In this episode, two acclaimed Lincoln historians—Sidney Blumenthal, author of the three-volume The Political Life of Abraham Lincoln, and Harold Holzer, author of the new book Brought Forth on This Continent: Abraham Lincoln and American Immigration, join Jeffrey Rosen to assess Lincoln’s life and legacy to explore similarities between the 19th century and today. This program was streamed live on March 27, 2024, as part of our America’s Town Hall series.
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Today’s episode was produced by Lana Ulrich, Tanaya Tauber, Samson Mostashari, and Bill Pollock. It was engineered by Greg Scheckler and Bill Pollock. Research was provided by Samson Mostashari, Cooper Smith, and Yara Daraiseh.
Participants
Sidney Blumenthal is the acclaimed author of A Self-Made Man and Wrestling with His Angel, the first two volumes in his five-volume biography, The Political Life of Abraham Lincoln. He is the former assistant and senior adviser to President Bill Clinton and senior adviser to Hillary Clinton. He has been a national staff reporter for The Washington Post and Washington editor and writer for The New Yorker. His books include the bestselling The Clinton Wars, The Rise of the Counter-Establishment, and The Permanent Campaign. He is also a columnist for The Guardian.
Harold Holzer is the Jonathan F. Fanton Director of The Roosevelt House Public Policy Institute at Hunter College, a post he assumed in 2015 after 23 years as senior vice president of The Metropolitan Museum of Art. He also served for six years as chairman of the Abraham Lincoln Bicentennial Foundation, and the previous 10 years as co-chair of the U.S. Lincoln Bicentennial Commission, appointed by President Bill Clinton. In 2008, Holzer was awarded the National Humanities Medal by President George W. Bush. Holzer is the author, co-author, or editor of 55 books on Lincoln and the Civil War era. His most recent book is Brought Forth on This Continent: Abraham Lincoln and American Immigration.
Jeffrey Rosen is the president and CEO of the National Constitution Center, a nonpartisan nonprofit organization devoted to educating the public about the U.S. Constitution. Rosen is also a professor of law at The George Washington University Law School and a contributing editor of The Atlantic.
Additional Resources:
- Harold Holzer, Brought Forth on This Continent: Abraham Lincoln and American Immigration
- Sidney Blumenthal, Wrestling With His Angel: The Political Life of Abraham Lincoln, Vol. II, 1849-1856
- Abraham Lincoln, Cooper Union Address (February 27, 1860)
- Harold Holzer, Lincoln at Cooper Union: The Speech That Made Abraham Lincoln President
Excerpt from Interview: Sidney Blumenthal discusses Lincoln's embrace of immigrant voters and unity with abolitionist Owen Lovejoy during his 1858 Senate campaign against Douglas.
Sidney Blumenthal: This is the Zohan Herald's book, and I commend the book. And part of it is in my third volume, All the Powers of Earth, including a long discussion of what happens to John C. Freeman in his campaign. It's the first birther campaign, as it were challenging whether he's really an American, because he's Catholic. So this is the emergence of Lincoln from being a kind of stealth anti-nativist at the same time he plays footsie with nativists to buy his campaign for the Senate against Stephen A. Douglas to be openly bidding for immigrant votes. So what happens in 1856 Harold referred to this first organizing meeting of the Illinois Republican Party. The Republican Party was organized state by state.
They were all different in each place. In Illinois, the meeting was called by editors. Editors were all partisan at that time. That's how the press worked. And they called the meeting, but they needed a larger political figure who could mediate between them. And Lincoln was the man. He had only served for one term in the Congress many years before. He has gone through his wilderness years, but now slavery has broken out as a major issue because Stephen A. Douglas, the Senator from Illinois, has proposed the Kansas-Nebraska Act opening up the territory to possibly slavery.
The parties fragment, disintegrate, and the Republican parties are formed. Lincoln is late to coming to the Republican Party, but he agrees to appear at this meeting. He sends a message saying, "All right, I'll go radicals and all." And he goes to this meeting in the middle of this snowstorm in Decatur. And it's just editors. And one of the editors is named George Schneider, who is the editor of a German language newspaper. He's German. That's a very important constituency. And the whole thing is just a small room full of people with newspaper editors.
It looks like the Republican Party of Illinois may fall apart before it's even organized over the question of nativism raised by Schneider. He wants the party to denounce nativism explicitly. And they all turn to Lincoln. And Lincoln says, "Well." He says, "I think the Declaration of Independence solves this. Let's just affirm that all men are created equal." And they do. And that smooths over the issue. And they go forward from there, having created the Republican Party of Illinois. And Lincoln has sort of maneuvered his way through the issue. Now it's 1858. He's running for the Senate against Stephen A. Douglas.
He's vying for the immigrant vote. Now the American Party is broken up and defeated and the slavery issue now is paramount above nativism. That is what Lincoln has been waiting for. And there's a very interesting predicate to this in terms of incidents involving a man named Owen Lovejoy. Owen Lovejoy is the brother of Elijah P. Lovejoy, the first great martyr of the abolitionist movement, who's murdered by a mob in Alton, Illinois. And Owen, his younger brother vows that he will carry the banner forward. He'll carry the torch. And he is now running for Congress as an abolitionist. The old Whigs don't like Owen Lovejoy. He's a preacher. He's an abolitionist. He's moralistic. They don't like it.
Or him, Mary Lincoln doesn't particularly like him, but Lincoln decides he's gonna support him because he's going to keep the party together. And it's the beginning of a very interesting friendship between Lincoln, who's an old Whig and a professional politician, and Owen Lovejoy, the evangelical abolitionist. And Lovejoy says, "When can we go forward on all this stuff? Oh, we got to get rid of the nativists. And they have private letters." And Lincoln says, "Not yet, not yet, not yet." He says, keep your powder dry. You have to wait 'till they fall apart. Then we'll go forward and we'll unite everyone around against slavery.
And then that happens. And that leads to Lincoln's Senate campaign in 1858 against Douglas, in which he says explicitly that if you are a believer in the words of the Declaration of Independence, that all men are created equal. Think going back to this 1856 meeting. He says, if you believe in that, then you're an American. And he uses very interesting language. He says, then you are blood of the blood, flesh of the flesh. It's biblical language, it's not poisoning of the blood. It's the opposite. But if you are an immigrant, wherever you came from, and you believe in the Declaration of Independence, you're as American as any American. And he has taken an open and a statement and can never turn back on it.
Excerpt from Interview: Harold Holzer describes Lincoln's effort to court immigrant voters during the 1858 campaign, emphasizing their importance and referring to them as "blood of the founders."
Harold Holzer: I will point out, and then I'm going to do a little political term that it's usually in Sid's wheelhouse to talk about. But it was before the Lincoln-Douglas debates. It was kind of a Lincoln-Douglas debate. It was July 11th. The debate, the formal debates began in August, but it was a part of their campaigning that wherever he spoke Lincoln would follow. And annoyed to the point that he agreed to the debates. Probably ill advisedly for him. This was at a hotel in Chicago. Douglas spoke for three hours. Lincoln stood up and said, "If you come back tomorrow, I'll give you my reply." And hundreds and hundreds of people came. So Lincoln begins this speech from the Tremont House in Sidney's hometown. And he looks out and sees a German leader named Anton Hesing.
He sees him because he's a giant of a man. He's as big as Lincoln. And on July 4th, Lincoln was invited to a German pic-nick, PIC-NICK, a political event in Chicago, which was a fabulous opportunity to glad hand Germans who were voting Republican. For some reason, we don't know, he didn't go. It was later reported in the Chicago Tribune as the event of the year with many political leaders present. So Lincoln gets up and sees Hesing in the crowd. But we don't know whether he had a prepared text because there were no manuscripts, from Lincoln's pre-presidential years extent. He just got rid of them all, once they were published in the papers, I think he saw Hesing and said, "I see among you people who were not part of the founding generation, and I want to tell you that I regard you as blood of the blood of the founders."
So it was biblical, yes, but it was very political. And he saw a crowd that he had dissed, a few days earlier. And I think he took advantage of that and did it magnificently. During the debates themselves, the issue came up, one major occasion, well two really, Lincoln, unfortunately mocked something Douglas said about mongrels from Mexico. And to this day, people accuse Lincoln of using the word mongrels to describe Latinos in that speech. In fact, he was parodying Stephen Douglas. But on this other occasion, he looked again into a rather diverse crowd and said, and there are caveats here because Lincoln believes that white men are the blood of the blood and the flesh of the flesh of the founders, not necessarily people of color at this point. Because he says, "I envision a free white west, open to all white men, including Hans and Baptist and Patrick."
That was his colloquial way of embracing Germans, Frenchmen. And this is a road not taken before by Lincoln Irishman to be part of that blood of the blood. And that was a ringing statement for the period of the Lincoln-Douglas debates when Douglass was charging. And the Democratic press was charging that wanted to suppress Irish votes while allowing black people, heaven forbid to vote. And there are newspaper editorials throughout this period, calling Lincoln a closet believer in equal rights for African-Americans and voting rights for African Americans.
For being a suppressor of Irish at the ballot box. And in all fairness, Lincoln fantasized through that entire campaign that the Irish were being imported to vote illegally against him. At one point in the campaign, he writes to one of his supporters and says, can't we hire a detective or someone of the detective class, I think, to go to the railroad station and look at all these Irishmen carrying carpet bags? Let's find out what they're doing and where they're going, and whether they're illegally obtaining citizenship and voting rights. So high moral ground, but he is a one, as Sid knows all too well, he is one tough political operator.
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