March 29, 2021 • 51 mins
Abraham Lincoln contemplated suicide more than once in his life, he knew suffering and yet he is perhaps histories' greatest leader through a period of time where the nation also wept, the American Civil War.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Personology is a production of I Heart Radio. Abraham Lincoln
is consistently ranked the top Us president of all time
by public polls and historical scholars. His history changing accomplishments
include abolishing slavery, managing the country through a Civil war
(00:23):
which resulted in preserving and strengthening the Union, as well
as modernizing the country's economy. My guest today is Eric Fohner,
who is the DeWitt Clinton Professor Emeritus of History at
Columbia University. He is one of the country's most prominent historians.
He is the author of The Fiery Trial Abraham Lincoln
(00:45):
and American Slavery, which was the winner, among other awards,
of the Bancroft Prize, the Pulitzer Prize for History, and
the Lincoln Prize. Abraham link And was born February twelfth,
eighteen o nine. He was born in Kentucky to basically
(01:06):
an illegitimate mother and a farmer father. And if we
can speak a little bit about his family of origin
and who they were, and a little bit of what
they were like and therefore what the impact was on
a young aim. So his father was Thomas. Well, let
me say to begin with that there's an enormous amount
(01:28):
of literature about Lincoln out there. Somebody has estimated that
there are sixteen thousand books that deal with Lincoln in
one way or another. If you counted up, that's an
average of more than two books a week since the
American Civil War. There are many different interpretations or accounts
(01:49):
of Lincoln's early family and what the impact of that
his upbringing was on his later career and character. I
think that it's very complicated. Despite those sixteen thousand books,
we know a lot less about Lincoln's early life that
we might want to. And he didn't talk about it
all that much in his campaign or autobiography. He just said, well,
(02:12):
my life. He quoted a line from a poem. It's
the Annals of the poor, you know, but not very
interesting his early life. His father was a farmer in Kentucky,
and then they moved when he was young to Indiana,
where he really grew up. They weren't dirt poor, but
they certainly weren't afflu we've in anyway, and they were
(02:32):
all very hard working. I'd said, the most important thing
about Lincoln's youth is that he somehow figured out that
the way to get ahead was not through hard physical labor,
but through his mind. He was a smart guy. He
loved to read. He was self educated completely. He only
had like one year of schooling in his whole life,
(02:54):
and his stepmother encouraged this. He was as he grew.
He was a big, strong guy. He had his father
what you know, what needed is to work in the field,
at which he did, but he also spent a lot
of time reading and his mother encouraged this. And if
his father complained that he wasn't working, his mother said,
look a stepmother, I mean you know this, this is
(03:15):
what he wants to do, this is what he needs to.
Let him read, let him learn. You know, he did have,
we know, at least some early trauma in the form
of an infant brother who died. Now we could say
that's traumatic, or we could say not his sister died,
but very very early on there was a baby brother
who died in babyhood, which isn't traumatic in the sense
(03:37):
that that was not uncommon for those times. And yes,
he had this sister to whom he was very close,
who in his teen years died in childbirth. That was
a big loss. But as you pointed out, his mother
died of this milk poison, which again unfortunately was not unusual. Also,
and aunt and uncle died of the milk poison when
he was only nine. And one thing that does seem
(03:59):
to be so what known factually is right, the father
left all the children together in this sort of one
room house defend for themselves for a fairly long for months,
basically for months by themselves, while he went to find
himself a new wife. Right. He couldn't handle the whole
thing himself. He needed another wife. Right. They were left
on their own, which wasn't very easy, but they somehow
(04:21):
matters to survive until the father came back with the stepmother,
the original mother he has in somewhere sort of described her,
or she has described as kind of a colder woman. Again,
she died by the time he was nine. So one
of the problems here is that we don't have documentation
really about Lincoln's early life. Where we're basing this on
is people's recollections later on, after Lincoln became famous and
(04:48):
great and was assassinated. Is Law Gardner Herndon, who wrote
the first biography, went around interviewing people, and of course
their recollections of Lincoln were filtered through what I knew
he had become you know, oh yeah, I know. He
was Lincoln when he was five years old. He determined
to free the slaves. You know, a lot of those
recollections and not a hud sent reliable, let's put it
(05:10):
that way. He described himself as kind of a sensitive kid,
as you said. A reader and others described him as
a young person, let's say, as ambitious in certain ways,
like driven, but also very sensitive. That he was sort
of a sensitive man. He was sensitive. He had a
very complicated relationship with his father because Lincoln was quite
(05:32):
ambitious and he felt his father wasn't very ambitious. It
wasn't exactly that he was lazy. He was a hard
working guy. You couldn't live as a small farmer in Indiana,
and he had not worked hard, but he didn't seem
to want to get ahead. Lincoln felt that his father
had lacked ambition, that he was satisfied with the kind
(05:53):
of subsistence life, low income life, whereas Lincoln, for reasons
that I don't know exactly, how do you explain, he
was driven by ambition very early on. Later on, he
really had a complicated relationship with his father. When his
father was dying. Right, he didn't come to his bedside, right,
he didn't come to his funeral. Yeah, his step mother
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this is like eighteen fifty or something. Lincoln is forty
years old. And his stepmother said, well, sent him a letter.
He was living about seventy eighty miles away in Springfield
at that time, in Illinois. And his stepmother said, you know,
I think your father is dying and you should come
and say goodbye. And Lincoln said, I don't see what
that would accomplish, you know what I mean, we know
(06:35):
that therefore that there wasn't certainly a warm relationship, and
in fact, his father basically docked his pay until the
age of twenty two. Again not a highly unusual practice,
but Lincoln seemed to feel really chafe under this idea
of you know, whatever I do, you take it, well,
that's up to age twenty one. Yeah. Again, he's a
(06:57):
strong guy. He works saw and his father would send
him out to work for neighbors to pay off his
own debts. And once he got to be twenty one,
Lincoln just took off. I mean that was it. He left.
He didn't want to be stuck there in the backwoods,
you know, working in the all the benefit going to
his father. He actually became an urban person. I'm in
small towns, but he never went back to work on
(07:18):
a farm. Later on he was offered to be governor
of the territory of Oregon. He said, no, that's that's
off the beaten pay. I'm not going out there. Some
early effects, you could say, and then we'll move into
his move to his urban life. But you could say,
in terms of what might have affected him early in
his life regarding the concept of slavery, his parents did
(07:41):
belong to a separate Baptist church that did believe in
no slavery. Right, his parents were anti slavery, no question
about anti slavery. Actually also anti dance, anti alcohol. There
was sort of a whole. But interestingly, even though his
father did pursue sort of own a farm and working
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the farm, definitely did not believe in slavery. And I'm
going to, just as a psychoanalyst, go out on a
limb and say that if you're chafing under your father's
you will go out and work for me, and I
will take your pay, and this will go on indefinitely.
One could imagine a young man feeling enslaved of sorts
and and feeling further. I'm not going to do this,
(08:24):
and there are people who recall, but I put that
in quotes. You know that Lincoln once said I was
a slave. But you know, I've known believe that. As
I say, I think people remembered a lot of things
about Lincoln that never really happened from old days. But
you know, to me, the most interesting thing about Lincoln
as a young man growing up in the Frontier is
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that he really learned to think for himself very early.
He was alienated in a way from the culture he
was growing up in. He didn't drink. Now everyone's boozed
up on the front day of all the time, not
to it was kind to animals. He didn't like to
go hunting. He didn't get involved in fist fights, and
occasionally he was in a wrestling match, but he didn't
(09:08):
like violence. He didn't hate Indians. In other words, he
thought for himself. He thought for himself. But you could
also say all those things you described suggest a man
early on with a degree of empathy that was unusual. Yeah, definitely, definitely. Also,
he rejected the what you might call the kind of
(09:28):
really hardcore masculinity of the culture there. Maybe that's empathy.
Now I'm not going out. You know, there are historians
who claim that Lincoln was really gay, which to my
mind is absurd. There's no real evidence of that. But
people saw this sensitive and empathic man with already early
(09:49):
on a pretty high level moral compass. Yes, I think so.
You know. So he was also against slavery, no question
about it. Now, we got that from his parents. He
got that from some of the reading he did. He
was often reading things which had an anti slavery implication
to it. He wasn't an abolitionist, you know. He didn't
(10:09):
go out on until much later. He didn't go out
making public statements against slavery, but that's certainly something that
was part of his upbringing. And even that was unusual
in his neck of the woods because most of the
people who settled in southern Indiana, like his own family,
were from the slave owning states. They weren't pro slavery
(10:30):
in an extreme way, but they certainly weren't anti slavery either.
But as you mentioned earlier, he even had this feeling
of compassion for animals that there's this I don't know
if it's apocryphal or true story of risking getting into
a brawl with a bunch of boys because he stopped
them from quote burning a turtle, torturing an animal. Yeah,
(10:51):
that that could be true. It's it rings true. As
I say, I think you have to take these recollections
with a big grain of salt. But there's still some
of them are probably true. And if you hear more
than one person recollecting it, it makes sense. He leaves
his father, he basically pursues a life of education self
self education, really, so he teaches himself the law. Yeah,
(11:14):
he basically puts himself through law school in a sense
you didn't have to go to law school back then.
Therefore he didn't have student loans to pay off. You
just worked with a lawyer and then you took you know,
then you got admitted to the bar. But he was
a pretty good lawyer. Apparently his real history as an
adult takes place in Illinois, not Indiana. He moves to
(11:34):
Illinois when he gets to one and goes into politics
very early. I mean he ran for office like an
age twenty one or two. The first time he ran
a lost, but he was in politics all the way
through today. A lot of people look down or don't
hold politicians and high esteem. But he was a politician.
(11:55):
That was his real passion. He made a living as
a lawyer, but politics, but when he was really interested.
Do we know anything of what motivated him early on
to want to be a politician. Gives an example of
him thinking for himself. He joined the Whig Party, not
widely known nowadays, because they believed in improvement, the same
kind of self improvement he was talking about. They believed
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in what we call today infrastructure, building canals, building railroads,
the government setting up a national bank, in other words,
the government promoting economic growth that would then benefit everybody.
Lincoln believed in that. Now, the fact is, in Illinois
most people were not Whigs. They were Democrats. The party
he joined was a big loser. They always lost in
(12:40):
most elections. They never elected a governor in Illinois, they
never elected a senator. Lincoln joined them because he was
this belief and improvement, both personal improvement and economic improvement
for the whole society. The Democrats believed in leis fair,
the government just step out of the way, let everybody
do what they feel like. But Lincoln felt, you're not
(13:02):
going to grow the economy that way. I think his
initial interest in politics was part of this kind of
forward looking vision of general social improvement, and he certainly
didn't shy away from aligning himself with the underdogs. As
you point out, the Wigs were the underdogs, right, they
kept losing. Well, they were the underdog, but they were
(13:24):
also the rich. I mean, that's the funny that Lincoln
grew up pretty modest, but the Wigs were a party
of the big business people as well as young guys,
you know, humble guys like Lincoln. But it's complicated. Yeah,
they were the minority. But nationally, the richest slave owners
were Whigs. The merchants in New York City were Whigs,
the bankers were Whigs. That Democrats were the small farmers,
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the factory workers, you know, the more of the working
class party and great followers of Andrew Jackson. It was
sort of like today, where the personality of the political
leader was the key thing. You know. So you Trump
today with millions of followers, and you had Andrew Jackson
back then with millions of followers, and it didn't even
matter what he said. They just loved Andrew Jackson, not Lincoln.
(14:09):
He doesn't like Andrew Jackson. He's a wig. The wigs
are opposing Jackson. We should also say that in terms
of his early adulthood, at this point, when he's early on,
there's no evidence of depression. But by age twenty six
with actually what seems to have been the tipping point
was a rejection. Really, he'd been awkward with women. He
(14:32):
wasn't a charismatic, let's say, and comfortable with women. He
was also quite ugly. Okay, well that doesn't help that.
He even felt that he would always be self deprecating.
You know, he told stories about how ugly he was
with you know, I don't know what psychologically that means.
He would say, you know, well, a woman said to me,
you know, if you're the ugliest man I've ever seen.
(14:54):
So Lincoln said, well, I'm sorry to you. What can
I do about that? And she said, well, you could indoors.
This is Lincoln telling a story about himself. So he
had a massochistic streak of sorts, one might say, and
that would fit with his reaction some degree to the
rejection of Ann Rutledge, who does appear to be his
(15:15):
first love. Right, that's what they say. Is it true? Possibly?
And it does seem though, that there is evidence of
what today we would call a major depression, a real
clinical depression. Absolutely, he suffered depression a couple of times.
One when Ann Rutledge died, really and then later when
(15:36):
his engagement to Mary Todd broke up and they were
going to get married and they decided not to for
one reason. Then he his friends really thought he was
going to commit suicide, that he was suicidal. They took
anything out of his rooms that might be dangerous. Now, again,
this is way beyond my pay grade. Is this psychological?
(15:57):
Is it chemical? I don't know what causes depression any way.
I don't even know if doctors know that. There's definitely
a clear mix, right of nature, nurture, of biology, and genetics.
And it's hard to document a family history when you
don't have documents, So we don't know a lot about
his extended family history in terms of recurrent major depression.
(16:17):
But definitely a documentation of recurrent periods of being suicidal
and having suicidal ideation means major depression. And he could
have had a biological predisposition and then a stressor like
a rejection by a woman, which, by the way, when
you have your mother die at the age of nine.
That is going to sensitize you to the abandonment or
(16:39):
loss of an important woman in your life. So not
surprising that somebody who is predisposed perhaps too depression would
have severe depressions in the stressor of losing a woman.
And in terms of the biology and Lincoln, it does
seem because even between these episodes of severe depression, he
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is described and pictorially appears to be a melancholy man.
And that's what they called it in those days, melancholy,
which was much more romanticized versions. In those days, it
wasn't seen like today. It wasn't seen as mental illness
that perhaps we stigmatize and definitely looked down on you
(17:23):
functionally as a person, which is unfortunate because it's unfair
and untrue. But in those days there was a romantic
version of being somewhat depressed. That is right. However, let
me just say that Lincoln eventually did marry Mary Todd,
and they had a quite good marriage. Actually, even though
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you wouldn't know that from a lot of books about Lincoln.
You know, when you put someone up on a pedestal,
there's gotta be the opposite somewhere around Lincoln is a
godlike figure. Who's the devil, Well, it's Mary Todd. She
was horrible, She was a shrewd. You spent too much money,
She spoiled the children. I think they actually had a
very good marriage. They had problems, but not nearly as
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much as you might guess in a lot of the readings.
She had a tough life for later on. I mean
she had children die young, her husband was assassinated sitting
next to her. That she ultimately suffered her own psychiatric issues.
She did, but a lot of that is later on.
In other words, while she's married to Lincoln. I mean
eventually her son had her committed to an institution for
(18:30):
a while. But she had, as you said, she had
all these Traumas leader, she gets a bad rap from
a lot of the people who really love Lincoln. They
decided they have to have someone as the foil. So anyway,
I know the words. I don't want to give the
impression that he was always melancholy and their marriage was
kind of depressing because of that. Now it was that
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they actually had a pretty good time. Now. It is
also true in terms of familiar you know, being comfortable
with women Lincoln really as a lawyer in the eighteen forties,
let's say it into the fifties, he was frequently not home.
He was what they call on the circuit. It was
a weird thing. These groups of lawyers and judges would
travel together through Illinois, stopping in each town to hear
(19:14):
local cases. They all knew each other. A case would
be okay, you represent this side, and you represent that side,
and Judge Smith over here will come in and hear
the case. Lincoln really loved that. He loved traveling around
the state with all these guys, and he didn't mind
being away from home all that much. And maybe that's
the secret of a good marriage. Many people say that
(19:35):
you have some space, absence makes the heart grow fonder.
But he did want to marry Mary Todd very much so.
And she was ambitious for herself, ambitious for him, he
had to say, for him, because in those days that
was the only vehicle women had for their own ambition.
If it had been today, she'd have been running for president,
not him. But she was very politically savvy. You know,
(19:57):
her father was a significant figure in Tucky politics. The
family knew Henry Clay, who was one of the great
politicians of that era. She was well educated, unlike Lincoln.
I mean, so here's a little tidbit. Historians always refer
to her as Mary Todd Lincoln. That is not she
never used that. She was always Mary Lincoln. You put
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in the Todd you're sort of creating a little separation
between her and Lincoln. She didn't want to know. She
was devoted to Lincoln and ambitious for Lincoln and for herself. Absolutely,
let's take a quick break here. We'll be back in
a moment. So even though he, you know, went through
these periods of depression, obviously he had friends, colleagues, and
(20:44):
ultimately a wife who who helped protect him from himself
in those darkest moments. And as you said, he remained
highly functional. He continued to pursue these political offices. It
was a struggle at first. And it's interesting because he
didn't really do that well politically almost up until the
time he was elected president. I know, he lost a
(21:05):
lot of races. I mean, he was in the Illinois
legislature for a few terms. He actually became a philly
important leader of the Whig Party in Illinois, even though
that they was lost. He served one term in Congress
and that's it. He left Congress in the beginning of
eighteen forty nine. He didn't hold another office until he's
elected president, so that's kind of unusual in American politics.
(21:28):
He ran for the Senate in eighteen fifty four and lost.
He ran for the Senate in eighteen fifty eight and lost,
but he kept going forward. That's what he had ambition.
He had a lot of friends. He was a very
savvay politician. He obviously must have been a very I
don't know what to say, likable congenial guy. That he
was always surrounded by people who really were devoted to him.
I would argue that, because this is something we do
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know about depression, that having depression makes you a more
empathic person, and that being able to stand in other
people all shoes helps them connect with you, brings people
to you. And of course that was one of the
gifts that Lincoln had in spades, his ability to bring
others and colleagues and create groups that could work together.
(22:15):
That he helped manage that and create that. The desire
to do that was definitely a talent of his that
we see early on, and an important talent that carried
him through what turned out to be one of the
most difficult time periods in terms of a presidency. Right.
But here's the problem that Lincoln faced, particularly in the
(22:35):
Whig Party. The Whig Party was a national party that
it was in the north and the south and east west.
Lincoln in Congress associated with members of the party from
all over the country. And yes, he was devoted to
bringing people together. But if you were going to bring
if you're going to keep the unity of the party,
you could not talk about slavery. That was the one
(22:58):
dangerous line of division. There was no agreement on slavery
within the Whig Party any more than there was within
the country. And so you've had to face this problem.
You had to keep it off the agenda, the futureist slavery,
no matter what your personal beliefs, if you wanted to
maintain the unity and strength of the party. So that's
(23:18):
a tremendous tension. In the eighteen forties, when he's a
politician in the Whig Party, he doesn't say very much
about slavery at all. He is his few speeches in Congress,
he doesn't say anything much about slavery. Why because that
would create a division within the political party. In the
eighteen fifties, when the political system kind of cracks up,
(23:39):
then there's an opening. The opening is the Republican Party,
which is only a northern party. It doesn't exist in
the South. It's devoted to stopping the expansion of slavery,
and there Lincoln can come in and take a major role.
Because the party's raised, our debt is northern, it doesn't
have to worry about southern part anymore. So. Really, as
(24:01):
opposed to Lincoln's critics who say, well, the Civil War
and his actions were really originally never about emancipation, it's
not clear, like you said that, it would be sort
of I guess party suicide to have been very vocal
about that early on, But it's certainly by the time
he is nominated for president and basically beats out Seward,
(24:22):
Chase Cameron, Dayton Wade, that is on his mind. Well,
you know, Lincoln, this is awfully complicated, and as you say,
there are many different Lincoln's out there in the literature.
There's no question that Lincoln personally hated slavery, absolutely, but
that is not a party, that's not a political program
to say I hate slavery. What are you going to
(24:44):
do about. And that's a little tricky because the Constitution
protects slavery. The South has enough power in Congress to
prevent anything from being done. There. The crux of the
political debate comes to be whether slavery should banded into
the western territories. That not the existence of slavery at
(25:04):
the moment, but it's westward expansion. And there Lincoln becomes
a very vocal and eloquent opponent of the expansion of slavery,
starting really in eighteen fifty four when he's out giving
speeches for complicated degrees, you know, but the Congress had
opened up the westward expansion of slavery through the Kansas
(25:25):
Nebraska Act. Lincoln opposes that the Whig Party breaks up
along north to South lines. Then, you know, the eighteen fifties,
one thing after another happens, which exacerbates the sectional crisis,
Civil war in Kansas, the dread Scott Decision, which says
that black people can never be citizens of the United States,
(25:45):
John Brown invading the South to set off a slavery revolution.
All these things exacerbate the slavery issue. So Lincoln wants
to stop the expansion of slavery, but he's not an abolitionist.
He's not calling for immediate ending of slavery, and yet
he's not willing to retreat either. You know, when people
say Lincoln only cared about the Union, not slavery, I say, well,
(26:07):
then why didn't he just give the South what he wanted.
You could easily save the Union by giving into Southern
demands if you didn't care about slavery. Why not when
the South begins to succeed Lincoln when he's president elect,
he gets a letter from Alexander Stevens, who we had
a form of Georgian, who formerly he knew in Congress
(26:28):
very well. And Steven's actually not forced to say. He
says to Lincoln, look, you've got to issue a statement
reassuring the South here. And Lincoln says, you know, what
could I say in this statement? The problem is this,
you think slavery is right and we think slavery is wrong.
That's the problem here. Well, if that's the problem, how
(26:50):
are you going to solve it? How can you compromise? Well,
it's half right and half wrong. So you have to
distinguish between personal hatred of slavery and any policies which
are politically viable in a constitutional system that protects slavery. Now,
Lincoln is a believer in law and order, you know,
(27:11):
so an abolitionists will violate the law. They will, let's say,
prevent fugitive slaves from being recaptured. That's against the law.
The fugitive slave law says, you've got to get these
guys back. Lincoln never, he says, we have to abide
by the fugitive slave law, even though we hate it.
It's a horrible law, one of the worst laws ever
passed in American history. We have to abide by. Why
(27:33):
it's in the constitution that the owners have to get
their fugitive slave. If we violate the constitution, the country
is going to fall apart. So he's torn between the
idea of the union. Now, you can take this back
psychologically if you want to his child to it that
somehow stability is important to him, that the breakup of
(27:55):
the country would be in a way he has written
large the things that happened to and when he was young.
You could do that. But I think another feature you
could think about is that people with recurrent major depression,
in addition to having higher levels of empathy from the
suffering that they've had etcetera, also have higher levels of realism.
(28:15):
People tend to think that people with depression actually see
everything in this highly negative light all the time, and
the rest of us see things realistically. That is actually
not the case. Often often the cases, we see things
with a bit of rosy colored glasses in an optimistic way,
and people with depression see things in a very realistic way.
(28:36):
And Lincoln was very realistic. He you know, as you said,
these were problems that didn't have at all easy solutions.
But he also didn't look away, he didn't gloss over.
Lincoln was realistic, but also not realistic in some ways.
For example, in what was his plan? He had a
plan to get rid of slavery, but it required the
(28:58):
cooperation of the slave owners. But well, there was no
way of abolishing slavery without their approval until you have war.
But his plan was one gradual emancipation, that is, it
would take place over a long period sometimes you said
fifty sixty years. Even Secondly, the slave owners would be compensated.
(29:19):
They'd be losing property. Today we have people talk about
reparations for the slaves, no linkous talk about reparations for
the owners because they're losing what is for slaves, which
are property. But the third part of it is what
he calls colonization. The freed slaves have to be sent
(29:41):
out of the country because you can never have a
biracial republic. You can never have a society of equality
with black and white living together. They've got to get Now,
that's utterly unrealistic. It's completely crazy, the notion that four
million people are just going to be shipped somewhere else.
But Lincoln believed in this. Henry Clay has political idol,
(30:04):
believed in it all the way up into the Civil War.
Lincoln is talking about it, so, you know, like any politician,
and now this Lincoln has got some plans which are
very realistic and some which aren't. On the empathy point, yes,
I agree with you. One of the interesting things about
lincoln speeches on slavery is he doesn't actually talk about
the terrible reality of slavery, the whippings, the rapes, the violence,
(30:31):
until the very end of the Civil War, when he
does talk dramatically about it. Abolitionists are always talking about
the brutality of slavery to the individual slave. Not Lincoln.
He talks about slavery as a matter of principle. As
you know, it's unjust. It's against the principles of the
Declaration of Independence. All men are created equal privately he does.
(30:54):
He has a famous letter to his friend Joshua Speed
in which he talks about a time they had seen
a group of slaves being transported to be sold at
a slave market in St. Louis, and he says, you
know that site was a torture to me just to
see this, But I bite my lip and keep silent.
(31:15):
Why why does he why does he keep saying? He said,
you have to realize how much the people of the
North crucify our feelings to maintain the union, crucify your
feeling In other words, he's very upset to see what
is the buying and selling of human beings, and yet
he doesn't say anything about that. So how that fits
(31:39):
into this question of empathy, I don't know. But he
feels the empathy, but politically he can't give voice to them.
The fight between his empathy and his moral compass and
his ambition was clearly along the way a difficult fight,
and he clearly also believed that without achieving a certain
(32:02):
degree of power, he would never be in a position
to make changes right. But remember, once the political system
cracks up and re refigures itself, then for the first time,
his ambition and his beliefs now go inside. They line
up in that setting. He's elected president eighteen sixty one right,
(32:22):
eighteen sixty election right, and he's inaugurated right in sixty one,
and in sixty two, emancipation is announced right for the
first time and proclaimed. In sixty three he gives his
Gettysburg Address. How does this continue to play out? What
are the most important I guess features psychologically that he
(32:43):
brings to this, to the Civil War, to what is occurring.
First of all, here is the irony of Lincoln. In
a way, Lincoln is not a violent man. Lincoln is
a peace loving man. He does not like violence, he
does not like fighting, and yet he presides over the
most bloody violence in American history. Seven hundred and fifty
(33:03):
thousand people die in the Civil War. That if you
multiply that outproportionate to the population, that would be over
seven million deaths today in this country. This is the
role he's given, so to speak, and he will not
retreat and recognize and accept the break up of the country.
So yeah, at the beginning of the war, Lincoln says,
(33:24):
very explicitly, we are fighting for the Union. We are
fighting to maintain the Union. We are not fighting to
abolish slavery. That is not a purpose of the war.
Purpose of the war is to maintain the unity of
the nation. But very quickly that position is becomes more
and more difficult to hold. First of all, right, at
(33:45):
the beginning of the war, slaves start running away two
Union lines. They the slaves understand this war is about slavery.
Whatever Lincoln says, it doesn't make any difference. They understand
the balance of power is now shifted. As when the
Union army begins to enter let's say Virginia, the power
of this local slave owner is broken. Even though the
(34:08):
army says, well, we're not here to interfere with slavery,
slaves run away and they say, we want our freedom.
Here we are. They present themselves at these Union army camps. Well,
what are you gonna do? There is no policy. Some
generals send them back. They said, forget it. We don't
want you to go back to your owner. Some of
them say, well, these guys are working for the Confederacy.
Their labor is helping the confedor why should I send
(34:30):
them back to work in a way that is bad
for our army? Now keep me and let them work
for us. Put them to work, let them build fortifications
or dic digits or something. So the government has to
start making policy about slavery right at the beginning, and
very quickly it's clear they're not going to send these
guys back, So the Union army becomes a refuge. That's
(34:52):
not an official policy, really, it's just a fact on
the ground. But do we have evidence that Lincoln really
quietly was you using the need well, I mean clearly
he believed that there needed to be a union, and
we ended it was a moral crisis of epic proportion
to consider any sort of division. While that was the
main message, and clearly the message that he believed was
(35:14):
this also the nose under the tent for emancipation. Was
there evidence that that was really something he was after
even though he couldn't say this is the purpose here?
You're getting into slad of speculation. But Lincoln is pulled
in many directions. The notion that in a war, the
protections of slavery fall away was widely known. I mean,
(35:35):
you know, in the American Revolution, the British had offered
freedom to American slaves. Any slaver ran away to the
British became free. Why were the British anti slavery. No,
you weakened the other side by offering freedom to their slaves.
This happened all the time. It happened in the West Indies.
Everybody knew this. In fact, the US government had done
(35:56):
it when they were fighting the Seminole Indians in Florid.
Uh the slaves from Georgia had run away and they
were with the Seminoles. The Union Army general sent to
the seminal, Look, you can keep these slave We're not
you know, we're not going to send it back. You
can free them, I don't care. But if you have
to surrender, you know so. The idea that war changes
(36:18):
the laws about slavery was very well known. But on
the other hand, there were four slave states that had
not succeeded, the so called border states, including Kentucky his
home state, Kentucky, Missouri, Maryland, Delaware. They were slave states,
but they were still in the Union. Lincoln was constrained.
He knew that if you started taking direct action against slavery,
(36:40):
you might drive these guys to succeed, particularly Kentucky. If
Kentucky succeeded, it would make it almost impossible to defeat
the Confederacy. So he's constrained by that. That's part of
the politics of war. On the other hand, there's growing
pressure in the North of people saying, why are we
protecting slavery here? Now, this is the ward to defend slavery.
(37:01):
Let's go after the slavery. You know, it's slaves that
are helping to keep these armies in the field. They're
growing the crops, they're doing the work. So as time
goes on, and particularly since they're not winning the war,
and you know, in the first year it's kind of
a stalemate, and they said, well, we can't fight this
war with one hand tied behind our back. And Lincoln
(37:22):
comes to accept this. By the early eighteen sixty two,
Congress is already moving forward. They abolish slavery in Washington,
d c. They repeal the Fugitive Slave Act. Lincoln is
pushing for gradual emancipation. Nobody wants to accept it, so,
you know, the issue comes pretty fast. But within a
year of the beginning of the war, slavery is right
(37:44):
on the agenda, and Lincoln realizes he has to make
some policy. You know, it's July eighteen sixty two. He
tells his cabinet, We're gonna have to liberate the slaves, folks.
You know, we just are not winning the way we
want to. If the Federacy had surrendered right off, slavery
would have survived. But as long as the war goes on,
(38:07):
the pressure to deal with slavery becomes stronger and stronger.
Let's take a quick break here, we'll be back in
a moment now. It's interesting that, you know, though he's
self taught, he's a lawyer by trade, he is intimately
involved with the decision making and the plan of attack
in terms of the Civil War, in terms of the
(38:28):
choice of generals and what will happen. That he is
really at the center of that intellectually. Yeah, it's interesting
because he had no military experience whatsoever. He'd been in
the militia, but they didn't the militia generally got drunk
once a month and had a nice party. But he
understood something that a lot of the generals took a
long time to understand, which is a that the target
(38:53):
of the war was the armies of the South. There
were generals, and what we're gonna occupied territory well occupied,
and then the out will surrendered. No, you've got to
defeat their armies in the field. And second of all,
that the Union had the advantage of greater manpower, that
wasn't as big an advantage as you might think because
(39:13):
the task of the Union was much bigger. The North
had to occupy, or you know, conquer the South. The
South didn't have to conquer the North. They didn't have
to invade the North. So you needed a lot more
men if you're gonna invade and conquer the South. What
Lincoln realized is if to use your manpower advantage, you've
got to be attacking in many places at once. Most
(39:37):
of the generals that we're gonna build up building I
will have one big battle. Well that allows the South
to move its men to defend. You can't do that.
Then on the ground you don't have an advantage. But
if you attack and tend you know, five play all
along the line, as General Grant said, then somewhere there's
gonna be a weak spot in the Confederacy because they
(39:58):
don't have the manpower. But they took a time to
get generals to appreciate that. Of course, it meant higher casualties.
The force that was on the attack was going to
suffer much bigger casualties if they're attacking an entrenched army
behind fortifications and all this kind of thing. So Lincoln
is willing to accept really high casualties in order to
(40:20):
win the war. He had to find generals who understood
the situation as well as he did. Eventually he does
grant Sherman Sheridan. The early generals were not really cut
out for this kind of war. They were still fighting
the Napoleonic Wars, where the aim is to amass a
giant army and then just go and overwhelm the opponent.
(40:41):
But they couldn't really do that in this war. So
they needed other ways of fighting, which eventually you get
towards the end of the war. He was very tactical
in suctually an unusual way given his as you point out,
his total lack of experience. And he did go to
the battlefields, he did right to the parents of lost sons,
(41:03):
and he did do these things which you know are
caused him, no doubt, great suffering. He agonized over the war.
It made him more religious. Here's another thing, going back
to his upbringing, Lincoln never joined the church. The frontier
was full of these revival preachers. Lincoln was pretty much
a skeptic in religion. He never I think he's the
(41:24):
only president who never belonged to a church in his
entire life. He would worship with his wife some time
here and there. But the war made him think more
about maybe it's a way out. You know, this is
God's plan, This is God's punishment for the sin of slavery,
or something like that. Many people were saying that at
the time. The differences. Northern preachers would say, this is
(41:47):
God's punishment to the South for the sin of slavery.
Lincoln said, this is the punishment to the nation because
we are all complicit us here, the North is equally
guilty of profiting from slavery. He called it American slavery,
not Southern slavery. To my mind, one of the most
(42:08):
admirable qualities of Lincoln is first of all, just modesty.
You know, I hate to say, but he's a guy
with ambition, but he doesn't mind criticism. Well, it's this way,
as you're saying. If you can't accept constructive criticism, right,
you can't grow and learn. Continue to grow and learn,
and that was something that Lincoln very much did do well.
(42:31):
That's part of self education. He was always learning. I
used to tell my students before I retired, he is
what you should learn from Lincoln. You have a much
greater education than he did. But he was always learning.
Is a entile life. Don't stop learning when you graduate
from college, you know, and that enabled him to change
during the war in a in a situation like this,
(42:53):
just sticking to the old ways is definitely a rescipe
for defeat. Lincoln changed his attitudes. He changed his attitude
about how to get rid of slavery. The Humancipation Proclamation
is completely different from his older point of view. It's immediate,
not gradual. There's nothing in it about payment to the
slave owners. They're not going to get the compensation. And
(43:15):
he drops this idea of colonization. The blacks are going
to remain in the country now and moreover, he says
they can join the army that never allowed blacks and
the on now combat troops. We're going to have thousands
of black people in the arm Lincoln. This is a
little change in Lincoln's attitude because he was mentally flexible
(43:35):
enough to address what had become not only a moral
crisis and a military crisis, but for him a constitutional crisis,
because as you said, right, it was all about the constitution,
but it was a crisis constitutionally for him that the constitutions,
that slavery is fine, and he took that on as well.
The Southern has accused him of being a tyrant who
(43:57):
ran roughshod over the constitution. He suspended the rit of
habeas corpus, you know, cracked down on criticism, and the
administration freeing the slaves. What is the constitutional basis for that?
Lincoln said, well, it's my role as commander in chief.
The president is commander in chief. This is a military measure.
It's to help win the war. You know, you read
(44:18):
the Emancipation Proclamation. It's not like the Declaration of Independence.
It doesn't talk about all men being created equal. It's
a military order. It's boring, really, but it's military necessity
is the constitutional justification. And Lincoln puts it up. He
at what point he says, I have not violated the constitution.
(44:41):
I have gone beyond the constitution. But you know, fair enough,
the people who wrote, the Constitution did not anticipate a
situation where eleven states waged war against the rest of
the country. There was nothing in the Constitution about how
to deal with that, so you've got to try to
figure it out. But they abolished slavery eventually with a
(45:03):
constitutional amendment, the thirteenth Amendment. The Emancipation Proclamation frees a
lot of slaves, but not all of them by any means.
The Thirteenth Amendment eradicate slavery in the whole country. So
the Constitution is changed. And at the end of the day,
though this obviously this as you point out, the Civil War,
the largest loss of life ever and an absolute demolishing,
(45:25):
you know, so much of the nation. But he is
at the end loved as a president, and he's reelected.
He's re elected. He at a certain point he thought
he was not going to be re elected, because in
eighteen sixty before there was a lot of war weariness
in the North. But then the time of battle turned.
In September eighteen sixty four, Sherman captured Atlanta. It seemed
(45:47):
that suddenly the door had opened to victory pretty soon.
But you know, they didn't suspend the election. They didn't
cancel the election. They had an election in the middle
of a terrible war, and that was because as Lincoln
believed in democracy, and he also believed I hate to
get into current events. If he lost, he was going
to accept the fact that he lost, and he talked
(46:10):
to his cabinet, well, if I lose, what do we do.
How do we make sure that the people who have
been freed are not put back into slavery. He never
said I'm going to contest the election and deny that
I lost. You know, he believed in the democratic system,
and it's important for people to understand that he continued
to have episodes of terrible depression even during his presidency. Died.
(46:32):
He was terribly depressed, as was his wife. But you know,
he couldn't stop being president. Well you could say that,
but I think it's important for people to understand that
one can continue to be exceedingly high functioning even in
the face of terrible recurrent depression. And he did. He was.
It's not that he didn't express himself. It's not that
people weren't aware that he was terribly depressed. Wasn't that
(46:54):
he didn't suffer terrible tragedy and his wife didn't, but
he continued to function and soldier on and resolve. Let's
say that his wife was also terribly depressed when the
sun terrible, which didn't make it any easier for Lincoln obviously.
And I just think, you know, we in this country,
we still think of you know, well, you're depressed, you
can't be something, you can't be somebody, you can't achieve
(47:16):
or you can't recover, you can't be high functioning. And
you know, I think this is really a tremendous example
of how untrue that is. And he was reelected. It's
hard to say what he might have gone on to do. Unfortunately,
that's not history. That's what we call counter factual history.
We have enough trouble figuring out what did happen that
(47:37):
we can't quite say what would have happened. His death
is certainly an example of the fact that things were
quite unresolved, and that the South was tremendously angry, and
things were basically certainly far from resolution. The basic question
facing the country was what is going to be in
the status of these four million former slaves. White othern
(48:00):
has said, well, okay, they're not slaves anymore, but they're
certainly not going to be citizens or have the right
to vote, or have any civil rights or not. They
just go to work on the plantations. Again, that will
pay them a little. Many Northern has said that's not
sufficient as a way of ending slavery. Lincoln, we don't know.
Lincoln had His views on race had evolved considerably during
(48:21):
the war. Before the war, he shared a lot of
the prejudices of that society. He outgrew a lot of
them during the war. He was particularly impressed by the
service of two hundred thousand black soldiers and felt they
were essential to victory. They had earned the citizenship and
rights by serving and dying for the Union. That's one
(48:42):
of the reasons he dropped the idea of colonization. You
don't put people in the army to fight for the
nation and then kick him out of the country when
the war is over. But where he would have gone
with that is impossible to say. So he didn't leave
us any blueprint or or thoughts on in Lincoln didn't
have blueprints. One of the things about Lincoln is he
(49:05):
was an experimenter. He let different things happen. Yeah, there
was a blueprint in Louisiana, but there was a different blueprint.
In Georgia and in Tennessee, for example, people talk a
lot about forty acres in the mule. People have heard
that term. You know, the former slaves wanted land as
a kind of compensation for the labor they've done. The
way to survive in that society is to own some land.
(49:27):
General Sherman actually divided up land among former slaves in Georgia.
That's where it comes up forty acres in the mule
to black families, people say, well, what was Lincoln's position
on Sherman's order? He had Sherman gave this. What Lincoln's
position was nothing. He didn't say anything, He didn't oppose it,
he didn't approve it. He just let it happen. He
(49:48):
wasn't responsible, but he wanted to see what happened. So
I don't know what he would have concluded, but that
was Lincoln. So there's no blueprint. Lincoln doesn't leave a blueprint.
He's an experimenter, and where he would have gone we
don't know. He remains at the top of the list.
Are certainly in the top three of the most important
presidents of all time, and it is this unusual combination
(50:08):
of intellect, of I think empathy. I think, as you said,
his mental flexibility, the ability to experiment and to receive
constructive criticism as he moved through one of the most
difficult periods of history. Absolutely, you have to admire him.
I had talked about Lincoln my whole career. I've written
(50:29):
a book about Lincoln. The more I studied him, the
more I came to admire him. He was not perfect,
no human being ever is, but he had many, many
admirable qualities, and I think we can learn a lot
from Lincoln. Thank you to my guest, Eric Fohner, one
(50:49):
of America's greatest historians. And if you'd like to know
more about Lincoln from Professor Phoner, you can see his
book The Fiery Trial Abraham Lincoln and American Sleep Very
And during the two thousand fourteen fifteen academic year, his
Columbia University course on the Civil War and Reconstruction was
made available online free of charge via Columbia X and
(51:12):
ed X, which can be found on YouTube. Personology is
a production of I Heart Radio. The executive producers are
doctor Gayl Saltz and Tyler Klang. The associate producer is
Lowell Berlante. For more podcasts from My Heart Radio, visit
the I heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you
get your podcasts.
Personology is a production of I Heart Radio. Abraham Lincoln
is consistently ranked the top Us president of all time
by public polls and historical scholars. His history changing accomplishments
include abolishing slavery, managing the country through a Civil war
(00:23):
which resulted in preserving and strengthening the Union, as well
as modernizing the country's economy. My guest today is Eric Fohner,
who is the DeWitt Clinton Professor Emeritus of History at
Columbia University. He is one of the country's most prominent historians.
He is the author of The Fiery Trial Abraham Lincoln
(00:45):
and American Slavery, which was the winner, among other awards,
of the Bancroft Prize, the Pulitzer Prize for History, and
the Lincoln Prize. Abraham link And was born February twelfth,
eighteen o nine. He was born in Kentucky to basically
(01:06):
an illegitimate mother and a farmer father. And if we
can speak a little bit about his family of origin
and who they were, and a little bit of what
they were like and therefore what the impact was on
a young aim. So his father was Thomas. Well, let
me say to begin with that there's an enormous amount
(01:28):
of literature about Lincoln out there. Somebody has estimated that
there are sixteen thousand books that deal with Lincoln in
one way or another. If you counted up, that's an
average of more than two books a week since the
American Civil War. There are many different interpretations or accounts
(01:49):
of Lincoln's early family and what the impact of that
his upbringing was on his later career and character. I
think that it's very complicated. Despite those sixteen thousand books,
we know a lot less about Lincoln's early life that
we might want to. And he didn't talk about it
all that much in his campaign or autobiography. He just said, well,
(02:12):
my life. He quoted a line from a poem. It's
the Annals of the poor, you know, but not very
interesting his early life. His father was a farmer in Kentucky,
and then they moved when he was young to Indiana,
where he really grew up. They weren't dirt poor, but
they certainly weren't afflu we've in anyway, and they were
(02:32):
all very hard working. I'd said, the most important thing
about Lincoln's youth is that he somehow figured out that
the way to get ahead was not through hard physical labor,
but through his mind. He was a smart guy. He
loved to read. He was self educated completely. He only
had like one year of schooling in his whole life,
(02:54):
and his stepmother encouraged this. He was as he grew.
He was a big, strong guy. He had his father
what you know, what needed is to work in the field,
at which he did, but he also spent a lot
of time reading and his mother encouraged this. And if
his father complained that he wasn't working, his mother said,
look a stepmother, I mean you know this, this is
(03:15):
what he wants to do, this is what he needs to.
Let him read, let him learn. You know, he did have,
we know, at least some early trauma in the form
of an infant brother who died. Now we could say
that's traumatic, or we could say not his sister died,
but very very early on there was a baby brother
who died in babyhood, which isn't traumatic in the sense
(03:37):
that that was not uncommon for those times. And yes,
he had this sister to whom he was very close,
who in his teen years died in childbirth. That was
a big loss. But as you pointed out, his mother
died of this milk poison, which again unfortunately was not unusual. Also,
and aunt and uncle died of the milk poison when
he was only nine. And one thing that does seem
(03:59):
to be so what known factually is right, the father
left all the children together in this sort of one
room house defend for themselves for a fairly long for months,
basically for months by themselves, while he went to find
himself a new wife. Right. He couldn't handle the whole
thing himself. He needed another wife. Right. They were left
on their own, which wasn't very easy, but they somehow
(04:21):
matters to survive until the father came back with the stepmother,
the original mother he has in somewhere sort of described her,
or she has described as kind of a colder woman. Again,
she died by the time he was nine. So one
of the problems here is that we don't have documentation
really about Lincoln's early life. Where we're basing this on
is people's recollections later on, after Lincoln became famous and
(04:48):
great and was assassinated. Is Law Gardner Herndon, who wrote
the first biography, went around interviewing people, and of course
their recollections of Lincoln were filtered through what I knew
he had become you know, oh yeah, I know. He
was Lincoln when he was five years old. He determined
to free the slaves. You know, a lot of those
recollections and not a hud sent reliable, let's put it
(05:10):
that way. He described himself as kind of a sensitive kid,
as you said. A reader and others described him as
a young person, let's say, as ambitious in certain ways,
like driven, but also very sensitive. That he was sort
of a sensitive man. He was sensitive. He had a
very complicated relationship with his father because Lincoln was quite
(05:32):
ambitious and he felt his father wasn't very ambitious. It
wasn't exactly that he was lazy. He was a hard
working guy. You couldn't live as a small farmer in Indiana,
and he had not worked hard, but he didn't seem
to want to get ahead. Lincoln felt that his father
had lacked ambition, that he was satisfied with the kind
(05:53):
of subsistence life, low income life, whereas Lincoln, for reasons
that I don't know exactly, how do you explain, he
was driven by ambition very early on. Later on, he
really had a complicated relationship with his father. When his
father was dying. Right, he didn't come to his bedside, right,
he didn't come to his funeral. Yeah, his step mother
(06:14):
this is like eighteen fifty or something. Lincoln is forty
years old. And his stepmother said, well, sent him a letter.
He was living about seventy eighty miles away in Springfield
at that time, in Illinois. And his stepmother said, you know,
I think your father is dying and you should come
and say goodbye. And Lincoln said, I don't see what
that would accomplish, you know what I mean, we know
(06:35):
that therefore that there wasn't certainly a warm relationship, and
in fact, his father basically docked his pay until the
age of twenty two. Again not a highly unusual practice,
but Lincoln seemed to feel really chafe under this idea
of you know, whatever I do, you take it, well,
that's up to age twenty one. Yeah. Again, he's a
(06:57):
strong guy. He works saw and his father would send
him out to work for neighbors to pay off his
own debts. And once he got to be twenty one,
Lincoln just took off. I mean that was it. He left.
He didn't want to be stuck there in the backwoods,
you know, working in the all the benefit going to
his father. He actually became an urban person. I'm in
small towns, but he never went back to work on
(07:18):
a farm. Later on he was offered to be governor
of the territory of Oregon. He said, no, that's that's
off the beaten pay. I'm not going out there. Some
early effects, you could say, and then we'll move into
his move to his urban life. But you could say,
in terms of what might have affected him early in
his life regarding the concept of slavery, his parents did
(07:41):
belong to a separate Baptist church that did believe in
no slavery. Right, his parents were anti slavery, no question
about anti slavery. Actually also anti dance, anti alcohol. There
was sort of a whole. But interestingly, even though his
father did pursue sort of own a farm and working
(08:01):
the farm, definitely did not believe in slavery. And I'm
going to, just as a psychoanalyst, go out on a
limb and say that if you're chafing under your father's
you will go out and work for me, and I
will take your pay, and this will go on indefinitely.
One could imagine a young man feeling enslaved of sorts
and and feeling further. I'm not going to do this,
(08:24):
and there are people who recall, but I put that
in quotes. You know that Lincoln once said I was
a slave. But you know, I've known believe that. As
I say, I think people remembered a lot of things
about Lincoln that never really happened from old days. But
you know, to me, the most interesting thing about Lincoln
as a young man growing up in the Frontier is
(08:48):
that he really learned to think for himself very early.
He was alienated in a way from the culture he
was growing up in. He didn't drink. Now everyone's boozed
up on the front day of all the time, not
to it was kind to animals. He didn't like to
go hunting. He didn't get involved in fist fights, and
occasionally he was in a wrestling match, but he didn't
(09:08):
like violence. He didn't hate Indians. In other words, he
thought for himself. He thought for himself. But you could
also say all those things you described suggest a man
early on with a degree of empathy that was unusual. Yeah, definitely, definitely. Also,
he rejected the what you might call the kind of
(09:28):
really hardcore masculinity of the culture there. Maybe that's empathy.
Now I'm not going out. You know, there are historians
who claim that Lincoln was really gay, which to my
mind is absurd. There's no real evidence of that. But
people saw this sensitive and empathic man with already early
(09:49):
on a pretty high level moral compass. Yes, I think so.
You know. So he was also against slavery, no question
about it. Now, we got that from his parents. He
got that from some of the reading he did. He
was often reading things which had an anti slavery implication
to it. He wasn't an abolitionist, you know. He didn't
(10:09):
go out on until much later. He didn't go out
making public statements against slavery, but that's certainly something that
was part of his upbringing. And even that was unusual
in his neck of the woods because most of the
people who settled in southern Indiana, like his own family,
were from the slave owning states. They weren't pro slavery
(10:30):
in an extreme way, but they certainly weren't anti slavery either.
But as you mentioned earlier, he even had this feeling
of compassion for animals that there's this I don't know
if it's apocryphal or true story of risking getting into
a brawl with a bunch of boys because he stopped
them from quote burning a turtle, torturing an animal. Yeah,
(10:51):
that that could be true. It's it rings true. As
I say, I think you have to take these recollections
with a big grain of salt. But there's still some
of them are probably true. And if you hear more
than one person recollecting it, it makes sense. He leaves
his father, he basically pursues a life of education self
self education, really, so he teaches himself the law. Yeah,
(11:14):
he basically puts himself through law school in a sense
you didn't have to go to law school back then.
Therefore he didn't have student loans to pay off. You
just worked with a lawyer and then you took you know,
then you got admitted to the bar. But he was
a pretty good lawyer. Apparently his real history as an
adult takes place in Illinois, not Indiana. He moves to
(11:34):
Illinois when he gets to one and goes into politics
very early. I mean he ran for office like an
age twenty one or two. The first time he ran
a lost, but he was in politics all the way
through today. A lot of people look down or don't
hold politicians and high esteem. But he was a politician.
(11:55):
That was his real passion. He made a living as
a lawyer, but politics, but when he was really interested.
Do we know anything of what motivated him early on
to want to be a politician. Gives an example of
him thinking for himself. He joined the Whig Party, not
widely known nowadays, because they believed in improvement, the same
kind of self improvement he was talking about. They believed
(12:17):
in what we call today infrastructure, building canals, building railroads,
the government setting up a national bank, in other words,
the government promoting economic growth that would then benefit everybody.
Lincoln believed in that. Now, the fact is, in Illinois
most people were not Whigs. They were Democrats. The party
he joined was a big loser. They always lost in
(12:40):
most elections. They never elected a governor in Illinois, they
never elected a senator. Lincoln joined them because he was
this belief and improvement, both personal improvement and economic improvement
for the whole society. The Democrats believed in leis fair,
the government just step out of the way, let everybody
do what they feel like. But Lincoln felt, you're not
(13:02):
going to grow the economy that way. I think his
initial interest in politics was part of this kind of
forward looking vision of general social improvement, and he certainly
didn't shy away from aligning himself with the underdogs. As
you point out, the Wigs were the underdogs, right, they
kept losing. Well, they were the underdog, but they were
(13:24):
also the rich. I mean, that's the funny that Lincoln
grew up pretty modest, but the Wigs were a party
of the big business people as well as young guys,
you know, humble guys like Lincoln. But it's complicated. Yeah,
they were the minority. But nationally, the richest slave owners
were Whigs. The merchants in New York City were Whigs,
the bankers were Whigs. That Democrats were the small farmers,
(13:48):
the factory workers, you know, the more of the working
class party and great followers of Andrew Jackson. It was
sort of like today, where the personality of the political
leader was the key thing. You know. So you Trump
today with millions of followers, and you had Andrew Jackson
back then with millions of followers, and it didn't even
matter what he said. They just loved Andrew Jackson, not Lincoln.
(14:09):
He doesn't like Andrew Jackson. He's a wig. The wigs
are opposing Jackson. We should also say that in terms
of his early adulthood, at this point, when he's early on,
there's no evidence of depression. But by age twenty six
with actually what seems to have been the tipping point
was a rejection. Really, he'd been awkward with women. He
(14:32):
wasn't a charismatic, let's say, and comfortable with women. He
was also quite ugly. Okay, well that doesn't help that.
He even felt that he would always be self deprecating.
You know, he told stories about how ugly he was
with you know, I don't know what psychologically that means.
He would say, you know, well, a woman said to me,
you know, if you're the ugliest man I've ever seen.
(14:54):
So Lincoln said, well, I'm sorry to you. What can
I do about that? And she said, well, you could indoors.
This is Lincoln telling a story about himself. So he
had a massochistic streak of sorts, one might say, and
that would fit with his reaction some degree to the
rejection of Ann Rutledge, who does appear to be his
(15:15):
first love. Right, that's what they say. Is it true? Possibly?
And it does seem though, that there is evidence of
what today we would call a major depression, a real
clinical depression. Absolutely, he suffered depression a couple of times.
One when Ann Rutledge died, really and then later when
(15:36):
his engagement to Mary Todd broke up and they were
going to get married and they decided not to for
one reason. Then he his friends really thought he was
going to commit suicide, that he was suicidal. They took
anything out of his rooms that might be dangerous. Now, again,
this is way beyond my pay grade. Is this psychological?
(15:57):
Is it chemical? I don't know what causes depression any way.
I don't even know if doctors know that. There's definitely
a clear mix, right of nature, nurture, of biology, and genetics.
And it's hard to document a family history when you
don't have documents, So we don't know a lot about
his extended family history in terms of recurrent major depression.
(16:17):
But definitely a documentation of recurrent periods of being suicidal
and having suicidal ideation means major depression. And he could
have had a biological predisposition and then a stressor like
a rejection by a woman, which, by the way, when
you have your mother die at the age of nine.
That is going to sensitize you to the abandonment or
(16:39):
loss of an important woman in your life. So not
surprising that somebody who is predisposed perhaps too depression would
have severe depressions in the stressor of losing a woman.
And in terms of the biology and Lincoln, it does
seem because even between these episodes of severe depression, he
(17:02):
is described and pictorially appears to be a melancholy man.
And that's what they called it in those days, melancholy,
which was much more romanticized versions. In those days, it
wasn't seen like today. It wasn't seen as mental illness
that perhaps we stigmatize and definitely looked down on you
(17:23):
functionally as a person, which is unfortunate because it's unfair
and untrue. But in those days there was a romantic
version of being somewhat depressed. That is right. However, let
me just say that Lincoln eventually did marry Mary Todd,
and they had a quite good marriage. Actually, even though
(17:45):
you wouldn't know that from a lot of books about Lincoln.
You know, when you put someone up on a pedestal,
there's gotta be the opposite somewhere around Lincoln is a
godlike figure. Who's the devil, Well, it's Mary Todd. She
was horrible, She was a shrewd. You spent too much money,
She spoiled the children. I think they actually had a
very good marriage. They had problems, but not nearly as
(18:07):
much as you might guess in a lot of the readings.
She had a tough life for later on. I mean
she had children die young, her husband was assassinated sitting
next to her. That she ultimately suffered her own psychiatric issues.
She did, but a lot of that is later on.
In other words, while she's married to Lincoln. I mean
eventually her son had her committed to an institution for
(18:30):
a while. But she had, as you said, she had
all these Traumas leader, she gets a bad rap from
a lot of the people who really love Lincoln. They
decided they have to have someone as the foil. So anyway,
I know the words. I don't want to give the
impression that he was always melancholy and their marriage was
kind of depressing because of that. Now it was that
(18:50):
they actually had a pretty good time. Now. It is
also true in terms of familiar you know, being comfortable
with women Lincoln really as a lawyer in the eighteen forties,
let's say it into the fifties, he was frequently not home.
He was what they call on the circuit. It was
a weird thing. These groups of lawyers and judges would
travel together through Illinois, stopping in each town to hear
(19:14):
local cases. They all knew each other. A case would
be okay, you represent this side, and you represent that side,
and Judge Smith over here will come in and hear
the case. Lincoln really loved that. He loved traveling around
the state with all these guys, and he didn't mind
being away from home all that much. And maybe that's
the secret of a good marriage. Many people say that
(19:35):
you have some space, absence makes the heart grow fonder.
But he did want to marry Mary Todd very much so.
And she was ambitious for herself, ambitious for him, he
had to say, for him, because in those days that
was the only vehicle women had for their own ambition.
If it had been today, she'd have been running for president,
not him. But she was very politically savvy. You know,
(19:57):
her father was a significant figure in Tucky politics. The
family knew Henry Clay, who was one of the great
politicians of that era. She was well educated, unlike Lincoln.
I mean, so here's a little tidbit. Historians always refer
to her as Mary Todd Lincoln. That is not she
never used that. She was always Mary Lincoln. You put
(20:22):
in the Todd you're sort of creating a little separation
between her and Lincoln. She didn't want to know. She
was devoted to Lincoln and ambitious for Lincoln and for herself. Absolutely,
let's take a quick break here. We'll be back in
a moment. So even though he, you know, went through
these periods of depression, obviously he had friends, colleagues, and
(20:44):
ultimately a wife who who helped protect him from himself
in those darkest moments. And as you said, he remained
highly functional. He continued to pursue these political offices. It
was a struggle at first. And it's interesting because he
didn't really do that well politically almost up until the
time he was elected president. I know, he lost a
(21:05):
lot of races. I mean, he was in the Illinois
legislature for a few terms. He actually became a philly
important leader of the Whig Party in Illinois, even though
that they was lost. He served one term in Congress
and that's it. He left Congress in the beginning of
eighteen forty nine. He didn't hold another office until he's
elected president, so that's kind of unusual in American politics.
(21:28):
He ran for the Senate in eighteen fifty four and lost.
He ran for the Senate in eighteen fifty eight and lost,
but he kept going forward. That's what he had ambition.
He had a lot of friends. He was a very
savvay politician. He obviously must have been a very I
don't know what to say, likable congenial guy. That he
was always surrounded by people who really were devoted to him.
I would argue that, because this is something we do
(21:51):
know about depression, that having depression makes you a more
empathic person, and that being able to stand in other
people all shoes helps them connect with you, brings people
to you. And of course that was one of the
gifts that Lincoln had in spades, his ability to bring
others and colleagues and create groups that could work together.
(22:15):
That he helped manage that and create that. The desire
to do that was definitely a talent of his that
we see early on, and an important talent that carried
him through what turned out to be one of the
most difficult time periods in terms of a presidency. Right.
But here's the problem that Lincoln faced, particularly in the
(22:35):
Whig Party. The Whig Party was a national party that
it was in the north and the south and east west.
Lincoln in Congress associated with members of the party from
all over the country. And yes, he was devoted to
bringing people together. But if you were going to bring
if you're going to keep the unity of the party,
you could not talk about slavery. That was the one
(22:58):
dangerous line of division. There was no agreement on slavery
within the Whig Party any more than there was within
the country. And so you've had to face this problem.
You had to keep it off the agenda, the futureist slavery,
no matter what your personal beliefs, if you wanted to
maintain the unity and strength of the party. So that's
(23:18):
a tremendous tension. In the eighteen forties, when he's a
politician in the Whig Party, he doesn't say very much
about slavery at all. He is his few speeches in Congress,
he doesn't say anything much about slavery. Why because that
would create a division within the political party. In the
eighteen fifties, when the political system kind of cracks up,
(23:39):
then there's an opening. The opening is the Republican Party,
which is only a northern party. It doesn't exist in
the South. It's devoted to stopping the expansion of slavery,
and there Lincoln can come in and take a major role.
Because the party's raised, our debt is northern, it doesn't
have to worry about southern part anymore. So. Really, as
(24:01):
opposed to Lincoln's critics who say, well, the Civil War
and his actions were really originally never about emancipation, it's
not clear, like you said that, it would be sort
of I guess party suicide to have been very vocal
about that early on, But it's certainly by the time
he is nominated for president and basically beats out Seward,
(24:22):
Chase Cameron, Dayton Wade, that is on his mind. Well,
you know, Lincoln, this is awfully complicated, and as you say,
there are many different Lincoln's out there in the literature.
There's no question that Lincoln personally hated slavery, absolutely, but
that is not a party, that's not a political program
to say I hate slavery. What are you going to
(24:44):
do about. And that's a little tricky because the Constitution
protects slavery. The South has enough power in Congress to
prevent anything from being done. There. The crux of the
political debate comes to be whether slavery should banded into
the western territories. That not the existence of slavery at
(25:04):
the moment, but it's westward expansion. And there Lincoln becomes
a very vocal and eloquent opponent of the expansion of slavery,
starting really in eighteen fifty four when he's out giving
speeches for complicated degrees, you know, but the Congress had
opened up the westward expansion of slavery through the Kansas
(25:25):
Nebraska Act. Lincoln opposes that the Whig Party breaks up
along north to South lines. Then, you know, the eighteen fifties,
one thing after another happens, which exacerbates the sectional crisis,
Civil war in Kansas, the dread Scott Decision, which says
that black people can never be citizens of the United States,
(25:45):
John Brown invading the South to set off a slavery revolution.
All these things exacerbate the slavery issue. So Lincoln wants
to stop the expansion of slavery, but he's not an abolitionist.
He's not calling for immediate ending of slavery, and yet
he's not willing to retreat either. You know, when people
say Lincoln only cared about the Union, not slavery, I say, well,
(26:07):
then why didn't he just give the South what he wanted.
You could easily save the Union by giving into Southern
demands if you didn't care about slavery. Why not when
the South begins to succeed Lincoln when he's president elect,
he gets a letter from Alexander Stevens, who we had
a form of Georgian, who formerly he knew in Congress
(26:28):
very well. And Steven's actually not forced to say. He
says to Lincoln, look, you've got to issue a statement
reassuring the South here. And Lincoln says, you know, what
could I say in this statement? The problem is this,
you think slavery is right and we think slavery is wrong.
That's the problem here. Well, if that's the problem, how
(26:50):
are you going to solve it? How can you compromise? Well,
it's half right and half wrong. So you have to
distinguish between personal hatred of slavery and any policies which
are politically viable in a constitutional system that protects slavery. Now,
Lincoln is a believer in law and order, you know,
(27:11):
so an abolitionists will violate the law. They will, let's say,
prevent fugitive slaves from being recaptured. That's against the law.
The fugitive slave law says, you've got to get these
guys back. Lincoln never, he says, we have to abide
by the fugitive slave law, even though we hate it.
It's a horrible law, one of the worst laws ever
passed in American history. We have to abide by. Why
(27:33):
it's in the constitution that the owners have to get
their fugitive slave. If we violate the constitution, the country
is going to fall apart. So he's torn between the
idea of the union. Now, you can take this back
psychologically if you want to his child to it that
somehow stability is important to him, that the breakup of
(27:55):
the country would be in a way he has written
large the things that happened to and when he was young.
You could do that. But I think another feature you
could think about is that people with recurrent major depression,
in addition to having higher levels of empathy from the
suffering that they've had etcetera, also have higher levels of realism.
(28:15):
People tend to think that people with depression actually see
everything in this highly negative light all the time, and
the rest of us see things realistically. That is actually
not the case. Often often the cases, we see things
with a bit of rosy colored glasses in an optimistic way,
and people with depression see things in a very realistic way.
(28:36):
And Lincoln was very realistic. He you know, as you said,
these were problems that didn't have at all easy solutions.
But he also didn't look away, he didn't gloss over.
Lincoln was realistic, but also not realistic in some ways.
For example, in what was his plan? He had a
plan to get rid of slavery, but it required the
(28:58):
cooperation of the slave owners. But well, there was no
way of abolishing slavery without their approval until you have war.
But his plan was one gradual emancipation, that is, it
would take place over a long period sometimes you said
fifty sixty years. Even Secondly, the slave owners would be compensated.
(29:19):
They'd be losing property. Today we have people talk about
reparations for the slaves, no linkous talk about reparations for
the owners because they're losing what is for slaves, which
are property. But the third part of it is what
he calls colonization. The freed slaves have to be sent
(29:41):
out of the country because you can never have a
biracial republic. You can never have a society of equality
with black and white living together. They've got to get Now,
that's utterly unrealistic. It's completely crazy, the notion that four
million people are just going to be shipped somewhere else.
But Lincoln believed in this. Henry Clay has political idol,
(30:04):
believed in it all the way up into the Civil War.
Lincoln is talking about it, so, you know, like any politician,
and now this Lincoln has got some plans which are
very realistic and some which aren't. On the empathy point, yes,
I agree with you. One of the interesting things about
lincoln speeches on slavery is he doesn't actually talk about
the terrible reality of slavery, the whippings, the rapes, the violence,
(30:31):
until the very end of the Civil War, when he
does talk dramatically about it. Abolitionists are always talking about
the brutality of slavery to the individual slave. Not Lincoln.
He talks about slavery as a matter of principle. As
you know, it's unjust. It's against the principles of the
Declaration of Independence. All men are created equal privately he does.
(30:54):
He has a famous letter to his friend Joshua Speed
in which he talks about a time they had seen
a group of slaves being transported to be sold at
a slave market in St. Louis, and he says, you
know that site was a torture to me just to
see this, But I bite my lip and keep silent.
(31:15):
Why why does he why does he keep saying? He said,
you have to realize how much the people of the
North crucify our feelings to maintain the union, crucify your
feeling In other words, he's very upset to see what
is the buying and selling of human beings, and yet
he doesn't say anything about that. So how that fits
(31:39):
into this question of empathy, I don't know. But he
feels the empathy, but politically he can't give voice to them.
The fight between his empathy and his moral compass and
his ambition was clearly along the way a difficult fight,
and he clearly also believed that without achieving a certain
(32:02):
degree of power, he would never be in a position
to make changes right. But remember, once the political system
cracks up and re refigures itself, then for the first time,
his ambition and his beliefs now go inside. They line
up in that setting. He's elected president eighteen sixty one right,
(32:22):
eighteen sixty election right, and he's inaugurated right in sixty one,
and in sixty two, emancipation is announced right for the
first time and proclaimed. In sixty three he gives his
Gettysburg Address. How does this continue to play out? What
are the most important I guess features psychologically that he
(32:43):
brings to this, to the Civil War, to what is occurring.
First of all, here is the irony of Lincoln. In
a way, Lincoln is not a violent man. Lincoln is
a peace loving man. He does not like violence, he
does not like fighting, and yet he presides over the
most bloody violence in American history. Seven hundred and fifty
(33:03):
thousand people die in the Civil War. That if you
multiply that outproportionate to the population, that would be over
seven million deaths today in this country. This is the
role he's given, so to speak, and he will not
retreat and recognize and accept the break up of the country.
So yeah, at the beginning of the war, Lincoln says,
(33:24):
very explicitly, we are fighting for the Union. We are
fighting to maintain the Union. We are not fighting to
abolish slavery. That is not a purpose of the war.
Purpose of the war is to maintain the unity of
the nation. But very quickly that position is becomes more
and more difficult to hold. First of all, right, at
(33:45):
the beginning of the war, slaves start running away two
Union lines. They the slaves understand this war is about slavery.
Whatever Lincoln says, it doesn't make any difference. They understand
the balance of power is now shifted. As when the
Union army begins to enter let's say Virginia, the power
of this local slave owner is broken. Even though the
(34:08):
army says, well, we're not here to interfere with slavery,
slaves run away and they say, we want our freedom.
Here we are. They present themselves at these Union army camps. Well,
what are you gonna do? There is no policy. Some
generals send them back. They said, forget it. We don't
want you to go back to your owner. Some of
them say, well, these guys are working for the Confederacy.
Their labor is helping the confedor why should I send
(34:30):
them back to work in a way that is bad
for our army? Now keep me and let them work
for us. Put them to work, let them build fortifications
or dic digits or something. So the government has to
start making policy about slavery right at the beginning, and
very quickly it's clear they're not going to send these
guys back, So the Union army becomes a refuge. That's
(34:52):
not an official policy, really, it's just a fact on
the ground. But do we have evidence that Lincoln really
quietly was you using the need well, I mean clearly
he believed that there needed to be a union, and
we ended it was a moral crisis of epic proportion
to consider any sort of division. While that was the
main message, and clearly the message that he believed was
(35:14):
this also the nose under the tent for emancipation. Was
there evidence that that was really something he was after
even though he couldn't say this is the purpose here?
You're getting into slad of speculation. But Lincoln is pulled
in many directions. The notion that in a war, the
protections of slavery fall away was widely known. I mean,
(35:35):
you know, in the American Revolution, the British had offered
freedom to American slaves. Any slaver ran away to the
British became free. Why were the British anti slavery. No,
you weakened the other side by offering freedom to their slaves.
This happened all the time. It happened in the West Indies.
Everybody knew this. In fact, the US government had done
(35:56):
it when they were fighting the Seminole Indians in Florid.
Uh the slaves from Georgia had run away and they
were with the Seminoles. The Union Army general sent to
the seminal, Look, you can keep these slave We're not
you know, we're not going to send it back. You
can free them, I don't care. But if you have
to surrender, you know so. The idea that war changes
(36:18):
the laws about slavery was very well known. But on
the other hand, there were four slave states that had
not succeeded, the so called border states, including Kentucky his
home state, Kentucky, Missouri, Maryland, Delaware. They were slave states,
but they were still in the Union. Lincoln was constrained.
He knew that if you started taking direct action against slavery,
(36:40):
you might drive these guys to succeed, particularly Kentucky. If
Kentucky succeeded, it would make it almost impossible to defeat
the Confederacy. So he's constrained by that. That's part of
the politics of war. On the other hand, there's growing
pressure in the North of people saying, why are we
protecting slavery here? Now, this is the ward to defend slavery.
(37:01):
Let's go after the slavery. You know, it's slaves that
are helping to keep these armies in the field. They're
growing the crops, they're doing the work. So as time
goes on, and particularly since they're not winning the war,
and you know, in the first year it's kind of
a stalemate, and they said, well, we can't fight this
war with one hand tied behind our back. And Lincoln
(37:22):
comes to accept this. By the early eighteen sixty two,
Congress is already moving forward. They abolish slavery in Washington,
d c. They repeal the Fugitive Slave Act. Lincoln is
pushing for gradual emancipation. Nobody wants to accept it, so,
you know, the issue comes pretty fast. But within a
year of the beginning of the war, slavery is right
(37:44):
on the agenda, and Lincoln realizes he has to make
some policy. You know, it's July eighteen sixty two. He
tells his cabinet, We're gonna have to liberate the slaves, folks.
You know, we just are not winning the way we
want to. If the Federacy had surrendered right off, slavery
would have survived. But as long as the war goes on,
(38:07):
the pressure to deal with slavery becomes stronger and stronger.
Let's take a quick break here, we'll be back in
a moment now. It's interesting that, you know, though he's
self taught, he's a lawyer by trade, he is intimately
involved with the decision making and the plan of attack
in terms of the Civil War, in terms of the
(38:28):
choice of generals and what will happen. That he is
really at the center of that intellectually. Yeah, it's interesting
because he had no military experience whatsoever. He'd been in
the militia, but they didn't the militia generally got drunk
once a month and had a nice party. But he
understood something that a lot of the generals took a
long time to understand, which is a that the target
(38:53):
of the war was the armies of the South. There
were generals, and what we're gonna occupied territory well occupied,
and then the out will surrendered. No, you've got to
defeat their armies in the field. And second of all,
that the Union had the advantage of greater manpower, that
wasn't as big an advantage as you might think because
(39:13):
the task of the Union was much bigger. The North
had to occupy, or you know, conquer the South. The
South didn't have to conquer the North. They didn't have
to invade the North. So you needed a lot more
men if you're gonna invade and conquer the South. What
Lincoln realized is if to use your manpower advantage, you've
got to be attacking in many places at once. Most
(39:37):
of the generals that we're gonna build up building I
will have one big battle. Well that allows the South
to move its men to defend. You can't do that.
Then on the ground you don't have an advantage. But
if you attack and tend you know, five play all
along the line, as General Grant said, then somewhere there's
gonna be a weak spot in the Confederacy because they
(39:58):
don't have the manpower. But they took a time to
get generals to appreciate that. Of course, it meant higher casualties.
The force that was on the attack was going to
suffer much bigger casualties if they're attacking an entrenched army
behind fortifications and all this kind of thing. So Lincoln
is willing to accept really high casualties in order to
(40:20):
win the war. He had to find generals who understood
the situation as well as he did. Eventually he does
grant Sherman Sheridan. The early generals were not really cut
out for this kind of war. They were still fighting
the Napoleonic Wars, where the aim is to amass a
giant army and then just go and overwhelm the opponent.
(40:41):
But they couldn't really do that in this war. So
they needed other ways of fighting, which eventually you get
towards the end of the war. He was very tactical
in suctually an unusual way given his as you point out,
his total lack of experience. And he did go to
the battlefields, he did right to the parents of lost sons,
(41:03):
and he did do these things which you know are
caused him, no doubt, great suffering. He agonized over the war.
It made him more religious. Here's another thing, going back
to his upbringing, Lincoln never joined the church. The frontier
was full of these revival preachers. Lincoln was pretty much
a skeptic in religion. He never I think he's the
(41:24):
only president who never belonged to a church in his
entire life. He would worship with his wife some time
here and there. But the war made him think more
about maybe it's a way out. You know, this is
God's plan, This is God's punishment for the sin of slavery,
or something like that. Many people were saying that at
the time. The differences. Northern preachers would say, this is
(41:47):
God's punishment to the South for the sin of slavery.
Lincoln said, this is the punishment to the nation because
we are all complicit us here, the North is equally
guilty of profiting from slavery. He called it American slavery,
not Southern slavery. To my mind, one of the most
(42:08):
admirable qualities of Lincoln is first of all, just modesty.
You know, I hate to say, but he's a guy
with ambition, but he doesn't mind criticism. Well, it's this way,
as you're saying. If you can't accept constructive criticism, right,
you can't grow and learn. Continue to grow and learn,
and that was something that Lincoln very much did do well.
(42:31):
That's part of self education. He was always learning. I
used to tell my students before I retired, he is
what you should learn from Lincoln. You have a much
greater education than he did. But he was always learning.
Is a entile life. Don't stop learning when you graduate
from college, you know, and that enabled him to change
during the war in a in a situation like this,
(42:53):
just sticking to the old ways is definitely a rescipe
for defeat. Lincoln changed his attitudes. He changed his attitude
about how to get rid of slavery. The Humancipation Proclamation
is completely different from his older point of view. It's immediate,
not gradual. There's nothing in it about payment to the
slave owners. They're not going to get the compensation. And
(43:15):
he drops this idea of colonization. The blacks are going
to remain in the country now and moreover, he says
they can join the army that never allowed blacks and
the on now combat troops. We're going to have thousands
of black people in the arm Lincoln. This is a
little change in Lincoln's attitude because he was mentally flexible
(43:35):
enough to address what had become not only a moral
crisis and a military crisis, but for him a constitutional crisis,
because as you said, right, it was all about the constitution,
but it was a crisis constitutionally for him that the constitutions,
that slavery is fine, and he took that on as well.
The Southern has accused him of being a tyrant who
(43:57):
ran roughshod over the constitution. He suspended the rit of
habeas corpus, you know, cracked down on criticism, and the
administration freeing the slaves. What is the constitutional basis for that?
Lincoln said, well, it's my role as commander in chief.
The president is commander in chief. This is a military measure.
It's to help win the war. You know, you read
(44:18):
the Emancipation Proclamation. It's not like the Declaration of Independence.
It doesn't talk about all men being created equal. It's
a military order. It's boring, really, but it's military necessity
is the constitutional justification. And Lincoln puts it up. He
at what point he says, I have not violated the constitution.
(44:41):
I have gone beyond the constitution. But you know, fair enough,
the people who wrote, the Constitution did not anticipate a
situation where eleven states waged war against the rest of
the country. There was nothing in the Constitution about how
to deal with that, so you've got to try to
figure it out. But they abolished slavery eventually with a
(45:03):
constitutional amendment, the thirteenth Amendment. The Emancipation Proclamation frees a
lot of slaves, but not all of them by any means.
The Thirteenth Amendment eradicate slavery in the whole country. So
the Constitution is changed. And at the end of the day,
though this obviously this as you point out, the Civil War,
the largest loss of life ever and an absolute demolishing,
(45:25):
you know, so much of the nation. But he is
at the end loved as a president, and he's reelected.
He's re elected. He at a certain point he thought
he was not going to be re elected, because in
eighteen sixty before there was a lot of war weariness
in the North. But then the time of battle turned.
In September eighteen sixty four, Sherman captured Atlanta. It seemed
(45:47):
that suddenly the door had opened to victory pretty soon.
But you know, they didn't suspend the election. They didn't
cancel the election. They had an election in the middle
of a terrible war, and that was because as Lincoln
believed in democracy, and he also believed I hate to
get into current events. If he lost, he was going
to accept the fact that he lost, and he talked
(46:10):
to his cabinet, well, if I lose, what do we do.
How do we make sure that the people who have
been freed are not put back into slavery. He never
said I'm going to contest the election and deny that
I lost. You know, he believed in the democratic system,
and it's important for people to understand that he continued
to have episodes of terrible depression even during his presidency. Died.
(46:32):
He was terribly depressed, as was his wife. But you know,
he couldn't stop being president. Well you could say that,
but I think it's important for people to understand that
one can continue to be exceedingly high functioning even in
the face of terrible recurrent depression. And he did. He was.
It's not that he didn't express himself. It's not that
people weren't aware that he was terribly depressed. Wasn't that
(46:54):
he didn't suffer terrible tragedy and his wife didn't, but
he continued to function and soldier on and resolve. Let's
say that his wife was also terribly depressed when the
sun terrible, which didn't make it any easier for Lincoln obviously.
And I just think, you know, we in this country,
we still think of you know, well, you're depressed, you
can't be something, you can't be somebody, you can't achieve
(47:16):
or you can't recover, you can't be high functioning. And
you know, I think this is really a tremendous example
of how untrue that is. And he was reelected. It's
hard to say what he might have gone on to do. Unfortunately,
that's not history. That's what we call counter factual history.
We have enough trouble figuring out what did happen that
(47:37):
we can't quite say what would have happened. His death
is certainly an example of the fact that things were
quite unresolved, and that the South was tremendously angry, and
things were basically certainly far from resolution. The basic question
facing the country was what is going to be in
the status of these four million former slaves. White othern
(48:00):
has said, well, okay, they're not slaves anymore, but they're
certainly not going to be citizens or have the right
to vote, or have any civil rights or not. They
just go to work on the plantations. Again, that will
pay them a little. Many Northern has said that's not
sufficient as a way of ending slavery. Lincoln, we don't know.
Lincoln had His views on race had evolved considerably during
(48:21):
the war. Before the war, he shared a lot of
the prejudices of that society. He outgrew a lot of
them during the war. He was particularly impressed by the
service of two hundred thousand black soldiers and felt they
were essential to victory. They had earned the citizenship and
rights by serving and dying for the Union. That's one
(48:42):
of the reasons he dropped the idea of colonization. You
don't put people in the army to fight for the
nation and then kick him out of the country when
the war is over. But where he would have gone
with that is impossible to say. So he didn't leave
us any blueprint or or thoughts on in Lincoln didn't
have blueprints. One of the things about Lincoln is he
(49:05):
was an experimenter. He let different things happen. Yeah, there
was a blueprint in Louisiana, but there was a different blueprint.
In Georgia and in Tennessee, for example, people talk a
lot about forty acres in the mule. People have heard
that term. You know, the former slaves wanted land as
a kind of compensation for the labor they've done. The
way to survive in that society is to own some land.
(49:27):
General Sherman actually divided up land among former slaves in Georgia.
That's where it comes up forty acres in the mule
to black families, people say, well, what was Lincoln's position
on Sherman's order? He had Sherman gave this. What Lincoln's
position was nothing. He didn't say anything, He didn't oppose it,
he didn't approve it. He just let it happen. He
(49:48):
wasn't responsible, but he wanted to see what happened. So
I don't know what he would have concluded, but that
was Lincoln. So there's no blueprint. Lincoln doesn't leave a blueprint.
He's an experimenter, and where he would have gone we
don't know. He remains at the top of the list.
Are certainly in the top three of the most important
presidents of all time, and it is this unusual combination
(50:08):
of intellect, of I think empathy. I think, as you said,
his mental flexibility, the ability to experiment and to receive
constructive criticism as he moved through one of the most
difficult periods of history. Absolutely, you have to admire him.
I had talked about Lincoln my whole career. I've written
(50:29):
a book about Lincoln. The more I studied him, the
more I came to admire him. He was not perfect,
no human being ever is, but he had many, many
admirable qualities, and I think we can learn a lot
from Lincoln. Thank you to my guest, Eric Fohner, one
(50:49):
of America's greatest historians. And if you'd like to know
more about Lincoln from Professor Phoner, you can see his
book The Fiery Trial Abraham Lincoln and American Sleep Very
And during the two thousand fourteen fifteen academic year, his
Columbia University course on the Civil War and Reconstruction was
made available online free of charge via Columbia X and
(51:12):
ed X, which can be found on YouTube. Personology is
a production of I Heart Radio. The executive producers are
doctor Gayl Saltz and Tyler Klang. The associate producer is
Lowell Berlante. For more podcasts from My Heart Radio, visit
the I heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you
get your podcasts.
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