoln understood also that he had work to do.

And he also just a few weeks after this meeting with Douglass, wrote an open letter to be read aloud at a mass meeting in Illinois where there was massive consternation about the Emancipation Proclamation explaining to White voters why even if they were racist, equality was in their interest because Black soldiers were fighting to win the war.

RUBENSTEIN: Did Lincoln ever meet Douglass again?

INSKEEP: Yes.

They met again at the time of Lincoln's second inaugural, which is, uh, an amazing story.

Douglass stood in the audience in the mud.

It had been a rainy day and watched the inaugural address, then went to a presidential reception, an inaugural reception, at the White House where, uh, the guards didn't wanna admit him because he was a Black man.

He shot past them and said, "The president would want me here."

Um, and finally some, some guards cau-caught up to him and said, "Okay, this way," and, in Douglass' telling, he says, "I thought I was now gonna be guided to the president, but they instead began shoving me out a window."

Um, at which point, the window had been set up as some kind of exit, and at which point, Douglass called out to a passing White guest and said, "Get the president, tell him I'm here."

And word came in seconds for him to come in and see Lincoln and, uh, Lincoln reaches out his hand and shakes his hand and says, "How'd you like my speech?"

Um, and Douglass said, "It was a sacred effort."

RUBENSTEIN: This is a great book, great story.

You obviously know Lincoln and admire him.

Thank you very much for this great conversation.

INSKEEP: Thank you.

Enjoyed it.

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