Ronald C White on Lincoln in Private

[Music] good afternoon everybody and welcome to a house divided coming to you from abraham lincoln bookshop in chicago my name is bjorn skaptesen and i will be the administrator for this program the book we're going to talk about today is lincoln in private by ronald c white and you'll learn more about that book in just a moment i think with that i am ready to turn you over to your host for today daniel weinberg from abraham lincoln bookshop daniel welcome to the house divided i'm abra i'm abraham lincoln i wish i'm daniel weinberg and we're here at the abraham lincoln bookshop in chicago in our broadcast studio embedded in our shop i wish ron you were here with us as you have been in the past but your next book we hope to have you do that of course we're here for your latest book which i'll talk about in a moment lincoln in private and uh if you're watching this we will have a book signed for you and with book plates just like this uh our logo was on it that came from carl sandburg years and years ago and will and ron is going to be signing those for us and for you when you order a book from us let's introduce ron first ronald c white jr is a reader at the huntington library senior fellow of the trinity forum in washington dc he's taught at ucla colorado college whitworth university and the princeton theological seminary he's lectured at the white house been interviewed for the pbs newshour and lectured on lincoln truly all over the world some of his previous books include american ulysses the life of ulysses s grant a lincoln a biography lincoln's greatest speech the second inaugural liberty and justice for all racial reform and the second gospel and numbers of others his latest book as you've seen is lincoln in private what his most personal recollections tell us about our greatest president it's a random house book 328 pages fully illustrated and is 28 now as i said you're at a house divided yes one of our shows here at uh our 83 year old antiquarian shop uh but we're comfortable as you can see in the 21st century even though we're 19th century oriented and we've been broadcasting these author interviews now called the house divided since 2004 really inspired by brian lamb's uh work on c-span next time we hope ron you'll be here at the broadcast studio embedded in our shop and we welcome all our viewers to drop into our shop here in chicago by appointment we're thankful to c-span for following our programming for many years and we welcome c-span's viewers to follow both our live streaming broadcasts house divided which are on right now and our artifact show take a break with history because on every friday at 1pm central we also thank our publishing partners random house and their publicist rachel parker who have been instrumental in putting together this day of release event yes this is the release day for ron's new book and we hope you will follow all our book signing events with major authors in the fields of lincoln the civil war and the u.s presidents you're watching this on c-span a little later on and these will be on youtube as well so you can go there and we'll have copy signed with the book plate that i showed you so i hope you will sign up by your email at our our website so you can receive notice of future events well ron this book to me i've been in the business of lincolniana for 49 years now and i have to say this is among the finest books yet published on lincoln which perhaps now totals 17 000 titles because i think you have a sensitivity into lincoln's words thoughts and actions that bring great insight if this is really a reference book as well of lincoln's verbiage but it's a look at him psychologically emotionally as a political technocrat as an ethicist that's a powerful book to read i was reading through some of lincoln's words and i was taken aback i've read them for so long and it's powerful because you're reading lincoln in the raw the power of his verbiage is truly extraordinary these are not just throwaway musings and it's also powerful because as i've maybe intimated of ron acting as a greek chorus to these words giving context to lincoln's words explaining with historical insights arousing our curiosity into some of the mysteries in these fragments and notes all the while writing in a manner that would have made lincoln proud so i'm going to first start with the organization of this book that cover numerous aspects of lincoln and very quickly i'll just read that the chapters have one i'm going to call them frag notes because they're fragments and notes so i'm calling them frag notes today the lyrical lincoln which is subtitled the trans transcendence of niagara falls and each one has a subtitle i'll just tell you what he's covering of the aspects of lincoln the lyrical lincoln the humble lincoln the fiery defeated republican principal and outraged lincoln the unity lincoln the kentuckian and the theological lincoln that's what's covered in these ten chapters uh and then uh an appendix so ron you dissect these ten different maybe 11 different notes in these 10 chapters um we'll go to the appendix later on because there are 111 fragments frag notes that you found what was your overriding consideration when choosing the separate chapter frag notes in this book you first choose the aspects or do they just pop out at you anyway well first of all dan thank you so much for being a part of your program once again it's a very real delight and privilege this is a long winding story for me when i first encountered lincoln it was at the huntington library exhibit in 1993-94 i was teaching history at ucla and i had a choice of offering a seminar of my own i was had us reading a compendium of lincoln's words and when i came to the second inaugural i was very much struck by it but i wanted to know what was the antecedent of this so i learned that there was a document and brown university john hay lincoln's young secretary had titled it lincoln didn't title any of these called the meditation on the divine will so i traveled from southern california to brown university to hold this little piece of blue lined paper in my hands i had no idea at the time that there were so many many many notes and i've came to the conclusion that most people didn't know this oh some of these are familiar some are in the biographies of lincoln but i thought we needed to see lincoln whole and when i contacted daniel worthington who is the editor of the lincoln papers there in springfield he said well we believe there's 111 of these notes that have survived i'm sure lincoln wrote hundreds of them but 111 have survived so i wanted in a sense to put before people the private lincoln behind the public lincoln so those aspects the unity the outrage those is that how you first organize it or did as i said as i asked before the did the fragments just pop out at you and give you those aspects of lincoln i think the fragments popped out at me i didn't want to write a 700 page book so i made a decision to focus on 10 chapters with 12 fragments i also have had the privilege this really surprised me of narrating the audio book usually only michelle obama or somebody like that gets to do it but they let me do it but in the audio book they said well are there more fragments you'd like to read so i then read five more so in a sense i just chose 17 but there's many more i could have focused on but i want to have the time as you suggested in your introduction to take the time for the reader to sense the context the style that the different styles of lincoln very lyrical style style at niagara falls very different kind of style in some other fragments and notes well this book why i think it's one of the reasons i think it's so important is that it belongs on every lincoln bookshelf right next to the collected works by roy basler because you have 111 fragments in here that are his works they're not all in there another book that's next to it is don fehrenbacher's recollected words of abraham lincoln so those three titles this one and the other two belong together as basically a reference book besides goodreads period why do you think that they've been so overlooked where do most of them reside that they have not been used much before well they're spread across huge volumes of lincoln's words the first by nicolet and haye and then by basler in the 1950s and so we've never quite seen them together until quite recently they would have been in all kinds of different libraries the lincoln papers project in springfield through the previous years has digitized them so they own 110 of 111. fortunately for me i knew the gentleman in dallas texas who owned one of the greatest fragments of all the fragment on slavery and he and his curator allowed me to use that fragment in the book one of the things that's wonderful about this book is that you show them the ones in the chapters right here in living color and they really become more than just showing what the verbiage was and what they look like but you're showing them as artifacts well you would appreciate that very important for people to be able to see these materials as artifacts how did you get your your publisher to top four color illustrations in the middle of this book well my shout out first shout out goes to my phenomenal editor caitlin mckenna she advocated for this with random house as you are suggesting this is not inexpensive to print things in color and so right in the center of the book 16 pages in color and as you also suggest you can see the kind of real fragment the different colorizations they're all on quite different kinds of paper you really can see lincoln's handwriting so shout out to caitlyn she persuaded at random house and i think this is a real distinctive part of the book whom positively and we're going to show some of them as we speak of a few of them it's an impossibility for us to get through all of this but we'd be here for hours which i'm ready for frankly because i have hours of questions but we'll try to hone it down so the viewer uh doesn't uh fall asleep hopefully um you mentioned lincoln's handwriting and how the lincoln papers project was helpful with kelly closing there we both know uh helped you in understanding how lincoln's handwriting changed over time i myself in all my years of seeing and handling linkedin writings have identified for instance five different a's capital a's that he used that i look for um i've identified that he sometimes use one dot two dots or forgets to put dots after that a uh there's one signature i call a roller coaster signature the way it goes he doesn't cross his t's those are crossed to the right above the word not on the t and many times i found during his presidency he hearkens back to his earlier signatures in the 1850s 40s and even the 30s so what did she tell you about lincoln's handwriting and how it changed well i asked her that question because she'd been examining it for years and her observation which is a general observation yours is very helpful more specific is that she felt that over time as he aged his handwriting often became smaller and more rounded that he had learned as everyone in his generation would have learned penmanship but then through the years it began to change and she could watch it change through the years i'll say this though when he when he signed his full name abraham lincoln which he had to do for every uh official document whether his lawyer but mostly as president i think the papers project has come up with something like i think i've kind of come up with 35 000 of them out of the 100 000 plus that are in his hand that he had to sign full the military commissions he signed large most of the time sometimes stanton signed it so large he had no room but stanton later made it smaller and he became large and showed off his signature to a man that he was sending off maybe to be killed you also mentioned in here how these frag notes many times follow a book that he had just read or recently read so there are connections from the books he read to some of these give us an idea about that please well first of all the the traditional view of lincoln is that he didn't read many books that he mostly read newspapers and what i found interesting and the question i brought to the challenge task myself is did these notes make their way into his finished polished public speeches most often they did not but for example he he reads this book slavery ordained of god a book by presbyterian minister frederick ross in 1857 and this is an interesting story because william herndon had encouraged him to subscribe to various anti-slavery newspapers then lincoln said to herndon but i also want to subscribe to the richmond newspaper and the charleston courier and heard and said why would you do that and he said we need both sides at the table so one thing that i think is important for people today to understand he wanted both sides of the table so he read this pro-slavery book by frederick ross presbyterian minister from huntsville alabama and although he didn't agree with it and would finally offer a note in many ways challenging it he wanted to try to understand what what he was saying and then he would respond and i think this was his kind of grist his intellectual curiosity which although it didn't it was never quoted in a speech i think it was part of his thinking about how am i going to attack slavery well that that brings to the question that we've started to talk about already the usage of these frag notes uh now he wrote in order to speak yeah has been that's been brought up by numbers and i and i kind of agree with that that's what he was writing for and uh certainly the underlining he does on on many of his words for emphasis i think is for emphasis of speaking not just thinking and of course as you suggest he's writing used to hone his thoughts and studying the other side of an issue like ross uh so is that is those really the main reasons to hone his thought and to give speeches even though these specifically didn't always make it into them i think yes you're right he he did this to hone his thought but he's also sort of debating within himself this is this is part of what i think is so important in understanding him and i would say any leader that we want to vote for today his intellectual curiosity he it wasn't just that he had arrived at a conclusion but it's the way he arrives at the conclusion there's a logical lincoln very logical lincoln sometimes i almost can imagine him as a lawyer walking up and down in a courtroom kind of prosecuting a case against slavery advocates and so this is a way of him working out intellectually what he thinks about an issue sometimes the notes are ahead of what he will say in other words he he's he's a little more circumspect maybe in a public speech he's not quite ready to say something in his anti-slavery we've watched the development of islamic slavery thought but you can see the foundation of that in these notes i want to ask you about some of the commonalities that they have yes uh he delves into the historical you you note many times another is that he many times begins with a challenge and ends with some call to action yes uh are there other commonalities besides you can talk about these and is this common in most of his speeches as well well you've determined or described it well that he's never talking about this just to have an intellectual conversation but as you suggest and i try to point out often there's a call to action at the end but you don't get to that call to action until you've taken the time to understand the issue and so lincoln is wanting to deal with that for example he's very concerned when he joins the republican party that he doesn't think that the adherents of the party are quite aware of how much the party is being charged with sectionalism that this only a sectional party and he thinks we've got to deal with this issue but that at the end of the two notes that are on the republican party that i include but what are we there for to do about this he's always asking what are we therefore about to do we're going to show that and talk about that a little bit more as we go along uh of course you note how shut-mouthed lincoln was as is as his law partners third law partner billy herndon uh pointed out and described him in shut him out give us an example of how his inner feelings really show off in one of these frag notes that you have here as an historian what do you believe it shows of the man well first of all just the whole question of feelings i think that we need to understand that lincoln born in kentucky moving as a young boy to southern indiana grew up in what we would call the second great awakening his parents attended baptist churches that were extremely emotional and from a very young age lincoln reacted against this kind of emotionalism in religion but emotionalism generally and so he was very wary of kind of feelings he wanted to be a rational person he was a thoughtful person so i found it quite remarkable when after he runs for the senate senate we remember was elected by state legislatures he is defeated in 1855 he leads on the first seven ballots the big issue is the kansas-nebraska act whether slavery will be permitted to go west into the territories and even though his adherents want him to stay in the race he finally concludes he cannot win and withdraws so that a democrat at the time lyman trumbull but who is anti-nebraska will win well lincoln's very magnanimous in public afterwards it's okay i'm all right but then in this remarkable note he talks about the fact that his life is nothing but a failure nothing but a flat failure he would never have said that in public he would never have expressed those kind of deep deep-seated feelings and that's what makes the notes so important here we can talk he never expected us to read them we're not going to see them at the lincoln bookshop in 2021 he's writing for himself but he expresses this really heartfelt feeling my life is a failure a flat failure boy that just struck me but yet in that failure uh in chapter four you have the that failure note maybe we can see it um he spoke of that in 1856 but he ends on a positive note he does and please explain to us the import of lincoln of that in lincoln's character that he had that failure but he ends more positively so he can go on especially since he was such a depressive character as we know right well i've i've had the experience of speaking to lots of high school students who are studying 11th grade american history and i'll often ask the question how long do you think it took lincoln to write these notes and they'll say two minutes three minutes four minutes and i said how about an hour or two or three and i think what happened often was lincoln's writing this and this note might have happened and suddenly he pauses and he almost says to himself wow this is pretty self-pitying this is pretty negative and then he turns it around as you suggest and so he says i have no uh i'm not jealous of stephen douglas for all the success that he has achieved and he ends on a very positive note that he wants what he calls the the oppressed of my species to be lifted up that's what my goal is so he does turn it around i think many times lincoln probably paused in writing these notes and said oh my goodness and then takes it in a different direction you know you just reminded me that when i see lincoln's depressions and he had numbers of them sometimes where his friends took away knives and scissors from him they were fearful of in taking his own life why didn't he do that because positively he wanted to make a difference in the world before he left it yes and so again that shows positiveness that brought him out of the depression and melancholy that he could continue on with his life and work and not do away with it because of his deep depression for time i'm glad you reminded me of that uh another thing that's nice about this book by the way is that each chapter has uh a preface meaning a lincoln image that shows him at the time of the note what he looked like so that's another part that people can enjoy they'll be able to see lincoln at time of failure and what he looked like at that time but we're speaking of lincoln's character you write that lincoln quote embodied the ideal of the self-constructed man unquote please explain that concept and how it applied to lincoln well here i tip my hat to my fellow historian daniel walker howe for he argues persuasively that what it meant in the 19th century sort of a self-made man we might say became very different in the 20th century in the 20th century we associated with someone who made it economically who made wealth who advanced themselves but that was not how argues what it was meant in the 19th century self-constructed meant someone who was on a moral journey and whose moral life was in a kind of moral uplift and lincoln almost like benjamin franklin was kind of taking personal inventory of himself he recognized that as a young man he was sometimes given to bad humor to attacking others to sarcasm he was aware of those qualities in himself and he wanted to move beyond them and he did and so this is what it means to be self-constructed that lincoln is on a personal moral odyssey in his life and he's in he grows and he changes and that's what i think makes him so attractive the viewers that are listening in need to read what lincoln wrote here hear it within your own mind in other words buy the book because we're not going to be able to go over everything in here and there's such a power as i mentioned earlier about lincoln and the greek chorus that ron provides to help us along the journey of understanding it now then it starts out your book with the niagara falls uh note that he wrote and as you say is surprisingly lyrical and we're not going to read it here you have to read it for yourself but it really is that but you write that he was also crafty in the details that he discovered the details of the falls such as where the water came from and the tonnage of the water that came through why do you think he wrote that down why did he use all that in this note to remind himself why well of course remember he was interested in rivers and sort of engineering and all of that sort of stuff throughout his entire life he was always interested in causation what was causing this incredible phenomenon what i try to say in the context of understanding the context for the reader is that young america felt somewhat inferior to england and europe in terms of it could not match the kind of cultural literary musical artistic but what it could offer that could not be offered in europe was natural beauty and before yellowstone or yosemite it was niagara falls that was the great attraction for americans of lincoln's generation and so he goes there he writes this down surely he might be thinking well maybe i will use this future in a future way in a lecture but he's just captivated by it but wakes what makes it so interesting again is that when he comes back and shares his experience with herndon hearn had been there himself recently and herndon makes this amazing comment that lincoln would have no capacity for understanding the beauty of niagara falls that's not the man i know well herndon didn't know the man because this fragment shows that lincoln amazingly had the capacity for appreciating the beauty of niagara falls and i want to put this in it does come chronologically towards the beginning because mostly we encounter the logical lincoln but here we encounter the lyrical lincoln the poetic lincoln able to get into this experience it and see it very broadly in terms of what is the causation of this falls it's interesting that when i read through it and got to the end you had mentioned how this and if there is there's a comma at the end as if he went on after this but you know i felt that it it was a very powerful ending it actually ended where i think it should have ended maybe he put the comma and said no i'm done i can't do any better i think it's just a fabulous letter and i think or no lincoln may have seen that he had come to the end everyone should read herndon's reaction because as you say now he didn't know lincoln i think you're learning more about william herndon than you are about lincoln when uh herndon reacts to this the other thing that he uses in here is the word indefinite and uh he used that word in his dream that he told later of of sailing toward an indefinite shore yes so my question really is more about the digitalization of lincoln's words maybe a concordance although now we don't need it printed we could get it online i suppose um but is there some sort of digital concordance is it would it be useful of all lincoln's words and the numbers of times he used them well i never thought about that we need it don't we this would be fantastic i mean you made a connection here i had not thought of that connection the the word indefinite yeah yeah yeah yeah i'll send you my bill on the morning that's your next book okay yeah right now he gives one of one of the more famous uh frag notes that you had a lot longer than a fragment is his advice to a budding lawyer now i wanted to show because we can here at the abraham lincoln bookshop we have original artifacts such as this note written by lincoln in the hand of him but for logan and lincoln his second law partner and he's writing a price a p here i think it is uh in a case of justice and justice versus garth and about the costs of it um so we this is some of the things we have this is what his handwriting looked like as a lawyer so um there are many aspects to the the advice that he gives here not to take a fee in advance which is an interesting thought and of course his emphasis on honesty now ward hill lammon who was a fellow lawyer and later a uh helped guard lincoln wasn't there the night he needed to be but lincoln had sent him off to richmond on april 14th so he wasn't there but lincoln was a politician and a lawyer and lammon said of him i once had a note in which he said this that lincoln when he talked about honesty lincoln could stretch the truth when necessary so please comment not only on lammon's observation because that honesty is in this note uh very important uh but also what you think the most cogent arguments he made are in this in this long note well he begins in a remarkable way that the note is dated by basler to be 1850 we remember that lincoln served one term in congress 1847-49 he returned home he had taken a very strong stand against president james polk and the war with mexico and i think he thought and many may have agreed with him that perhaps his political career was over so he returns to becoming a lawyer full-time traveling the eighth judicial circuit in central illinois and so basler dates the document as july 1850 i think it probably was a little later than that i find it that lincoln would be rather audacious for him to write a lecture to lawyers right away why did he write the lecture well i consider that he was now spending 175 85 90 days out on this circuit and the practice of becoming a lawyer was to become a clerk in a law office and as lincoln became a very well-known lawyer many lawyers would have wanted to serve as a clerk with him but he could not he couldn't do that with his schedule so he offers this lecture to lawyers to aspiring lawyers and he begins let's see if we can find that word here i i really want to read this because this is so important just here we go i am not an accomplished lawyer i find quite as much material for a lecture in those points where i have failed as in those where i have been moderately successful my goodness he was an accomplished lawyer already a famous lawyer i will say to people can you imagine a modern leader lawyer politician business president of a college or university saying i am not this says so much about who abraham lincoln thinks he is not that he doesn't have ambition he will use that word a lot but he also has a sane estimate of himself and he really is in a sense defending the profession of law that i argue that although the lecture is directed at aspiring lawyers i think it's the finest self-portrait we have of lincoln the lawyer we have the wonderful lincoln legal papers project done some years ago where we found all these papers in the 102 courthouses of illinois but this is the best apprehension of who was lincoln the lawyer yeah that's important and you do you find out the man in that and also whom he wanted to represent himself we all want to present ourselves in the world and i think that's certainly what he was doing so if it was later he was thinking maybe of his uh of a political career if it was after the kansas uh embroglio began right maybe he was thinking that oh yeah he came right in to that embroglio so maybe this was a leader he wanted to show whom he was as well not a bad thing if you're going to be putting yourself out yes you talked before briefly of the birth of the republican party the sectionalism of parties and that is one of the most interesting chapters in this book ron where he's wrestling with party affiliation and you have two fragments there and the first well it reminded me just like we might we might question just which of us humans is the opposite sex lincoln questioned just which party was the real sectional party yes and so he speaks of the real power of the south staying silent and letting the north vie for them as you quote we get the measures and you get the men there was great fluidity in these parties at this time in the 40s and 50s all of them in flux my father might have said we're fluxed again but nonetheless today some might fault lincoln for not being an abolitionist being too moderate on the slavery issue but as usual in this uh franklin this first one lincoln cuts to the chase he says they meaning the abolitionists are righteous but would rather be right than win please comment on on this aspect of lincoln's thoughts at this time well he had a context for saying that his great mentor or what he called his bow ideal was henry clay and henry clay ran for the presidency three times and in one race clay would have won the presidency if he could have captured new york but he was denied that victory in new york because the liberty party this would have been the abolitionist party received more than 000 votes and so lincoln never forgot that election and he called these people the righteous that they would rather be right than to win and so here we see lincoln the very practical politician that we have to win i mean he he's not always going to follow the person who he completely agrees with all of their ideas he did agree with the ideas of clay but he wants the republican party we might use the term to be a big tent party it was hard for him at first because his dna was loyalty he was a loyal wig he didn't immediately join the republican party but when he did he wanted it to be open to everyone this is another conversation but he was worried about the nativists but in terms of the slavery anti-slavery spectrum he didn't want to draw lines and he was worried about the abolitionists because sometimes he felt they were very self-righteous about their cause um you know we here in illinois by the way i'm going to now go on to another chapter that you have we here in illinois say it's the land of lincoln we do it's on our license plate uh indiana rebuts us and say well it's we are the ones we had them uh as a young man and of course as the jesuits say give me the child we have the adult but of course kentucky was on his mind a lot yes and he grew up in an area of illinois where a lot of kentuckians also immigrated here to central illinois south illinois being really a border state just like kentucky uh i have we happen to have right now in our shop a uh a little note that he put on an envelope saying kentucky right there uh inside the envelope that's now gone uh was uh a list of adjutants perhaps from the state of kentucky that he was that were recommended to lincoln and uh so he's he wrote what was inside there and the note uh is gone right now i haven't looked at the papers to see if i could find it but uh you have an unused speech that he what he what he made you know he was on the inaugural train and he was right across the river from kentucky when he could have made this speech thinking about the slave right across the river from him and as you say with this particular fragment that uh except for historian harold holzer whom we both know well who devoted three pages to this really this has been largely ignored and the speech echoes most of his important policy as president-elect and beyond not to allow slavery into the territories he just would that was i think the most important things he ever did to make sure that he did not vary from that hardened position of his if he had nothing else may have followed please give us a comment on this wonderful speech well this is one that's been ignored uh when did he write it he didn't write it on the train he wrote it in springfield because we find it attached to a first draft of his first inaugural speech and you can tell from the speech and we know from other factors that he had this great affinity for kentucky perhaps he was overly optimistic in the beginning of 1861 about union sentiment in kentucky but it was certainly divided and so he keeps talking about my fellow kentuckians now he had spoken in cincinnati in 1859 and kentuckians had crossed the ohio river to hear him then and so he had this great hope that somehow he could give this speech he never did i imagine as he took the train and the train arrived coming into cincinnati he would have looked across the ohio river towards kentucky and so i think it's fascinating to say what would he say to his fellow kentuckians and in a sense on the one hand he's wanting to let them know that he has a great affinity affection for them on the other hand he wants them to know that he is not going to step back from the policies and the ideas that he's announced all through his life and are in his public words and if they don't agree with them why then that's the whole point of elections that you can elect someone or defeat someone in the next election but i think this has been as you say apart from harold holzer it's been completely overlooked and i wanted to be right here in this book yeah it's important and an interesting read yeah certainly i've not read it before in its entirety yeah um now in in a chapter you called unit uh uh unity lincoln secession and the constitution um you talk about a letter from alexander stevens who became the confederate vice president and initially as you mentioned uh he was against secession didn't think it should happen but in a letter to lincoln he's kind of leaning toward the secession movement i'm wondering if lincoln's disappointment in stevens uh was a reason why he didn't answer that letter why do you think that he was so silent on that i mean he was he was certainly not silent on as i mentioned before and you have the the issue of slavery not going into the territories and that issue uh dividing the nascent republican party and he said don't in another letter to thomas corwin of ohio he's he mentioned don't let's not start talking about live oak contracts as he did as a lawyer so why do you think he was silent to alexander stevens on such an important issue especially from someone in the south well let's remember that he and stephen served together in the 30th congress and he and both were wigs and one of the difficulties for him of leaving the whig party was it had been a national party and he was very impressed with stevens a very thoughtful intellectual person they really kind of bonded so when he heard that stevens had given an address against the kind of prevailing sentiment in georgia which was for a succession he was interested in this and he wrote to stevens and said my goodness i'd like to receive that address i'm interested to know what you think some have even suggested that perhaps he was wanting to maybe find some moderate southerner that he could put into his cabinet so stevens sent him the address he read it and wrote back but in writing back he does say to stevens but we have different ideas about slavery and and so he stevens writes to him and you've asked the question dan why did he not reply i think this may have been the beginning of his realizing that it wasn't just the fire brands of the south who were for succession but very very sadly people like stevens who he would have thought of as moderates he would have thought as kind of people of intellectual substance they also were and so this might have been a turning point for him not simply just against stevens but beginning to realize what was really happening in the south the thinking behind secession but it gave us the opportunity here that's the point of the fragment and i tip my hat to jonathan white who suggested to me it should be in my book is that lincoln has this remarkable discussion about the relationship of the declaration and the constitution which is primary and he'll argue that it's the declaration that his primary stands beneath is the foundation of the constitution and he writes about that at length he does yeah and uses this wonderful pro wonderful verse from the book of proverbs about the apple of gold that's that's actually stevens uses that praise and here's another trait of lincoln lincoln is remarkable at taking someone else's words this is stephen's words and digesting them and then saying but i think my friend stevens it actually means this not that he was great at taking someone else's words trying to understand it empathetically but then putting a different spin i don't that's the wrong word different interpretation of it was that did he use the ver the words that he verbiage in this note did he use them again yes he did yeah yeah yeah um you have an interesting they're all interesting but another interesting chapter in the theological lincoln um and those of us who have been toiling in the vineyards of lincolniana have always admired and known of his capacity to grow especially in the 50s but also through the presidency in the 60s but as i think you point out it doesn't seem that we generally allow that same capacity in on his theological side and we don't dwell into this would you talk a bit about how this this fragment and also just generally lincoln especially with especially with the numbers of men that he had to send off to be killed and maimed how did the theological side of his grow well here again we need to take a step back and understand his own biography i mentioned already growing up in the south becoming his parents part of the baptist churches but then he did what many young adults do then and now he rejected his parents faith and when he moves to new salem and we have this from several witnesses in the wonderful book herndon's informants that he wrote a paper where he was attacking revealed christianity or attacking the bible and the witnesses say that they took it out of his hand and threw it into the fire but then when life tumbles in it does ultimately for all of us it was the death of eddie first in 1850 then the death of willie in 1862 and then the civil war lincoln must rethink this he cannot go back to his parents faith it's too emotional it's too simple i argue that he gravitates to the presbyterian church first in springfield but most importantly in washington because this offers him a much more thoughtful rational approach to christianity and so here we find in this meditation and there's been different dating dating of it where he's thinking for himself the will of god prevails in great contests each party claims to act in accordance with the will of god here you see the underline both may be and one must be wrong god cannot be for and against the same thing at the same time all right here's the logical lincoln but then i think this next sentence is really profound in the present civil war it is quite possible that god's purpose is something different from the purpose of either party and yet he uses the instrumentalities working just as they do or the best adaptation to affect his purpose lincoln was being besieged by both ministers and politicians telling him god is on our side and he knew that jefferson davis was being also besieged by politicians and ministers saying god is on our side i love this photograph i think it is a kind of reflective thoughtful lincoln and so here lincoln is working this out he never thought anybody would ever see this document but as you think about it for a while you realize it really is the foundation of the second inaugural address however you'd date it a year before or two and a half years before lincoln is asking the question really where is god in the midst of the civil war sometimes i think it's been misunderstood in a couple of different ways one lincoln doesn't know no lincoln is humble he's not going to be so arrogant to say i know but he does believe that there's a force working in the civil war often the historians have used the term fatalism to make that that the general direction of lincoln's thinking is causistic or determinative thinking but i discovered a book written by an episcopal minister 1859 a man who would become one of the first professors of the episcopal seminary in cambridge massachusetts who said that actually fatalism was a bear a variety of unbelief not belief so i think lincoln is now on his journey moved over against fatalism to a god of providence a god who acts in history and no one at the second inaugural knew that lincoln had written this meditation he didn't title it by the way john haye found it in his desk in lincoln's desk drawer and hey a graduate of brown university that's why it's there now he gave it the title meditation on the divine will lincoln did not title it but it's a good title lincoln's thinking out loud what is the will of god in the civil war uh you you and iran are not reading many of these fragments and notes that's up to the reader and you especially do that in the appendix now you have a co-author of this book i do i hope he's getting royalties and that's abraham lincoln because in the appendix he wrote the pages 166 to 279 and you might give a little context to each one but that's all lincoln and you ask us to read through them and our cells be interactive and try to understand and question and conceptualize what we're reading of lincoln because there are 111 of them there and uh you only go through 11 12 13 in the in the main part of the book the rest is up to us to the reader so they ask us to be interactive and analyze it's so varied the the items there you know he goes over slavery the nature of labor number of times he talks about labor was a fragment for the house divided speech certainly the lungs response i've ever seen for any autograph request uh and there it is robert e lee maybe with his farewell to his troops at alphabetics in general order number nine rivals it in length but this is an autograph request and and it's just fabulous uh and of course my favorite fragment is they're a short one when you can't find it anywhere else look into this so one of the uh one of the uh fragments is a note to zachary taylor if he had zachary taylor in front of him this is a time in the 50s when the whigs were trying to get into power uh and what he often and what he ought to say about policy lincoln's saying to taylor uh and i've asked others before uh what the particular problems are of a soldier becoming a politician versus a politician becoming a commander-in-chief so how did lincoln in this fragment note uh speak to taylor what was he saying to him and how a soldier should look at now this political office well i almost included this one as a specific chapter because as you suggest it's fascinating zachary taylor was for lincoln a logical selection but not a persuasive one he was a slave holder no one exactly no one knew exactly what he thought lincoln would have preferred to have had henry clay again or someone like that but he said if we're going to win this election you know i got to admit this guy's a military hero so okay but three times in this fragment lincoln says were i president were i president were i present and i'm just imagining that he's not even necessarily totally speaking to zachary taylor but he's saying if i were the president this is what i would say and that's what i found so amazing about this we're i president so in a way he's putting it in zachary taylor's mouth but in another way he's putting it in his mouth and i think it's a fascinating fragment another one of them uh was written in october of 1858 at the end of the debates and where he says if he says a few words of myself now was that an anomaly for lincoln speaking of himself and in other contexts besides this one well it is he often spoke in the third person as we know when he writes his kind of famous uh autobiographical contribution for the 1860 election he writes in the third person which was not unusual in the 19th century but that's the way he writes so here again what i'm arguing is that the fragment we hear the i person because he never thought we'd see this he's perfectly free to say this is what i think what i believe what i feel yeah but he didn't generally do that no he did not generally do that no yeah right right right uh in another uh point uh speaking uh fragment i should say was speaking points for his tour yeah of ohio in 1859 fascinating uh but i think one of the most important things to have happened from that tour besides introducing himself there is that it resulted in the publication of the lincoln douglas debates in 1860 yes and that is one of the mainstays of how and why lincoln became president 50 000 copies were sold and distributed and read and that's he likes to say the cooper union photograph and that speech made him president sort of the debates and this tour and the speaking points are fascinating to me they are and one of the points just stepping back a bit is that some of the most important fragments were written during the seven debates with douglas in 1858 that here lincoln is reading these various books while he's you know his handlers are saying we've got to get prepared for the next debate to do this to do that but lincoln is continually thinking lincoln knew lincoln often there's a wonderful fragment on dred scott and that's before the debate before the decision is made but i often i argue in here that sometimes lincoln would hold his fire he would not immediately speak on a subject he had to take the time to walk across the street from his law office to the old state capitol where the library was where he was getting himself prepared and that in our day where everybody just speaks immediately lincoln the greatest speaker in american history would often not speak until he felt fully prepared and i also argue that when he argues in the notes for the law lecture that we need to learn how to learn speech to speak extemporaneously that doesn't mean speak off the top of your head no it means be fully prepared but then at a moment's notice in a particular situation because you are fully prepared you are then able to speak cogently and persuasively and you write about this in your epilogue that i mean i know i have been like lincoln to the extent that i write notes to myself and put them away sometimes never used again other times because i'm thinking something through and later on i'll i'll think back and say gee i was wrong on this or correct on that and uh you also do that you say in your epilogue and uh you know as you said it takes contemplation as you've just said in time without interruption so just briefly comment on your reflections in the epilogue something we haven't gramps covered yet well i decided and here again i tip my hat to my editor who said i know that writers and authors and especially academics don't want to be personal i say in the epilogue that when i was a phd student at princeton university a student asked the question said once well what if a student asked about what i think or feel and the professor said don't answer it [Laughter] don't answer it but she caitlin mckenna said share a little of your own personal point of view and the heart of that is i say i love to speak to high school students and i i want to communicate to them and i'm very concerned and worried about the screens in our life that are dominating our lives we've learned through this pandemic that lots of young people have spent even more time on their screens because they have been precluded from athletics or all kinds of other things and that lincoln who we know from the gettysburg address and the second inaugural was willing to seclude himself in the white house to say to his secretaries i don't want any interruptions it takes time and contemplation to write this way but the way i begin the the book is to tell this story in 1863 uh the audience will know who the copperheads are this was a variant of the republican democratic party who wanted to return the nation as it was and clement van landingham was an ohio politician who was attacking lincoln and they felt in his ben noningham's adherents felt that lincoln was very critical too critical so lincoln received in the mail the albany resolves which were attacking him and he did what he often did was to respond to these various protest movements at that moment a congressman from iowa entered the office and he saw lincoln writing out his response they said oh my goodness this is remarkable that you can sit down and just write this response oh i said oh no and he pointed to an open door of his desk he said it's all in there i have it all in there it's been there for a long time i keep these notes and so i'm arguing that lincoln had these notes there but those notes haven't been available to us and that's the whole thrust of this book to say this is the way lincoln thought operated wrote led and now we can see the private lincoln behind the public lincoln he didn't become the lincoln of the gettysburg address or the second inaugural without all of this previous contemplation where he wrote notes to himself well this actually would be an a great way to end uh but but i'm gonna put a comma onto it and do on my own epilogue very briefly let's keep this kind of brief between us we were beginning because you brought this up just now uh contemplation and time to have that and we were talking before the program uh together about what was the happiest time in lincoln's life time frame in lincoln's life i put down new salem when he was discovering himself rafting down the mississippi perhaps i'd mentioned that brief time between lee's surrender and his death maybe as a congressman but i think the same as you is when he was and you say this in the book when he was out on circuit uh i think that was a wonderful time for him to be able to do what he loved best speak about politics speak about the law but i brought up the idea that and i want you to comment on this that one of the reasons he did not go home all the time when all the other lawyers went home for the weekend or maybe even a holiday he sometimes stayed out there on circuit all alone and i think that was important to him to be able to for the only time that he had in his busy life to be alone to contemplate to understand uh what do you think about that i don't think he was not going home because he had a bad marriage is what i i'm proffering you i would completely agree he did not not go home because he didn't want to be with mary this was a very important time to think to he also was politicking he was kind of gaining adherence for a future political career but the eighth judicial circuit which is twice the size of the state of connecticut in central illinois and here i tip my hat to our mutual friend guy fraker who's helped me learn about this eighth judicial circuit that this allowed him the time to think to you know we know the story that he memorized euclid's principles their theorems when he was on the judicial circuit i think this was the happiest time of his life he really enjoyed this time he enjoyed the conviviality but he also enjoyed what you suggested the time to be alone to think and to write some of these notes yeah yeah so uh i since we're on mary for a moment because you bring up marion here and mary lincoln and speak about the time that she was uh in an institution that robert had put her in there and i have some very definite ideas on that strangely enough i happen to have a bible wow that i believe was with her she writes her name yes 1875. well that's just more than a coincidence to me right right and i think that this was with her in that asylum listen i think you're right and i want to uh ask you briefly about mary and your thought because i'm we have a another house divided interview coming up in a month and i'll mention that in a moment that brings up mary in a big way um that you speak about how myra bradwell who was the first lawyer lincoln a woman lawyer in illinois she had to fight for that and she and her husband helped bring her out um of of there uh and to her sister elizabeth in springfield and people have uh i've been not so happy with robert for putting her in there personally i think and i want to ask you what you think about this that she robert and mary harlan his wife couldn't have her come into their home it would not work and she needed someone at the same time and i learned this from my mother frankly when she needed someone in her home she fought a tooth and nail and i think mary did the same would not have anyone in her home couldn't go to robert couldn't be alone and wouldn't have anyone there elizabeth in springfield was ill and could not handle her at that time there was nowhere for her to go so she went into uh into the institution and but myra bradwell and also i think elizabeth getting well herself in health allowed mary then from robert to do it as soon as he could he did it after a few months only release her to elizabeth's care and she was able to get out what do you think of that uh thought that she was in there because there was nowhere else for her to go well i like that i like that theory and some of the lost letters of mary lincoln that have been discovered in recent years i think substantiate the fact it's it's been easy in the past to picture robert as the bad guy in this but i don't think that's necessarily the case at all and so myra badwell's role in getting mary released is quite remarkable oh yes and you write about it in this book a fascinating story that is a sub story in here well ron thank you so much we're going to get to questions from our audience uh but i just want to say that upcoming on a house divided here at the abraham lincoln bookshop we the next one we have is michael burlingame with an american marriage the untold story of abraham lincoln and mary todd this will be on june 1st at 3 30 pm central time and i hope that you will uh friend us on facebook and you will get emails get your email into our website so that you will know what's coming up and so that's michael burlingame on an american marriage june 1st and on june 5th just four days later timothy smith will come back for the umpteenth time with his new book the siege of vicksburg climax of the campaign to open the mississippi river and tim smith is a wonderful writer and incisive in his civil war writing i think any civil war buff will enjoy that june 5th again at 3 30 p.m central time so ron i'm so happy to be with you thank you and bjorn you must have some questions to uh from our vast audience yes very good well yeah there is a vast audience uh dan this seems to be one of our most popular programs so far so thank you everybody out there thank you ron for for writing a great book we have a lot of questions and i apologize up front to those of you at home we may not get to everybody's question because boy you really you really top yourself this time also it's good that i had the mute on this whole time otherwise you would heard that bell out there ringing every time you ordered one of these books uh again this has been one of our really uh uh thank you ron but this has been but also thank you to those at home this has been really one of our most uh productive programs in that you're buying the book even as ron is talking about it um so i am gonna i am gonna share a few questions that uh some folks have given us and uh ron if you could just do your best here and uh but also knows there are a lot of questions so we're going to try to get through them um i'm going to start with a question that has uh some theology in it and uh my uh my apologies to the customer who wrote this but i i've done a little bit of editing for brevity so this is a bit of a paraphrase but ron president lincoln had lost two of his four sons as of the middle of 1862. lincoln knew that he was sending thousands of men to their deaths we all heard of his severe bouts of melancholy or depression if you will which is justified based on personal tragedy and having the weight of the nation on his shoulders so here's the part from scripture when jesus faced his ordeal he asked his father three times if may this cup pass in his notes did lincoln ever seem to wonder if this cup might pass from him that's a very profound observation and question i think lincoln is very much weighted down as you suggest in the question not simply by the death of his two sons but by the death of all of these other sons and this is evident in some of the remarkable letters that he writes to wives to daughters to sons my argument is is that lincoln is much much more adept theologically than we have given him credit for that many of the traditional biographies simply say lincoln is for example quoting the bible like one might quote script of shakespeare in the middle of the 19th century but as for the second inaugural in the previous 18 inaugural addresses the bible was quoted only one time lincoln quotes the bible four times and he doesn't quote it at the end of kind of which we find in modern inaugural addresses and we need god's help too but he quotes all four verses very substantively as part of his argument for the idea that the almighty has his own purposes as lincoln suggests in the second inaugural so whether he's asking the question that you asked may this cup pass from me that's a interesting one i've never faced that one quite before but i think he really is operating a very deep level and as the meditation on the divine will suggest he's not even sure who's going to win this war the will the will the forward the war goes on wait a second he's supposed to be winning the war he's the commander-in-chief but no he's ceding in a sense to a higher power how the end of the war might become might come right well thank you and then i'll i'm going to follow up on another question that has to do with uh his methodology of thinking and this is from jim johnson here in uh illinois and jim wants to know we've seen lincoln's logical methodology of demonstration via euclidean principles discussed in other books what have you synthesized from lincoln's notes which would further identify a methodology embedded in his thinking which leads us to a closer understanding of him well one of the revelations for me in answer to your question jim is that lincoln although he is logical and he is euclidean in a sense he's much broader than that and that's why the fragment on niagara falls which i call the lyrical lincoln he's he's he's operating with a much wider keyboard than i think sometimes we have given him credit for and what even his law partner william herndon didn't fully understand and the notes demonstrate how he can come at an issue from various points of view philosophically theologically logically the point of view of a lawyer deductively all of these are part of his arsenal and this just to me enlarges my appreciation for the wide range of the way he can approach the issues of his time okay uh before we get to the next one i just want to say from that first question i know who sent it i just want to shout out to dale uh near buffalo and east aurora thank you for that question appreciate good thank you david i know yes all right then let's move on to uh i i promise everybody that ron has not seen your questions but he keeps suggesting the next question in his answer to the one thing i think that's because these are such great questions right but michelle michelle smith wants to know uh with regard to the notes and the destruction of of some of the correspondence she she asks robert todd lincoln is alleged to have burned some of his parents correspondence do we still believe that is true did he destroy any other papers is there any relationship to personal documents from the private thoughts that you discuss in this book thank you michelle that's a very good comment i do i do address that in the prologue the question of how first of all hey and nicolet are asked to collect the papers and then they come into the possession of robert todd lincoln and the suggestion maybe he thought as he transported them back and forth here to there that maybe even the notes and fragments didn't seem very important they weren't official documents maybe he didn't save them all we know the story of the burn pile of mary lincoln burning correspondence and her papers as they move to to washington for the presidency did lincoln participate in the burn pile on the other hand there are there's evidence which i show in the book where lincoln writes a note in the 1840s and brings it out in 1861 so here's an example of how lincoln saved these notes as i suggest i think he wrote hundreds and hundreds of notes like you and i we wouldn't save them all that's i'm grateful we have 111 i wish we had 311 but there's no particular evidence to say robert did or did not i think we might presume that perhaps he did and and mary saved when she was released from the asylum yes so she gave that note to myra bradwell yeah and that's on you know i would not be a slave i would not be a master right one of the most important and mary kept it and maybe felt she was part of that that she i suggest that yes we have bill shepard watching from here in in illinois and uh bill simply wants to know uh uh does the book contain all of the fragments uh or frag notes of lincoln that have been discovered and preserved perhaps in the appendix of the book it does include all of them every single one of them and with again credit to the lincoln papers project and i even put at the beginning some of the symbols so you can see for example maybe there's a place where the editors cannot fully decipher a particular word things like that but all 111 this has never been done before and i think that's part of the distinctiveness of the book so the book is also a valuable reference as daniel said earlier before it is it is yes and we're called for us as i said to analyze them ourselves be interactive with this book yes yes all right we're gonna do one more question before we just kind of do a shout out to everybody and i appreciate everybody who asked questions and uh daniel and i may jump on facebook uh uh don't jump on facebook here after we're done and answer a few questions a few address questions that didn't get answered here but i do want to uh uh give a shout out here and ask a question uh today bradley who i believe is our uk dave and so from over the pond i think i'm right about this and dave asks would you agree that one of lincoln's greatest assets was his pragmatic pragmatism and that this ability to see things as they really were enabled him to deal with situations and people as effectively as he did his pragmatism thank you dave if you are from the uk about a year and a half ago i had the privilege of speaking about lincoln and oxford and that was wonderful yes i like your suggestion that lincoln was a pragmatist i would make the distinction between idealists and ideologues lincoln had ideals but he was never an ideologue he he was willing to encounter the particular experience the particular issue or a problem and therefore change his mind that didn't mean he didn't have firm ideals and so i think part of his part of his effectiveness as a leader was his pragmatism this is what won his way through the civil war i i love the story of when he's arguing over uh slavery and should he emancipate the slaves and he says we're opera i'm operating on a different clock and part of pragmatism is ask answering the question what time is it and lincoln had the unique ability to know what time was it to move forward on this issue or that issue especially the issue of emancipation all right thank you very much uh for that now i'm gonna very quickly uh shout out to just some of the people that are watching and again as i said before this has become one of our easily one of our most uh popular live programs we've been there's been at least 40 people watching for every second that that we've been on and uh you know facebook analytics tells us that for every moment that someone's watching you know some people leave and then other people come in so we've had hundreds of people who've enjoyed this live program uh up to this point and i want to thank you all uh i do we do have some of our friends out there that are they're always there dave bradley is from the uk and so he's here bill is here from illinois uh jimmy from alabama david is here kevin from aurora illinois uh tom and brian from michigan john from tennessee hello john thank you very much we're so glad to have you joining us on the live and uh just as being a fan a new fan of abraham lincoln bookshop and uh so i think daniel i am going to toss this over to you to take us out and uh if you have any last um any last thoughts well you know as we go out of this ron i just thought as we were listening to some of the questions that have been coming through the in the import of this book is also that we're dealing with some who wish to destroy lincoln statues for some reason of lincoln's failings i think in this book is a good answer to what lincoln actually is whom he is the breadth of whom he is and that i think all of this in the book is powerful reasoning why we should not be taking down but building up more statues to him he is one that we all should be looking at as a moral exemplar we even with failings he's a human being a 19th century human being at that we all have that but if we look at the plus side of him i think that overwhelms any of the human failings that he might have as we all do so i want to thank everyone from those who are live with us and those who are with us on c-span and all of you who have seen this on youtube because we also put this up on youtube as all the others you can go in there and see many of our past interviews there we appreciate your being with us ron more than anything we thank you for being who you are and being the historian that you are and we look forward eagerly to your next missive as well thank you thank you dan thanks to everyone who's been a part of the program it's been very rich for me thank you bjorn if you'll take us out sure and so good afternoon to everybody and we'll see you next time on a house divided

Channel: Abraham Lincoln Book Shop, Inc.

Views: 1,219

Rating: 5 out of 5

Keywords: Abraham Lincoln Book Shop, A House Divided, Ronald C. White, Ron White, Daniel Weinberg, Bjorn Skaptason, Chicago, Abraham Lincoln, Lincoln in Private, Mary Lincoln, History, Book Chat, Books, Literature

Id: HCKBQ0P-kss

Length: 85min 25sec (5125 seconds)

Published: Wed May 05 2021