Washington Monthly - September/October 2019 - 112

down of political reason that Lincoln's
long-delayed appearance comes almost
as a plank to the drowning swimmer.

here are few saints and many sinners
in All the Powers of Earth. Chief among
the sinners is Douglas. Like many of his
fellow Jacksonian Democrats, Douglas
turned a political blind eye to the influence of slaveholders in his party. He saw
nothing repugnant in allowing slavery a
free place at the American table and, according to the rules of popular sovereignty, a free door to the western territories
if the territories so desired. Douglas's aggressiveness won him election to the Senate and the nickname "the Little Giant."
It also earned him a reputation as a prairie demagogue. Elite southern politicians
used him but disdained him; northern
opponents of slavery raged against him
as a sellout. But he remained popular
with northern Democrats, especially in
Illinois, which was a strongly Democratic state. Ultimately, Blumenthal deems
Douglas a gross political miscalculator,
one who sold his soul to the Slave Power
and then tried vainly to bargain with it.
Douglas is not alone in political duplicity. Blumenthal describes James Buchanan, president from 1857 to 1861, as
"a boilerplate partisan," whose "manner
was courtly, his image dignified," but
who was myopically content to fiddle
while the republic burned down around
him. John Brown, whose abolitionist
impulses might have commended him
to Blumenthal, was in reality a suicidal
freak with a "fixation on" transforming
himself into "the crucified warrior."
Abraham Lincoln, by contrast, is an island of calm in this white-capped sea of
folly, a man who emerges from a youth
of fustian, name-calling politics as a balanced, coherent personality with a "stark
naturalness" and an "inner sense as a man
of political destiny." He deals frankly and
evenhandedly with anti-immigration
nativists in the Know-Nothing Party
and with abolitionists and radical German Republicans. He quietly works to
liberate John Shelby, an Illinois black
man sold into slavery in New Orleans.
Yet, at the same time, he protests that he
has no intention of enraging white Illi112

September/October 2019

noisans by promoting racial equality-
even though Douglas sees that, in the
long term, racial equality will be the inevitable outcome of Lincoln's ideas.
This was mistaken in some quarters
for vacillation. It was, in fact, an exercise of what Blumenthal calls Lincoln's
"prescience," a self-correcting mixture
of high anti-slavery idealism and driving ambition. Ambition launches him
at Douglas's Senate seat in 1858, but his
moral loathing of slavery allows him to
soar to rhetorical heights in the ensuing
debates, earning national notice. Lincoln squeezes the levers of the political
locomotive as though he designed them,
all the while insisting that the immorality of slavery and the need to curtail its
growth are the nonnegotiable mandates
of the Republican Party. In the end, his
reward is to shock his own party's East
Coast establishment by snatching the
1860 presidential nomination out of the
hands of the long-touted front-runner,
William Henry Seward, a man who
could never quite get ambition and idealism into the same exquisite balance
as Lincoln.

lumenthal has enjoyed a career of
his own in politics, as a onetime
adviser to Bill and Hillary Clinton, and
his political finesse gives his narrative
a faultless sense of timing. Strange as
it may seem to devote thirty-six pages
to Charles Sumner's caning, and fifteen
more to John Brown's murderous rampage, Blumenthal makes such wanderings dovetail perfectly, and not only with
each other: it is at exactly the moment
when the full impact of the Sumner and
Brown outrages sink in that Blumenthal
introduces the assembling, just a week
later, of the Illinois Republicans' state
organizing convention, in which Lincoln
would give the speech that relaunched
his political career.
This attention to political tick-tock-
of how an event in one corner casts a
beam into a greater event in another-
gives us the sense of watching the crisis of 1860 unfold in real time. And it reminds us of something hopeful: that a
great deal in politics is contingent, that
it depends on choices, made at specific

moments and in response to particular
circumstances, and above all made fearlessly as matters of principle as well as
matters of prudence.
On the other hand, Blumenthal's intensive sweep of the American political
world has no eye for the intellectual Lincoln who so hugely admired John Stuart
Mill and the heirs of Adam Smith. And
Blumenthal may have let his penchant
for the dramatic lead him to relay too
credulously certain tales of questionable
provenance. He recounts, for example,
the 1857 incident in which Douglas, angered by Buchanan's support for a constitution drafted by pro-slavery legislators
in Kansas, supposedly confronted the
president at the White House. Buchanan warned Douglas that, in the days of
Andrew Jackson, those who bucked the
Democratic Party line were driven into
political exile. "Mr. President," Douglas
insolently replied, "I wish you to remember that General Jackson is dead, sir."
This story has been repeated by historian after historian. But it's a story that
got its first telling in 1860 from Douglas
himself, in a stump speech, with no corroboration, and was subsequently embroidered for good effect. Caveat narrator.
These are minor blemishes, however.
Blumenthal has made an important
contribution by carefully situating Lincoln in the political context of his time.
Some Lincoln biographies are really
about the "inner" Lincoln. Others position him in the social and professional web of his times. Comparatively little,
however, has connected the lofty thinker, the striving westerner, and the pessimistic fatalist with the hands-on politician, either in Illinois or in Washington.
And yet, practical politics was the environment in which Lincoln reveled. "Politics were his Heaven," recalled Lincoln's
longtime law partner, William Herndon,
and perhaps it requires someone who
has gotten his hands deep in the raw mechanics of politics to write as well as Blumenthal has written about the political
Lincoln.
Allen C. Guelzo, a senior research scholar at
Princeton University, is a Civil War historian
and three-time winner of the Lincoln Prize.

Washington Monthly - September/October 2019

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