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Book Reviews These are some reviews from a recent issue of
The Civil War News:
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“First Among Equals”: Abraham Lincoln’s Reputation During His Administration
by Hans L. Trefousse
Notes, index, 199 pp., 2005. Fordham University Press, University Box L, 2546 Belmont Ave., Bronx, NY 10458, $27.95 plus shipping.
Hans L. Trefousse is best known for his The Radical Republicans: Lincoln’s Vanguard for Racial Justice (1975), which not only remains the standard survey of the Radical faction of Lincoln’s party in the Civil War Congresses, but which made a dramatic argument against the conventional image of Lincoln as a moderate-to-conservative president who was annoyed by the abolitionist agenda of the Senate Radicals. Trefousse’s Lincoln may have been a moderate still on the subject of immediate abolition, but the Radicals were genuine heroes in the struggle for racial equality, and the distance between them and Lincoln was much smaller than it had become customary to think. Casting Lincoln as an ally rather than an enemy of the Radicals gave Trefousse a chance to put Lincoln back on the side of the political angels. That did not automatically mean that the Northern public joined Lincoln in this alliance. This book, then, comes almost as a sort of sequel to The Radical Republicans, showing how Northern opinion was by no means so one-sidedly hostile to Lincoln as we have believed. First Among Equals is a short book, and its message is concisely stated in the introduction: “Any number of observers became aware of Lincoln’s greatness at an early time.” Lincoln was by no means “totally unknown” in 1860, when he ran for president (so much for “Old Abe Lincoln came out of the wilderness”), and he was certainly not known for being wishy-washy on slavery. Once installed as president, Lincoln’s suspension of the writ of habeas corpus met with just as much defense as criticism, and even the embarrassing military defeats at Bull Run and the recall of Fremont in 1861 “did not materially diminish” public confidence in Lincoln. Relying principally on newspaper editorials, incoming White House correspondence, and the daily record of Congressional commentary in the Congressional Globe, Trefousse finds Lincoln “maintained his popularity throughout” 1862 and, surviving both the Emancipation Proclamation and the Enrollment Act, was riding reasonably high into 1863. By the fall of 1863, Republicans in the North were already calling for Lincoln’s re-election (which “furnished unmistakable proof of his popularity”), and once that re-election took place, exultant “comparisons of Lincoln to George Washington” became “commonplace.” His assassination contributed mightily to making Lincoln “a national hero,” but long before that, Lincoln was well on his way to “future renown” as “a great president, probably the greatest of them all.” No one would be more surprised by this conclusion than Lincoln himself. Although no Gallup polls existed in the 1860s to measure Lincoln’s standing in the public mind, the one unarguable set of numbers which does exist from the 1860s on presidential popularity — elections — does not always sustain Trefousse’s optimism. Lincoln won election in 1860 with only a third of the popular vote, nor were his coattails long enough to bring a Republican majority to either House. (If the South had not seceded, and withdrawn its Democratic senators and representatives, Lincoln would have been compelled to deal with a hostile and veto-proof Democratic Congress as well as a hostile and equally veto-proof judiciary). As it was, Lincoln’s party was severely handled in the 1862 Congressional elections, and although the Republicans maintained their command over both houses, the elections wiped out precisely the representatives who had been Lincoln’s most ardent supporters. When the Republican leadership warned him that the North would “be glad to hear some morning that the President had been found hanging from a lamppost at the door of the White House,” Lincoln blandly replied that they should not “be surprised to find that that suggestion has been executed any morning; the violent preliminaries to such an event would not surprise me.” Once we move beyond the election numbers, the notion of presidential popularity and reputation becomes much harder to define, and the newspaper editorials and adoring letters that Trefousse cites so copiously are not necessarily the best way to measure it. Merely citing favorable opinions of Lincoln back against unfavorable ones, as Trefousse frequently does, only establishes that both favorable and unfavorable opinions existed. Trefousse has not really given us any measurable way of understanding what Lincoln’s reputation really was in Northern minds. Nonetheless, First Among Equals is a healthy reminder not to sell Lincoln’s reputation, or the wisdom of the Northern masses, too short.
Dr. Allen C. Guelzo
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