Before Abe Was Lincoln: Jonathan Earle on the Most Important Election in American History

00:00:31 Andrew Keen: Hello, everybody. Yesterday, we had the very distinguished American journalist, novelist, Kurt Andersen on the show. He has a new novel. It's called The Breakup. He imagines the breakup of the United States, in the near future in 2045. And one of the most, moving, descriptions, sections of the book episodes takes place at the Lincoln Memorial, in, Washington DC. The hero of the book or one of the heroes of the book is in front of Abraham Lincoln, and he breaks down in tears when he thinks about the failed republic, the imaginary future Republic of the United States, which is broken up into, two pieces, a kind of repeat, in some ways, of the Civil War. Only this time, there was no Lincoln to save the Republic. Of course, Abraham Lincoln wasn't always Abraham Lincoln. At one point, he was elected president in 1860. In 1859, when, people imagined who might be president of the United States, Abraham Lincoln's name rarely, was thought of. He was barely known outside Illinois. And the election of eighteen sixty, in many ways, is perhaps amongst other elections, 1800, 1932, the most critical elections—American elections—in history. And that election is the subject of a new book, He Has the People, by my guest, Jonathan Earle. He Has the People: Abraham Lincoln and the Election of eighteen sixty. Jonathan is joining us from Baton Rouge where he teaches at, LSU. Jonathan, congratulations on the book. Would it be fair to say that, Lincoln wasn't always Lincoln? Is that one way of putting it?

00:02:29 Jonathan Earle: It's definitely one way to put it. And one of the reasons I wanted to write this book was to kind of take Lincoln off of Mount Rushmore and out of that throne that David French [ed.: Daniel Chester French] sculpted him on in the Lincoln Memorial and kind of, you know, make him into a flesh-and-blood politician because that's what he was.

00:02:51 Andrew Keen: A flesh-and-blood politician. He was all he was a—I mean, it wasn't a fleshy man, but there was a fleshy quality to him. Tell me about this man, Lincoln. What makes him so unusual and yet in so in other ways, so ordinary?

00:03:08 Jonathan Earle: Yeah. So I agree with you, Andrew, that the election of eighteen sixty is probably the most critical in American history. I mean, every four years we've heard for my lifetime that this is the most important election in American history. I'd usually say, hold on a second. It's it may be really important, but it's not 1860. Lincoln was kind of sui generis. He was born in Kentucky, so in the border south, in an actual log cabin like the legend purports, completely autodidactic. He read whatever he could, not formally educated, and he was the first Western president, really. He was super tall, which I think is an unusual thing for him. He was at a time when most people were much shorter than five foot eight or nine. He was well over six feet. He, was a great joke teller. He kind of honed his politics by riding what was known as the judicial circuit in Illinois. So you'd ride around to where a local court would be in session. And, you know, you can't be a jerk. You have to kind of break bread and tell stories and often sleep in—on the same mattress with your judge or your law or your fellow counselors. So he learned how to become a storyteller, a politician, and, he got ambitious. His law partner famously said that his ambition was an engine that knew no end. And I think that he wanted to be something a lot bigger than a congressman, which he was for one term in the eighteen forties, and a circuit lawyer, and even a successful railroad lawyer, which he was in the eighteen fifties.

00:04:49 Andrew Keen: So we have this unknown politician, very ambitious, who sleeps with the people, not literally, of course, but symbolically. You also had an interesting wife. Maybe we'll come to her later.

00:05:02 Jonathan Earle: Oh, good idea.

00:05:03 Andrew Keen: Tell me about the America of the late eighteen fifties. There was one issue which, of course, dominated its history, it seems, almost from the beginning of the republic. What was that?

00:05:15 Jonathan Earle: Well, that's true. And but let me go back a little bit. There was, you know, in the second US party system, which was in play for a good three decades in the kind of the age of Andrew Jackson, you had the Jacksonians and the Whigs. And both of these political parties, the Democratic the Democrats under Jackson and the Whigs under his opponents, wanted to keep slavery out of national politics because it was so divisive. And every once in a while, the American Congress and the president would try to solve the issue of the expansion of slavery, whether new states would be slave or free by having a compromise of you know, the Missouri Compromise of 1820 saying, okay. We'll draw a line, and maybe we'll let the north of the line be for free states and south of the line be for slave states. Or the Compromise of 1850, which tried to do it again by admitting California as a free state and allowing slavery in the District of Columbia. But as the eighteen fifties dawned, it became ever more impossible to keep slavery on the outside.

00:06:14 Andrew Keen: Just to go back to my original question, am I right or wrong to suggest that this was the issue that divided America almost from the beginning of the republic? Perhaps from the beginning.

00:06:28 Jonathan Earle: If you and I were talking about it, we would say it is. But if you looked at what the, say the election of eighteen forty four was decided over, slavery was not in the mainstream press about what the election was for. Now, it was still there in the background and it was still our original sin, uncompromisable problem. And let me actually give credit where credit is due. The reason why slavery became the issue in the 1850s, which it did, was because of a tiny group of radicals called the abolitionists who were hated by both parties. Abraham Lincoln swore that he was not an abolitionist and said nasty things about abolitionists, but, there were more and more Americans who believed that slavery and its future was the key issue of the day.

00:07:12 Andrew Keen: You mentioned Andrew Jackson, Jonathan. Many people compare him now to a current American president. Could we compare and contrast Jackson with Lincoln? How would they compare? In some ways, of course, both very ambitious. In other ways, quite different, I'm guessing.

00:07:33 Jonathan Earle: Yeah. Oh my gosh. I think the I think when we compare our current president to Jackson, it's because of they both had a kind of a air of populism about their political movement and about their personal style of leadership. You know, I believe Trump has put a big picture of Jackson back in the Oval Office, but I'm not sure if you can find it amidst all the Home Depot style, gilded plastic stuff. But Jackson was a military leader of great renown. He was a military hero before he was a politician. And he was famously, he famously won the most popular votes in the election of eighteen twenty four was—but was denied the presidency because he did not win in the House of Representatives where the election was decided. And he spent the next four years, 1824 through 1828, kind of running a political campaign based on righting this historical wrong as he saw it. So there's a lot of parallels you can make with Jackson and current politics. Lincoln was different. Lincoln was a Whig. So the party that was formed in opposition to Jackson and his kind of personal rule, the what you consider Jacksonian democracy. And, you know, Jackson was not a lawyer like Lincoln was. Lincoln was much more middle class. He strove that way. They were both born in rough circumstances. So I think there's a lot that's different, but they are both characters. They are both, they both end up, you know, being they're both on the money. So they're they both, like, transcended the nineteenth century and still invoke these big ideas in the twenty first.

00:09:24 Andrew Keen: Many people consider slavery, of course, the original sin of the republic, although others would argue that the original sin was American colonial treatment of indigenous people, which, of course, Jackson is very much implicated in. What was Lincoln's you've noted that Lincoln was slightly ambivalent on slavery, claimed he wasn't an abolitionist. We'll come to his exact politics. But what was his sense of America and these supposed sins? Did he, ingest, buy up the narrative of the free republic?

00:10:08 Jonathan Earle: Oh, absolutely.

00:10:09 Andrew Keen: A sinless republic, so to speak?

00:10:11 Jonathan Earle: I wouldn't say sinless because he really did come to believe by 1854, and that's gonna be the key date that we're gonna talk about for a few minutes, that there had to be a stop to slavery's expansion. And that should be the guiding principle of a new party called the Republican Party founded in that year. But absolutely, he was a believer in the, you know, government of the people, by the people, for the people in his words from his most famous speech or one of his most famous speeches. He was an absolute believer in the fragility of republics and that you have to tend to democracy and you have to go to the people and listen to the people. I mean, this is a guy who, a president who held an election, a presidential and congressional national election during the Civil War in 1864. One of my political heroes, President Zelensky of Ukraine, I saw just said that they're not gonna have elections because it would divide the country. I think that's a mistake. Lincoln showed that you can, in fact, prevail even during a protracted and unpopular war, especially if you let the soldiers vote, which Lincoln made sure the Union soldiers had a voice in that election. So, he did, in fact, drink that Kool-Aid of the American exceptionalism in the American Republic being unique and special.

00:11:35 Andrew Keen: Who were his heroes then? I mean, Jefferson, of course, comes to mind using these parties now in the context of current American politics. I'm not sure he's very helpful. You call him a Whig. I mean, he was, of course, a Republican, but he was very different from the American Republicans of today. You mentioned that he recognized the fragility of democracy. Was he an admirer of Madison, Jefferson, Hamilton?

00:12:05 Jonathan Earle: If he was on this podcast with you, Andrew, he would say his chief political hero was a man named Henry Clay, famous senator from the state of Kentucky from whence Lincoln also came. And Clay was the—he was three times a presidential candidate under the Whig party banner, different from the British Whig party. We could talk about that. Mostly, existed as an anti-Jacksonian Democratic Party. They were in the opposition. They lost more than they won. You might notice that Henry Clay was never elected president, but he sure came close, and that was Lincoln's guiding light. Henry Clay's political philosophy was to, aid American growth and might by having the government, help out farmers, businessmen, entrepreneurs. Jacksonian Democrats much more wanted a laissez-faire, let things take care of themselves. Henry Clay was himself a slaveholder, but his but slave holding and slavery was not at the center of his political ideology. And Lincoln kind of hewed to that all the way until eighteen fifties when he became a believer that there had to be a party dedicated to the stop the stopping of the spread of slavery.

00:13:19 Andrew Keen: So in a sense, does that go back to Hamilton?

00:13:23 Jonathan Earle: I think it exactly goes back to Hamilton, and that's what Henry Clay would say as well. They are kind of the descendants of the federalists. So in some ways, anti-Jefferson. I don't think that Lincoln opposed anything. You know, he liked Thomas Jefferson. He sort of liked the, Northwest Ordinance that Jefferson authored that kept slavery out of what was called the old Northwest—state that became Ohio, Illinois, Indiana, and leaving one out. Michigan. So he was definitely kind of Hamilton—George Washington and Hamilton to Henry Clay to his own political structure. He also, loved the classics. He would tell you that his favorite book was Euclid. He loved geometry. He loved teaching himself, mathematics from the classical period. So that was where he read when he had a chance to have a book.

00:14:16 Andrew Keen: You, don't need me to tell you this. Back in 2008, you wrote a book, entitled John Brown's Raid on Harpers Ferry. And I know the argument in your book suggests that without Harpers Ferry, Lincoln wasn't only wouldn't only be seen as presidential material, would never have been president. Explain why Harpers Ferry is so important in the election of eighteen sixty.

00:14:41 Jonathan Earle: Well, I think if you look at a kind of a basic history textbook there, they all have to mention John Brown who was a radical abolitionist who, after causing all sorts of mayhem in Kansas territory in 1854, there's that date again, in 1859, decided to take his war against slavery into the South itself, and he and 21 allies, armed themselves and invaded a tiny town in what was then Virginia, now West Virginia, very close to Washington DC, and occupied the town, which was a place that, contained a federal arsenal, a giant building full of guns and ammunition. And his plan that he stated later was to, get these guns and arm enslaved people on both sides of the Appalachian Mountains and start a slave revolt in the South itself, in 1859. That did not work out for John Brown and his followers. You could argue that he never really had a realistic chance of doing that. He didn't bring lunch, for example. He didn't have a long-term plan for how this was going to happen. But what did happen was this became a flashpoint in both the North and the South for the idea that you can no longer compromise on the issue of slavery. You can't have a Missouri Compromise. You can't have a Compromise of 1850 because if you ask a Southerner, everyone in the North is secretly a John Brown and wants to, free the slaves and take over the American West. If you ask a Northerner, it's that these slaveholders who have—and I think this is, it has rings of truth—who have controlled all three branches of government since the founding. More slaveholders were presidents. More slaveholders were Supreme Court justices. More slaveholders were majority leaders in the US Senate, Speaker of the House. No one could trust each other after John Brown. And in the piece that you showed from the Post, I argue that we don't talk about Harpers Ferry as happening during a presidential campaign. I meant that—I meant I mentioned that it's as if the, attacks on the World Trade Center in New York City happened before the election of two thousand instead of after. Or Pearl Harbor, the attack on the American naval installation in Hawaii happened after FDR's, before FDR's reelection in 1940 instead of after in 1941. It really scrambled the chessboard, in terms of candidates, in terms of what politicians were on the way up, and what politicians seem to be on the way down.

00:17:14 Andrew Keen: Yeah. It's interesting that, I'm not sure if you probably haven't read Andersen's new book. I think you'd find it interesting because it makes all sorts of references to nineteenth century America. But he, in this imaginary breakup of America, sort of invents a Harpers Ferry kind of violent event that triggered, the next civil war.

00:17:37 Jonathan Earle: I will definitely read this novel because, I wonder if Kurt listens to this podcast. I worked for him when I was a college kid as an unpaid intern at—

00:17:44 Andrew Keen: Ah, well, I'll have to let him know.

00:17:46 Jonathan Earle: Spy Magazine. [ed.: "Spy" lost to cross-talk]

00:17:47 Andrew Keen: Right. So, why—so we have Harpers Ferry. Everything, as you say, gets scrambled. The politics get turned upside down. The chessboard gets—reimagined. Lincoln, I know you argue this in the book, Lincoln wasn't some sort of, accidental beneficiary of all this. He understood what was happening. He was a very smart observer of national politics even if he wasn't very well known. Is that fair?

00:18:26 Jonathan Earle: Oh, yes. It's fair. He was among the canniest politicians our country has produced, maybe the planet. And, again, it was very unlikely that he would be the nominee as the presidential cycle began in 1859. But he was definitely a comer, and there was definitely an air of—that he was a man of the future. And while he was relatively unknown, Andrew, he was part of a famous debate cycle in 1858, so the year before Harpers Ferry, where he and the Illinois senator Stephen Douglas traveled around Illinois giving these hours-long debates, all over the state of Illinois in the North, in the South, in the East, in the West. And these debates were picked up by the national press and made him a more than unknown politician. I think of someone like you know, I read about Jon Ossoff who has been making the news a lot by kind of getting under Republicans and Trump administration's people's skin. You know, he's not an insignificant politician. He's a senator from—major state Georgia, but, you know, no one's really been thinking about him as a presidential candidate. But, boy, he says things. He's on the stump. He's getting news play. Lincoln did that in 1858 in a big way. I think most people thought of him as vice presidential material, not presidential material.

00:19:47 Andrew Keen: Yeah. And, of course, it brings to mind a later Illinois politician, Barack Obama. When we talk about those Lincoln-Douglas debates, which two years later was turned into a presidential election fight, Douglas in the Democratic Party, Lincoln as a Republican, In our tick—in our age of TikTok and Instagram, people often note that was the moment, that was the time where politicians would speak in complete sentences and would be coherent and civil. Is that the best way to describe the Lincoln-Douglas debates, and what were they arguing about?

00:20:24 Jonathan Earle: It's an outstanding way to describe them. First of all, these were the most entertaining happenings, of the day. People would ride in a carriage or—or on a horseback, you know, an entire day to hear presidential debates like this. They were wildly entertaining. You know? No Christopher Nolan movies. No cage matches on the White House grounds. So you have these two master debaters, Lincoln and Douglas. Douglas, the more famous, Douglas, the better known, really fighting it out for a Senate seat in Illinois. And in reality, you know, the American people didn't choose their senators until the early twentieth century. This was really an election for a state legislature in Louis—in Illinois that would then choose the next senator. And they argued about slavery and slavery expansion. This was the kind of, epicenter of American politics in 1858. And they would open up with an hour-long speech, and then there would be a rebuttal, and then they would ask each other questions. They would get under each other's skin. And in one of the more famous debates in Freeport, Illinois, Lincoln did something quite brilliant. He backed Douglas into a corner and basically made him defend his idea of popular sovereignty, letting the settlers of a territory, the white settlers of a territory, vote at some point on whether the state that resulted would be free or slave. And it basically helped win Douglas the Senate seat, but put him in a very bad position with his Democratic Southern—fellow Democrats from the South two years later. So he was kinda playing the long game, you could say, during these debates.

00:22:11 Andrew Keen: Speaking of the North and the South, what was the Illinois take or the general Illinois, the popular Illinois take on this incredibly complicated and divisive issue of slavery.

00:22:25 Jonathan Earle: I love it. If you show that Illinois map again from the Lincoln-Douglas debates, much of Illinois is—borders slave states like Kentucky, like Tennessee, way down there. And that's where Lincoln came from. Remember? Lincoln came from Kentucky. So those southern states—

00:22:41 Andrew Keen: Right on top. For people just listening, we've got—as we've got the map of Illinois. The half all the North is red Lincoln. All the South is blue. It kind of reminds us, I guess, of the red-blue divide in contemporary America.

00:22:56 Jonathan Earle: It really does. And I love that they use the same colors on that, when—

00:22:59 Andrew Keen: It's probably not coincidental. I'm guessing.

00:23:01 Jonathan Earle: It is not coincidental. So, yes. So, Illinois was a—they called them at the time doubtful state. We now call them battleground states. I make a joke in the book that isn't it nice that our political metaphors were religious back in the nineteenth century instead of martial? But, the Southern Illinois counties were very much tied to the South economically. They were much more proslavery than antislavery. And those newer communities in the North, places like Chicago, where the convention for the Republicans in 1860 took place, were very much antislavery and very Republican. And what's amazing if you read those Lincoln-Douglas debates, and I swear for your listeners, they are fascinating today, they will make different arguments in, depending on where they're speaking. Southern Illinois down at Cairo, same spelling as the city in Egypt, but they pronounce it Cairo in Illinois. They're basically arguing a more, proslavery, both of them. And then in Northern Illinois, even Douglas gets more hostile towards slavery. While Lincoln kinda goes in for the kill with his Freeport doctrine.

00:24:12 Andrew Keen: So how did Lincoln then, coming back to 1859, a year after those debates, how did he reinvent—or I don't think we reinvent because I'm not sure he was really a reinventer. How did he introduce himself to the American people? What did he do? What opportunity did he see which nobody else seemed to be taking?

00:24:35 Jonathan Earle: That's a great question. The first thing he did, which I put in the book, he took a tour of Kansas, which was the, again, the epicenter. It was like the Gaza of the day, where there were proslavery settlers and antislavery settlers and John Brown messed around in 1856. And then he decided—

00:24:55 Andrew Keen: And by the way, you wrote a book back in—

00:24:57 Jonathan Earle: I did.

00:24:58 Andrew Keen: 2014 [ed.: 2013] called Bleeding Kansas, Bleeding Missouri: The Long Civil War on the Border. So, you know all about Bleeding Kansas and Missouri.

00:25:07 Jonathan Earle: I think there's a good argument to be made that the Civil War began in the river valleys of Kansas in 1856, you know, fully five years before the Civil War began in Manassas, Virginia. But getting back to that, he did something that I find really interesting. He decided to do historical research. And I'm not just saying I like this because I'm a historian, but he spent a lot of the winter of eighteen fifty nine, eighteen sixty in the archives, the State Library of Illinois, trying to prove a political point that the founders, not just the famous ones, the presidents like Madison, Washington, but the people who were in the first Congress and the first congresses of the United States did have the power, and they believed they have the power, and they believed it was the right thing to use that power to stop slavery at the Ohio River and let this whole Northwestern territory enter the Union as any number of free states. It became more than, you know, four or five depending on how you count. And he put this argument into a speech, that he gave in New York City in February 1860 called the Cooper Union Address. And actually, that's really right across the street from where I worked for Kurt Andersen at Spy Magazine. It's in the East Village of New York City.

00:26:22 Andrew Keen: I know it. I know it very well.

00:26:24 Jonathan Earle: Yeah. So Lincoln shows up and he gives a speech to the National Press Corps. Again, he's kind of a rube. He speaks with a high voice, I'm told, not a booming baritone, but a reedy high voice with an accent. But he wins over powerful media figures like Horace Greeley of the New York Tribune. The Republican press in New York City is very impressed with this fresh face. And you mentioned the Obama analogy. I make that not in the book, but I make that in my public appearances that he it was like when Obama spoke to the Democratic convention in Boston in 2004 and says there aren't blue states, there aren't red states, there's just the United States of America. He made a big impression. And a lot more people were then saying, well, this guy Lincoln, who knows? But, you know, he's definitely someone to look for, when the Republicans meet in convention in his home state of Chicago later on this year.

00:27:16 Andrew Keen: He, you noted earlier that he explicitly said he wasn't an abolitionist. Didn't that alienate the abolitionists, those people who had very strong feelings on slavery? I mean, obviously, not all abolitionists were sympathetic to John Brown. Not all abolitionists were—

00:27:31 Jonathan Earle: Correct.

00:27:33 Andrew Keen: —violent. So did he have to thread that needle between abolitionism and mainstream America?

00:27:43 Jonathan Earle: I don't think he did. Abolitionists were such a tiny minority of people, and alienating them was probably pretty good politics, Andrew. So it's like when a Democratic candidate punches left to kind of shore up his standing in the middle. So no, I think he really did not, and most abolitionists also didn't vote. And when they did, you know, Frederick Douglass was very, very torn, probably the leading abolitionist in the country, by supporting the Republican Party because it was better than the Democrats and better than the Constitutional Unionists. But he didn't go out and endorse Lincoln and say Lincoln's great. He ended up, you know, supporting the ticket.

00:28:24 Andrew Keen: But—yeah. We got an upcoming show, actually. Someone in, another Oxford, or an Oxford University Press book on, I think, actually, it's a Princeton University book, on, Lincoln, written by we got it coming up next month, Dennis Rasmussen. [ed.: Rasmussen's forthcoming Princeton book is Frederick Douglass's American Founding, not a book on Lincoln] So I'd be interested to compare and contrast your book. So, you know, the popular narrative, of course, Jonathan, and you know this a million times better than I do, is that the Civil War was a moral war between those who were against slavery versus those who were strongly opposed to it. [ed.: as spoken; presumably "those who supported slavery"] But the way you're presenting it, certainly the election of eighteen sixty, that would be the Hollywood version, wouldn't it?

00:29:06 Jonathan Earle: That's a great question. I think what Lincoln and Douglas and even John Bell said—that would say that the election was about was what form the Union would take, and will it be preserved? And, you know, the Civil War really doesn't become a war of emancipation until Lincoln writes the Emancipation Proclamation in the fall of eighteen sixty two and signs it on the first day of January in 1863. It's—Lincoln lets the South start the war in Fort Sumter. He's—he said, look, I'm just trying to keep the Union together. I'm trying to resupply Union forces in the—in Charleston Harbor. I don't—you know, he famously says, I don't—I would preserve the Union if I could free no slaves, but I would also free all the slaves and then preserving the Union. [as spoken] He made keeping the United States whole the be-all and end-all of his first months in office. And I think that was genuine. No one wanted a civil war except for these people called fire-eaters who are these rabble-rousers, from places like Montgomery, Alabama and Charleston, South Carolina who decided that they would rather blow the whole thing up and hasten a slaveholders republic in true form.

00:30:22 Andrew Keen: Yeah. Well, according to, Kurt Andersen, history will repeat itself in the middle of the twenty-first century. I have to admit the eighteen sixty election is really confusing because it wasn't the traditional Obama versus, McCain or Trump versus Biden. It was, would it be fair to call it, Jonathan, a four-way race? Lincoln, Breckinridge, Bell, and Douglas? Why was it so complicated?

00:30:53 Jonathan Earle: Good question. I mean, first of all, it was conducted during a massive political crisis, the sectional crisis of the 1850s. And it did not feature a kind of duopoly, you know, Whig versus Democrat or Republican versus Democrat that we are so used to in the United States. I think, you know, your native country is more the analogy here. You know, you have the Lib Dems, you have the Labour Party, you have the Tories. And what basically happened, here's the way I kind of explain it to my students, is that you have two elections running simultaneously, one in the Northern states and another in the Southern states. And in the Northern states, you have Lincoln, the Republican nominee against Stephen Douglas, his old foe, from the eighteen fifty-eight Senate. And in the South, you have the vice president of the United States, John Breckinridge, fighting that with John Bell, who's a Tennessee senator, who's the head of the Constitutional Union Party. It's complicated, yes, because there are four candidates that win electoral votes, which is very unusual. But then if you just look at the top line there on that graphic, Lincoln won 180 electoral votes. You needed 152. Not close. The next highest vote getter in the electoral vote category is John Breckinridge with 72. What is interesting though is he wins the presidency, Lincoln, with less than 40% of the popular vote. And that is, of course, the lowest winning percentage we've had of all of our presidential elections. And we've all lived through times in our lives here. If you were here during George W. Bush's first term where he lost the popular vote to Al Gore but was selected as the president by the electoral college and Trump, Donald Trump in 2017 when he took the oath of office, he lost the popular vote to Hillary Clinton, but won in the electoral college. It always makes it a little bit awkward to govern.

00:32:41 Andrew Keen: You mentioned Hillary. Obama, of course, defeated Hillary. Who was the equivalent of Hillary? If Lincoln was the Obama within the Republican Party of eighteen fifty nine, eighteen sixty, who was the Hillary? Who was the establishment candidate?

00:32:59 Jonathan Earle: He was New York senator William Henry Seward, who was a very famous senator. He had been governor of New York. He was the frontrunner. Everyone assumed, including my interlocutor, my journalist, Murat Halstead, that Seward would be the nominee of the Republican Party. He was famous. He gave speeches that were republished in hundreds of thousands of newspapers. He was the guy. And like Hillary, he was a senator from New York. So I make it—I make the analogy even more explicit. But he had some weaknesses. And I think, we—to go back to John Brown's raid—he was tarred as more radical on the slavery issue than other candidates, including Lincoln. I don't think that's necessarily fair to Governor and Senator Seward, but that's the way he was perceived. He gave a famous speech on the Senate floor called, the higher law speech, claiming there's a higher law than the Constitution. So he was the guy. He won the most votes on the first ballot at the Republican convention. He won the most votes on the second ballot.

00:34:11 Andrew Keen: Convention?

00:34:12 Jonathan Earle: It was in Chicago, Illinois, which was a brilliant move by Lincoln's lieutenants and handlers to have the election be in the West—the convention in the West and to have the convention be in Lincoln's home state of Illinois. It helped him immeasurably.

00:34:25 Andrew Keen: Not the first or the last time that convention in Illinois makes news. And it's interesting you call it the West, of course. Now—

00:34:34 Jonathan Earle: It was.

00:34:34 Andrew Keen: People think of Chicago as the East or certainly the Eastern part of the Midwest. So it's interesting how geography shapes things. Yeah. So he—it was all—it was it essentially, then, at this convention, Jonathan? Was it a smoky backroom job?

00:34:54 Jonathan Earle: Oh, yeah.

00:34:54 Andrew Keen: Did he have good people who simply figured out the internal politics of the Republican Party and convinced the power brokers to go with Lincoln?

00:35:06 Jonathan Earle: That's, it's my favorite chapter of my book. I call it Chicagoland. And, yes, everything you invoke about a smoky backroom of people making deals and promises. Lincoln himself famously said, make no promises I am bound to honor, but his team, his lieutenants, promised lots of things in Chicago, offices, favors, newspapers.

00:35:30 Andrew Keen: Yeah. I mean, was Mayor Daley around at that time?

00:35:32 Jonathan Earle: No. But his equivalent was—and the mayor of Chicago was a big part of this. So it—they won the convention. They won over people who never liked Seward much anyway. His popularity was fairly soft in places like Ohio and Indiana. And the states that the Republicans needed to flip between 1856 and 1860 were Indiana, were Illinois, were Pennsylvania. So that's where Lincoln's men kind of worked their magic, in this convention. And the title of the book, comes from someone who is kind of shocked, a Lincoln supporter who was shocked that Seward had gone down like Goliath because he said Seward had all the money and Seward had all the bullies. Lincoln didn't have money or bullies, but by God, he had the people.

00:36:18 Andrew Keen: Yeah. But—and I wanna come back to the title. I know it's not your necessarily chosen title, although it's a good title.

00:36:25 Jonathan Earle: It's a good title.

00:36:26 Andrew Keen: The people aren't the ordinary people who he slept with in the eighteen fifties when he was traveling around the state or traveling around America. They were the power brokers. That's what determined, his victory, at least at the convention over Seward. So the—

00:36:44 Jonathan Earle: So true.

00:36:45 Andrew Keen: It's not quite the people or the people as we think of it these days.

00:36:49 Jonathan Earle: I do believe that those delegates really did think of themselves as the stew—as the peop—as the people's choice to go forth as Republicans to Chicago and choose the best candidate. And then it became a very rousing campaign. I think that gets lost sometimes too. Turnout for the election of eighteen sixty was 78% of eligible voters, all men, mostly white, cast ballots in that election. And it's just amazing to me that 81—there it is right there, 81.8%. I was off by a few percentage—

00:37:23 Andrew Keen: Right. It's going to Wikipedia. [as spoken] Wikipedia, 81—

00:37:25 Jonathan Earle: Can you imagine?

00:37:26 Andrew Keen: Quite a chi—quite, especially when you compare it to today. Two brief questions on this. Firstly, you mentioned mostly men, of course, or all men.

00:37:35 Jonathan Earle: All men.

00:37:39 Andrew Keen: Describe the franchise then. I mean, what did you have to be to qualify to vote in 1860 in America?

00:37:46 Jonathan Earle: Excellent question. I mean, famously, the Democratic Party, you know, lined up to greet ships arriving from Ireland to sign up new Irish residents of New York as Democrats right away.

00:37:58 Andrew Keen: Mayor Daley again. Right?

00:37:59 Jonathan Earle: Exactly. You had to be white and you had to be a citizen, but it was the threshold for citizenship was so easy by the 1840s when the potato famine occurs in Ireland and all these German political refugees are landing on our shores after the failed revolutions of eighteen forty eight. So really being a white guy, you didn't have to own property. And while we're now talking in twenty-first century America about these restrictions, yes, women couldn't vote. Yes, most African Americans couldn't vote. It was, however, the largest percentage of people in any country on the planet that could participate politically. It was really kind of an amazing thing in addition to being a restrictive thing.

00:38:38 Andrew Keen: And, of course, Tocqueville had come here, what, twenty years earlier or thirty years earlier to describe this. What about, African Americans, those who had escaped slavery? Could they vote?

00:38:49 Jonathan Earle: In several states, they could vote if they had avoided some of the backlash laws that were passed in the eighteen thirties, forties, and fifties. In most northern states, there were at least some African Americans on the ballot on the voting rolls who cast ballots, but very few. And it was becoming rarer and rarer as the time went on. A lot of things are happening in politics now about the Fourteenth Amendment, which passed after the Civil War and gave unequivocally African American citizenship to the United States and to the state in which they resided and made it very clear that people born here would be US citizens and would be eligible for the rights of citizenship, including the—including suffrage. So that's—this is the world out of which that solution came because it was so hard for so many black people, even free black people to vote in this country.

00:39:43 Andrew Keen: Presumably, the franchise was as much a third rail back then as it is today.

00:39:49 Jonathan Earle: It absolutely was. And, again—and I do think that, women who were the backbone of the antislavery movement, the backbone of the temperance movement, the backbone of all these reform movements, a lot of these early feminists were very, very angry with Republicans in Congress when the Fifteenth Amendment allowed black men to vote, but not white women or black women. So they shut the door really for two generations in the eighteen seventies. Women did not have the right to vote in most American states and in the—in presidential elections till 1920.

00:40:24 Andrew Keen: So Lincoln wins the election, very unusual election. No one in 1860, I think, would have argued it was the most important election in history. Two questions on that. Firstly, what did people make of it? And secondly, what did Lincoln make of it? Was he like the dog that caught the car?

00:40:44 Jonathan Earle: That's a great question. Well, first of all, I do—my reporter, Murat Halstead—

00:40:49 Andrew Keen: Yeah. Let's just briefly talk about this Murat Halstead. You introduce him in the book. I mean, so much has been written, of course, about this election and Lincoln, but one of the original aspects of He Has the People is that you have this character, Murat Halstead, as a central figure in your narrative. He's a central figure.

00:41:13 Jonathan Earle: He attends—he famously claimed to attend every political convention, major political convention between 1856 and nineteen oh eight. But in 1860, he was the only person I found that was at each of these seven major conventions, and he has kind of an equal-opportunity style of reportage. He's—calls it like he sees it. He's not a Lincoln man going in. He actually supported Seward. And, again, journalism in the nineteenth century was not—it was not objective. It was much more like, you know, I think we're going back to the nineteenth century now with MS NOW and Fox News and we—whatever your political persuasion, you choose your media—

00:41:54 Andrew Keen: Yeah. I mean, he was more of a Chris Matthews. He was born in a fantastically named place, Paddy's Run, which is now called Shandon, Ohio. I wish I'd been born in Paddy's Run.

00:42:06 Jonathan Earle: Exactly. So—

00:42:07 Andrew Keen: I didn't have any Irish, descendants. [ed.: presumably "ancestors"] I probably would never have been born.

00:42:11 Jonathan Earle: Yeah. Fair enough. He does right away call this a revolution because after the generations of Southerners and slaveholders holding power, all these northern presidents that we know about, Buchanan, Van Buren, Pierce, they're Northern men with Southern principles. The way you got ahead in Northern democratic politics was to make your deals with Southern slaveholders, and maybe you'll get to be president someday. So Murat Halstead understood that this was the first time an antislavery party had wrested control of the government from the status quo that had really been in place since the founders. So he figured out how revolutionary he was. Lincoln, for his part, I really think he is given a bad rap by historians about how he acts between the election and his inauguration. Again, you didn't get inaugurated in this century really before FDR until March. [ed.: as spoken; presumably "in this country"] So there's this long four and a half months of waiting for a new administration to come in. And he had all these opportunities to compromise away his political victory, and he refused to do it. He said, we won. I'm not gonna we're not gonna have a Missouri Compromise line going all the way between Missouri and California, because we won. And he probably could have at least forestalled or at least delayed, some kind of a sectional conflict or a Kurt Andersen style civil war by making a peace deal, and he refused to do it.

00:43:37 Andrew Keen: So what you're saying then, I—it's interesting you mentioned Buchanan. I was just in Kenosha, Wisconsin, and I visited, Buchanan's home. [ed.: Buchanan's home, Wheatland, is in Lancaster, Pennsylvania] He was a member of the upper class, much more of a political aristocracy in contrast to Lincoln. Are you saying then, Jonathan, that with the election of Lincoln in 1860, the Civil War was pretty—I know this is a, not a word that most historians like. Was that the Civil War was pretty inevitable?

00:44:06 Jonathan Earle: We don't like it, but I think the Civil War is inevitable after John Brown. And it was just who is gonna be in charge when it happens. So, yes, I really do think it was gonna happen. And, again, it's these Southern fire-eaters, they had a lot of clout and a lot of momentum after this very complicated election where, you know, if you're a Southerner and you look at that map, Andrew, it doesn't feel like your side got fair shake. More people—they said things like, more people voted against Lincoln than voted for him. Why should we be ruled by this black abolitionist? [ed.: the period epithet was "Black Republican"] And that was a phrase they used very intentionally to tar the Republican Party with abolitionism, with, all sorts of miscegenation, nightmarish scenarios.

00:44:56 Andrew Keen: And what would have happened, I know it's impossible to say, but had Seward won the nomination and been elected, would it? Would the Civil War have been as equally inevitable? I mean, you said that after Harpers Ferry, civil war was inevitable, but would it have been like as likely under a President William Seward?

00:45:15 Jonathan Earle: I think so. I think so. The—I think the trickier counterfactual would be: what if Douglas—what if the old political laws of physics had held and Stephen Douglas—

00:45:28 Andrew Keen: —already know that. [unclear]

00:45:29 Jonathan Earle: Exactly. Northern Democrat like Pierce, like Buchanan, had kind of papered together some kind of a fusion. You know, everybody join me under the banner of stopping the Republicans, stopping Lincoln. That would have been a more interesting question. I think the Civil War still would have happened personally, but it might have been very different. And maybe the North would have broken away. Maybe New England would have broken away, but Wisconsin would have stayed. I don't know. That's where it gets kinda interesting.

00:45:55 Andrew Keen: So does Lincoln—I mean, given that he wasn't president for very long, five years [ed.: just over four], assassinated on April 14, 1865, was he—does he deserve his reputation? Does he deserve his central memorial in Washington, DC, or was he himself, if not a victim, a beneficiary of history? The fact that he was so unknown, it required someone unknown to remake American history.

00:46:27 Jonathan Earle: It's a good question. I think the reason why Lincoln, every time there's a survey of professionals, political scientists, historians, Lincoln comes out as, if not number one, top two or three, and I would put him there too. And the reason being, here's a guy who grew so observably, palpably, majorly over the course of his political life. He evolved, in a way that many people don't. I sometimes compare him to not the current Secretary of Health and Human Services, Bobby Kennedy Junior, but his dad, Bobby Kennedy, RFK, kind of went from being a McCarthyite, kind of a little nepo attorney general to being someone who, by the time of his assassination, understood that poverty and race were intersecting in nineteen sixties America and had some real opportunities to solve that. I think Lincoln's the same way. Lincoln moves across the spectrum of antislavery and all the way from 1860 where he says, I don't believe that black men and white men are equal. They have rights granted by the Declaration of Independence, he conceded. But the last speech he gave before he was assassinated, a speech attended by John Wilkes Booth, his assassin, was to give certain African American men the right to vote. He singled out, soldiers, African American Union soldiers, the very intelligent, college-educated perhaps. So he'd moved all the way from kind of a white supremacist but moderately antislavery all the way toward black enfranchisement because of African American heroism on the battlefield during the Civil War.

00:48:09 Andrew Keen: You present him as a political realist, almost Machiavellian, in his run-up to 1860 for the election to become president or get the nomination of his party. Are you suggesting then when he was in power, he changed from maybe the Machiavelli of The Prince to the Machiavelli of the Discourses?

00:48:30 Jonathan Earle: I like that. And now, again, I stopped my book, as soon as he takes the oath of office. So that's a good question. Not my—

00:48:36 Andrew Keen: Maybe you're an expert. You can focus on that.

00:48:39 Jonathan Earle: Maybe. But I do think he understood the power of the presidency and, you know, you're—it's different when you're a politician trying to get a nomination and when you are trying to hold a country together in the midst of a civil war. And he turned out to have real skills and real reservoirs of strength that I don't know if you could have located them in the Lincoln of the 1840s or 1850s. He understood some things that his generals, graduates of West Point did not about fighting. He understood that, like, it's gonna be a meat grinder. It's gonna take tremendous losses by Northern forces to force the surrender of the South, and he was correct about that. He knew that he had to hold an election in the midst of that civil war to give American democracy legitimacy—

00:49:29 Andrew Keen: The election of eighteen sixty four.

00:49:31 Jonathan Earle: Which he thought he was gonna lose all the way until mid-October and right before the election when he sees things might be changing.

00:49:40 Andrew Keen: It's interesting you bring up Bobby Kennedy. I have an interest in him.

00:49:44 Jonathan Earle: Me too.

00:49:44 Andrew Keen: Kennedy, of course, became a radical during the mid to later—well, he was assassinated in '68. But so his radicalism was articulated during, the election as opposed to afterwards. I mean, of course, one of the great counterfactuals of all American history is what would have happened had he not been assassinated and won the election. We wouldn't have had a President Nixon. That's maybe subject of another story, another book.

00:50:14 Jonathan Earle: I think that—that scans.

00:50:16 Andrew Keen: Jonathan, one of the things that you may not probably agree with your old friend or your old employee, Kurt Andersen, in our conversation, he suggested that he didn't necessarily think it was such a great thing that America remained united during the Civil War. In some ways, it might have been better had it broken up. In his novel, The Breakup, he suggests that the breaking up of America isn't such a bad thing. Could one argue that given the subsequent history of America and these deep divisions now in the America of the twenty twenties, that it might have been better had America just broken up?

00:50:56 Jonathan Earle: Hard no. Why? I mean, I live in a state that is 33% African American, and that would be consigning my fellow Louisianians to, unremitted servitude for them and their descendants forever and ever and ever. I know it's hard for republics and democracies to stay intact, but having a United States of America that has as its DNA, those words in the Declaration of Independence, I think are important for our country, for the citizenry, and for the planet, for the world. So, and I do think, you know, it would be fun to talk to Kurt about what a new civil war would look like. It would not be geographically based.

00:51:40 Andrew Keen: Yeah. I mean, you need to read the book. I think you're—

00:51:42 Jonathan Earle: —telling me.

00:51:42 Andrew Keen: —a lot of fun. It's a very, I'm in the middle of it now. It's a very good book. He's a wonderful writer.

00:51:48 Jonathan Earle: —Called Heyday about the period I work on, the eighteen forties. It's really great. I mean, so he does research. He's obviously super intelligent, and funny person. So no. But I really do think I'm not willing to say that, no. I think we need a United States of America. We need Mississippi in the United States of America, and we need Wyoming in the United States of America, whether you're a New York liberal or a southern conservative.

00:52:15 Andrew Keen: Fine. And let's end where we began. You noted that Americans, every time there's an election, they say it's the most important election in history. And you talk about the eighteen sixty election. I think very few people would disagree with you as being one of the most important. It will be inevitable that in 2028, people will talk about this election as being the most important. Who knows who will get the nominations? Who knows what the situation will be? Who knows indeed whether there'll even be an election? What can we learn, though, about the fragility of American democracy today? And I think everybody would want—I think everyone watching this, at least, would wanna maintain American democracy from your eighteen sixty election. What will people learn for the late twenty twenties about American democracy from your new book, He Has the People?

00:53:09 Jonathan Earle: Oh, thank you for giving me the opportunity. I think the main argument of the book is that historical contingency always wins, and we never know who the nominee is really gonna be. And we never know what global significant event is going to rock the election from somewhere, October surprise or terrorist attack or what have you. So I would say—we—those people who say, you know who's gonna win? It's gonna be, you know, John McCain and Barack Obama. Like, nobody would have thought Barack Obama would be the 2008 nominee two years before.

00:53:44 Andrew Keen: And nobody thought that McCain would either. I mean, at least they are the Republican nominee. So—

00:53:50 Jonathan Earle: We do not know. But what we should kind of focus on is how to keep the democratic experiment healthy and strong. And I think that's why this election in 2028 is going to be one of the most important in American history, if not the most. And hopefully, it won't lead to a Kurt Andersen style civil war. We can—

00:54:09 Andrew Keen: Well, you mentioned earlier, Ossoff, a lot of people now talking about him. He isn't. He's certainly not unknown or an unknown unknown to borrow some famous, cliched, saying, which actually, interestingly enough, Andersen uses in his book. But do you think there's a Lincoln somewhere? I think there's a—somewhere in America that we don't even know his name, but by 2028, like Barack Obama or maybe Bill Clinton, we'll all be talking about?

00:54:44 Jonathan Earle: It stands to reason. Now people did know Clinton. You know, Bill Clinton, you know, that his first biographer's title was First in His Class. People knew Bill Clinton from, you know, being a Rhodes Scholar and being a very young governor of a very small state. People knew Obama as this Chicago state senator who played poker with, you know, the power brokers from the south of southern Illinois. You know, we probably professionals know who these people are, but, I don't think the general public does. And I do think that there is a Lincoln out there. I do.

00:55:18 Andrew Keen: Well, there you have it. He Has the People: Abraham Lincoln and the Election of eighteen sixty. It's getting great reviews. It's written by Jonathan Earle, one of America's leading historians of the nineteenth century. It's a book not just about American past, but also perhaps about the future. Maybe it should be read in association with Kurt Andersen's The Breakup, which was the subject of our show yesterday. Really, fun conversation, Jonathan. We'll have to get you back on the show back, in a year or two when, 2028 is more coherent.

00:55:52 Jonathan Earle: Thank you so much. That would make me very happy. Thanks for inviting me, Andrew.