The Contradictions of Abraham Lincoln
49:16 Share

This message comes from NPR sponsor, Mattress Firm. How do you sleep at night? Upgrade to the rest you deserve with Mattress Firm's premium selection of top brand mattresses. Get matched at Mattress Firm's semi-annual sale and clearance and sleep at night.

His speeches have fallen like a wet blanket here. They put to flight all notions of greatness. This government has no constitutional power to involve us of the free states in the turpitude of slavery. As to the politics of Washington, the most striking thing is the absence of personal loyalty to the president. It does not exist. Whoever lived through the next four years will see Mr. Lincoln and his administration attacked more bitterly

for their pro-slavery truckling than for doing any anti-slavery work. If the president had his wife's will and would use it rightly, our affairs would look much better. Universally an admitted failure has no will, no courage, no executive capacity. The obscene ape of Illinois is about to be deposed from the Washington Purple, and the White House will echo to his little jokes no more. He is evidently a person of very inferior cast of character.

Being a politician is a perilous job where criticism is inevitable and someone's always bound to be left unhappy with what you do. It's a word that has developed negative connotations. A politician is someone that's cunning, slick, sly, waiting to pull the wool over your eyes.

And those quotes you just heard earlier were from people who really thought Abraham Lincoln was this kind of politician. Deceptive, unfitting, a failure. But the word politician can also be interpreted another way. A politician can also be seen as someone who's able to maneuver through the machine and get things done. A master of a craft that can sometimes seem murky and amoral, but ultimately leads to real life changes.

A politician has to walk a moral tightrope to reach their destination. But what comes from the fallout of this work? This was a question Abraham Lincoln had to face constantly. That is what was going to be necessary if we were going to have a democracy that moved in the right direction. You need a majority most of the time to move in the right direction.

My name is Steve Inskeep. Yes, that's Steve Inskeep. You might have heard of him. I'm a journalist. I'm the co-host of NPR's Morning Edition. And I also write books and write histories. My latest book is called Differ We Must, How Lincoln Succeeded in a Divided America, which his absolutely was since he was the president during the Civil War. Lincoln's political success looms large in our imaginations.

He's the man whose leadership helped end slavery in the United States and kept the Union together.

But his path to victory wasn't straightforward at all. And it's something we could learn from in our own divided moment. InSkeep makes a case for why we should collaborate and, yes, compromise with people across the aisle. Not because it's nice or it's the right thing to do, but because that's what makes our government work. I'm Randa Abdel-Fattah. And I'm Ramteen Adablui. Today on this show, we focus on Abraham Lincoln, the politician.

From his early career up to the Emancipation Proclamation, how he used compromise to reach his goal of ending slavery, and who he decided to leave out in order to get it done. Hi, I'm Christina Rogas. I'm from Wheaton, Illinois, and you're listening to ThruLine.

Support for NPR and the following message come from Amazon Business. Everyone could use more time. Amazon Business offers smart business buying solutions so you can spend more time growing your business and less time doing the admin. Learn more at amazonbusiness.com.

This message comes from NPR sponsor Sony Pictures Classics presenting Kneecap, a new comedy about three friends who start a rap group that creates a movement. Starring the group Kneecap as themselves and Michael Fassbender. Now playing nationwide only in theaters.

On this week's episode of Wildcard, author Taffy Brodesser-Ackner talks about the strange places we can find peace. I've always felt safe when I was in motion. I think that being in transit is actually the only time you can stop. Like, I feel very safe. I'm Rachel Martin. Join us for NPR's Wildcard podcast, the game where cards control the conversation.

Differ, We Must. I really love that title because automatically I feel like it brings us to a very kind of provocative space for where things are at right now. Right. Like, I think a lot of people may hear that title and think, must we differ? Really? Because differences seem to be tearing us apart.

I started thinking about the diversity of America. I've written a couple of books about 19th century history, and it's become clear to me how incredibly diverse America was then as it is now, that there were many different kinds of people of many different backgrounds from many different places and many different points of view. Lincoln is a central and overwhelming figure in that

And he's somebody who's been fascinating to me for a long time, who I've read about ever since I was a kid. He grew up mainly in my home state of Indiana. And so when you grow up in Indiana, you learn a lot about Lincoln. You grow up anywhere in America, you learn a lot about Lincoln. But I was thinking about the rest of the country and who else was out there and how he dealt with them.

So my first thought was to capture Lincoln's encounters with a diverse group of people. And as I wrote, it became clear to me that what is most interesting is those instances in which he had a disagreement with someone.

and that someone might be a white man who owned slaves, who owned enslaved people. That someone might be a political progressive in our terms who thought that Lincoln was extremely slow to attack slavery in an effective way. That might be someone who had a very different idea of ethics than Lincoln did, but he was a powerful politician whose support Lincoln needed.

There was an incredible variety of people of many different backgrounds and races and genders that Lincoln had to deal with. And I felt that I would understand Lincoln better by reconstructing his conversations, his face-to-face meetings with these people, because you see somebody better when they're in action.

than when they're just sitting there in the same way that you can best understand the skill or the brilliance of an athlete by watching them on the field. Lincoln, like Washington, like Jefferson, you know, he is one of these sort of figures of American history who, you know,

has been written about kind of ad nauseum. So I'm really curious, would you say that that's sort of the unique take that you wanted to infuse into this book? It seems to me that Lincoln struggled to be practical and reach out to people who disagreed with him and try to win. He was an ambitious guy without ultimately giving up his principle.

For me, the most powerful example of that is the 1858 Senate campaign. He ran for United States Senate against Stephen Douglas, which is a campaign that's famous for their debates, the Lincoln-Douglas debates. But I think it should also be known for what was going on behind the scenes. Lincoln did a county-by-county analysis of voting patterns in Illinois and concluded that he could not win

unless his party got the votes of anti-immigrant groups who dominated a particular section of Illinois, nativists or know-nothings as they were called then. The know-nothings were a political party strongly against immigration and anything that brought foreign influence into the country. Lincoln had an extreme aversion to

to their beliefs. He actually wrote in a letter, "If the Know-Nothings get control, I would rather emigrate to some country where they make no pretense of loving liberty, such as Russia, for instance." He really did not like them, but he reached out to a friend of his, Joseph Gillespie, who was a leading nativist, and said, "I need you to round up votes for me, and as best I can determine from the record that survives."

Lincoln continuously reached out to nativist voters, but appealed to them only based on their common aversion to slavery. He did not pander to them. He did not give them any sign or signal that he was sort of a nativist too. What was it about Lincoln that made him

Able to kind of hold this line between idealism and practicality How common was this? I think Lincoln was uniquely equipped to Hold conflicting ideas in his head at one time. He thought in what he would see as practical terms in the end Lincoln did not succeed in that election. He lost and

It seems to me that he might have gotten a little closer to winning had he been willing to pander to the nativists and gained more nativist votes. But he was not, for various personal, moral, and political reasons, not willing to do that. And he did lose that campaign. But he added, as others did, some nativists to the anti-slavery cause, which did prevail two years later when Lincoln was nominated by the Republican Party and won the presidency.

How has researching and writing this book changed your opinion of Lincoln or your view of him as a historical figure and as a human being, as a person? In writing this, I was forced to confront some of the contradictions of Abraham Lincoln and some of the criticisms of Abraham Lincoln. When you study Americans of this period, you find all kinds of interesting people with interesting and deep opinions about

But when it comes to a subject like racism or slavery, you find very few people whose remarks all stand up today, where you would say, I agree with nearly everything they have to say. Frederick Douglass is one of the very few. If you look at Frederick Douglass from, say, the late 1840s through to the end of his life,

It's hard to find that much to disagree with, although some people did disagree with him from the right and the left in his time, for sure. But from a modern perspective, it's hard to find that much in Frederick Douglass's writings that you would disagree with. You can easily find things in Lincoln's speeches and writings that you would disagree with today.

And you would have to ask, why is it that Abraham Lincoln was opposed to slavery, but said that he also opposed allowing political equality for black people, which is to say things like voting rights? Why would he say that he was against that? Clearly that was wrong. And he had enough information then to know it was wrong. But what's even more remarkable to me is that when I read his speeches, his speeches tell me

that this was wrong. He says in one of his speeches in 1854 that it is a total destruction of self-government to refuse the vote to black people, to refuse self-government to black people. "If the Negro is a man, is it not to that extent a total destruction of self-government to say that he too shall not govern himself?"

And yet a few years later, he's saying, no, I'm not really going for that. I believe we have no power under the Constitution of the United States or rather under the form of government under which we live to interfere with the institution of slavery. I think the way that it is often dealt with is people kind of acknowledge it and go on and acknowledge that the guy signed the Emancipation Proclamation and did a lot of important things, which is all true. But.

I wanted to understand why would he say that when it seems to me that he knew it was not correct, that it was not true. It seemed to me that he was trying to narrow the debate to a subject that he could win. The immediate question wasn't about black voting rights. That really wasn't the question at the moment. The question at the moment

which Lincoln thought he could win before the particular audiences that he was talking with in his home state of Illinois was, is slavery right or is slavery wrong? I, Abraham Lincoln, say it is wrong. My opponents say all kinds of strange and vague things but won't really admit that it is just wrong. And he wanted to keep the focus on that. So

It's forced me to think about why would he himself say these things that I would disagree with, even though there is much about the guy that I admire. And I think it's given me a deeper appreciation and understanding for

what politics is and for the morally perilous business of politics. Lincoln was trying desperately to assemble a coalition of people who did not necessarily believe things that he believed and move them at least a little bit or a lot in the right direction. And he had to think of lots of different ways to do that and to make sure they focused on the issue as he wanted to frame it in the way that he could win.

What is so compelling about this framing of him and sort of like way of gaining insights into him as a person is that, you know, you mentioned in the book Tolstoy describing him as kind of a saint of humanity. And I really liked that because often we sit in that mythical space with people like Lincoln and Lincoln,

it moves us into a very human space, a very flawed space, a very complex space. And politics and the word politician, they feel like kind of dirty words like nowadays. I think a lot of people have like negative connotations, but that's the word that comes to mind as you're describing sort of he's politic and he is a politician fundamentally. And as a politician, he's,

How would you say, like, how would you characterize his kind of tactical approach? We have been conditioned to think of politics as a bad thing. Plenty of politicians have taught us that it often is a bad thing. But politics is what is necessary in a democracy if you're going to move people forward. And Lincoln embraced that. Now, you ask about his political style. Lincoln was approachable and yet not approachable.

He was a great storyteller. He could tell a joke. He could tell an off-color story. Lincoln recounted a time that he'd climbed up in a tree and his friend had gone to sleep, was taking a nap. And Lincoln attempted from the tree to poop into his friend's hat. He thought this would be really funny.

But the friend foiled him because he wasn't really sleeping. And at the last second, he switched their hats. This is the story that Lincoln told in the White House, according to a man who was there. Nothing was really off limits for this guy. He was almost like a comedian. He was very entertaining.

But by telling stories and talking in that way, he often was diverting or derailing the conversation away from the thing that the other person in the room really might have wanted to know. He only wanted to say the thing that would advance the campaign that he was in. And he was comfortable withholding other things almost to the point of seeming to deceive someone. And there's a cost to that.

to avoiding saying certain things. One of the things I find frustrating about Lincoln and also about this deeper question, which is, is it better to compromise your own personal beliefs or perhaps put them to the side or evade or describe some of the things you did about his style and win? Or is it better to stand up

for your ideals and potentially lose. And what would have someone like Frederick Douglass, for example, who often was frustrated with Lincoln, have made of Lincoln's style and that kind of leaning towards doing what you have to do tactically to win versus Lincoln's

kind of making a statement. What would someone like Frederick Douglass have made of that style? What did he make of that? Yeah, well, Frederick Douglass is great because he himself was a political pragmatist.

He began his political career as, I guess we would say, more of an idealist or an absolutist on slavery. And why would he not? He escaped from a horrible experience of slavery and became an anti-slavery writer and orator. And his patron or influence, William Lloyd Garrison, was someone who concluded that slavery so contaminated the Constitution that

it was okay to burn copies of the constitution and to call for a breakup of the union, because why would you want anything to do with this horrible institution? Uh,

William Lloyd Garrison didn't even believe in voting. Why would you vote and participate in this unjust system? Frederick Douglass started there but began to feel that he could have a greater impact by participating in the system and participating in whatever democracy was available to him.

He lived in New York State where a black man could vote. He had to own some property, $250, I think, which is not a requirement that applied to white people. So it was a racist law, but it allowed an opening for a black man to vote and Frederick Douglass voted.

he had an opportunity to be influential through his newspaper that he ran in Rochester, New York, an anti-slavery newspaper. And from the early 1850s, he was increasingly supporting anti-slavery parties. And then in 1856,

openly supported the Republican Party, which was not as radical as the parties he had supported in the past. So he went from saying, no politics at all, to I will participate in politics so long as I'm running, so long as I'm supporting this third party that favors abolition immediately, to

And then he went to saying, I'm going to support the Republican Party, which calls for something a little bit less than that or considerably less than that. But I think they can win and they are an anti-slavery party. I think also what I'm wondering is kind of that the practicality in his tactics, how would that have frustrated someone who was looking for a kind of an idealistic stand because these are very intense real issues he's dealing with?

You know, Lincoln frustrated a lot of progressives or people we would consider progressives, the really strong abolitionists. And we should be clear, the abolitionists were morally right in the argument, 100%. But they disagreed with Lincoln about his tactics. There were a lot of people who considered him to be just too moderate.

and not inspiring, but there were also abolitionists, and Frederick Douglass is one of them, who got to know Lincoln and seemed to understand just what he was doing.

Douglass, I think, is the best example because I think that Douglass always knew that Lincoln was being pragmatic and moving toward the right goal. But I think that Douglass felt a duty at the same time to openly criticize Lincoln for the times that he fell short because there were times that he did fall short. Coming up, the Lincoln who we often forget.

Hi, this is Amy Latka from Indianapolis, Indiana, and you're listening to ThruLine from NPR.

We just want to take a moment to shout out our ThruLine Plus subscribers. Thank you so much for your support. If you don't already know, subscribing to ThruLine Plus means you get to listen to our show without any sponsor breaks. And you also get access to special bonus episodes where we take you behind the scenes, introduce you to our amazing producers, and tell you about how we make the show.

To get these awesome benefits and support our work here at NPR, head over to plus.npr.org slash ThruLine.

This message comes from NPR sponsor, Capella University. With their game-changing FlexPath learning format, Capella empowers you to fit education into your life without putting other priorities on hold. FlexPath lets you set your own deadlines and adjust them if something comes up. And depending on your schedule, you can take courses at your own speed and move on to the next one when you're ready. Imagine how a flexible program can make a difference in your life at capella.edu.

This message comes from NPR sponsor, Charles Schwab. Financial decisions can be tricky. Your cognitive and emotional biases can lead you astray. Financial Decoder, an original podcast from Charles Schwab, can help. Listen today at schwab.com slash financial decoder.

New from the Embedded Podcast. Elite female runners are being told they can't compete because of their biology. Not only can you not compete, you're not actually female. Hear about the 100-year history of sex testing in women's sports and the hard choices these athletes are facing now. Listen to Tested, a new series from CBC and NPR's Embedded Podcast.

Before Abraham Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation on January 1st, 1863, he said, I never in my life felt more certain that I was doing right than I do in signing this paper. Lincoln would finally reach his long-term goal, but there were other areas of his presidency that would show the cost of having his eyes focused on only one objective—

I think one stark contrast, though, to the sort of risk he took on in fighting the Civil War and eventually emancipating enslaved people is the lack of risk he took when it came to the Native American cause. There's the one person you profile in the book, Lean Bear, who speaks to this issue.

sort of a difference in his prioritizing of the moral importance of protecting Native Americans versus enslaved people. You have just hit on a powerful word when you talked about prioritizing. Lincoln's priority as president was the preservation of the Union, and he gave far less priority to justice for

for native nations across the country. He thought about them and we could have a discussion about ways that he involved himself in those issues, but he mainly was trying to bring quiet so that he could focus on the war.

There's a famous incident in which there was an uprising in Minnesota of what were then called the Sioux people, some of them. And it was an uprising that began as many, if not most,

Such uprisings began there was a treaty the United States had more or less imposed a treaty on people Who were following it? but the white settlers who were coming into their areas were not following the terms of the treaty and Ultimately, they rose in rebellion and it was a brutal rebellion. They were killing women and children as well as as men and Minnesota and federal forces captured hundreds of fighters in

And in these military commissions that they set up, uh, sentenced 303 of them to hang. Um, Lincoln, uh, personally intervened in this case. He allowed only the executions to go forward for those who had been convicted of participating in massive massacres, killing the innocent. And this is what happened in the incident in the, in the book. Um,

Lincoln or his administration invited a number of delegates of native nations, including the Cheyenne, to the White House to have an exchange of views. And Lincoln's view was, I really hope you take up agriculture and settle down, and we'd like to help you if we can. But the warning of Lean Bear, one of the leaders who was there, was, we have land, it's secured to us by treaty,

It's in what is now the modern state of Colorado, and white settlers are continuously encroaching on our land and taking our land and killing our people. And we have no intention of going to war with you, but I want to warn you about these white settlers. Lindbergh then went back to the Cheyenne lands and

and ultimately was killed, I think assassinated is a fair word, or just randomly killed by a group of U.S. soldiers. Massacres followed. Lincoln wanted peace in the West, which was a fair thing to want. And he brought people to the White House to urge them to be peaceful, which was a fair thing to do, except he had brought the wrong people

to the White House to urge peace. He would have needed to bring white settlers there to tell them to be peaceful because they were the ones, according to any evidence that I've been able to study, they were the ones who were the aggressors in that situation. Wow. You know, based on what you saw, there is today very much a negative view of Lincoln's relationship with Native people in the United States. And not only that, his view of Native people

Where does that come from? Just as with slavery, you can go through Lincoln's writings and find things that make you cringe. Even when you read the transcripts of his speech that he gave to the native leaders that he invited to the White House, a lot of it is kind of hard to read because it just seems so kind of antiquated and outdated. He's respectful and he hears them out

And he's talking things through. And then he says, I've brought some kind of a professor here and he has a globe. Let's roll over this globe on wheels. And then he's trying to explain to them how white people believe the world is a great ball. And he's

Here's where we are on it and here's where you are on it and trying to give them a little science, which I don't know, maybe somebody in the room didn't know that. But when you read it today, it just feels very patronizing. It feels very strange. Like, why is he doing that? I don't think that Lincoln had given nearly as much serious thought to

to the integration of Native Americans or whatever you would want to say the strategy was as he had to slavery. I totally hear that. And at the same time, I'm just wondering, was Lincoln unaware of the level of violence that was being carried out of the kind of true intentions of many of the white settlers that were moving out West? And did he just choose for political expediency to kind of look the other way?

Or do you think he was actually as well-intentioned in trying to bring Lean Bear and the other Native American leaders to the White House? Or was that part of his sort of like, I'm playing both sides here and seeing what's going to kind of like allow me to get more political brownie points? When Lincoln was speaking with the Native delegation,

One of the things he said is, we, meaning the white people, U.S. citizens, the people that Lincoln represents, we will try to maintain peace with you. We will try to maintain peace with you. But we cannot always control what our settlers do. And he has an analogy to father and children, saying something to the effect of, as you know, a father cannot always dictate what his children will do.

Lincoln is there stating his understanding, I think, of a reality that white settlers were going to push West and the United States government was not going to be very serious about stopping them if it was seen as being in the broader interest of the United States. He was essentially saying, I will try to be helpful here, but I will not commit to

to being helpful here. It was more important to him to keep the focus on the big war against the Confederates, and he just didn't want a little war out west and did not in any way succeed in preventing one. Lincoln's failures as well as his successes were news all around the country. What is this world that Lincoln is having to navigate that would have him have to kind of

negotiate his values in different spaces. Lincoln came of age and went through his career in a fascinating, fast-changing, technologically evolving, disorienting country.

During his adult life, railroads were developed and began spreading rapidly across the country, which incredibly sped communications. Daily newspapers became a regular part of American life, which incredibly sped communications. And the telegraph made it possible for the first time in human history to

to know what was going on in some distant city over the horizon at virtually the same time that it was happening. None of this had been possible before. And all of these things were creating pressures on the economy and on society.

It's easy to understand the effect of that on an issue like slavery, where if you lived in the North somewhere, where there was a very small black population, and if you were white, and if your state had long ago abolished slavery, you might have no contact with the institution and only a very general abstract idea that there were several million people performing forced labor somewhere else in the country that you had never been or seen.

Railroads made it possible to travel there. Railroads made it possible for people escaping from slavery to quickly get north and appear in your community. The telegraph would bring news of distant conflicts and outrages and atrocities on people. And it would get in your newspaper possibly the very next day. And people were having to confront their differences. And Lincoln, he understood that.

That if he was to rise, he needed to wrestle with different kinds of people. Intellectually, I mean. And he needed to figure out how he was going to unite people in a cause with himself at the head. This...

context sounds eerily familiar. The parallels are jarring, right? The airplane is the railroad today, the newspapers are the internet, the amount of information being passed on. It almost seems like, you know, the technology at that time was bringing the country together. Technology today has brought the world together. But as we alluded to earlier, it doesn't feel like

Lincoln's technique or tactics would be as successful today given the environment in which we live in where

For example, being friends with someone who believes in something that's fundamentally opposed to your belief system, something as deep and as emotional as someone's belief on slavery, for example, back then, doesn't feel like there's as much space for those tactics. Now, maybe I'm wrong, but what do you think was different about the cultural context of that time that made someone like Lincoln successful politically?

I agree that it was hard to reach out to people who disagreed then. I mean, it was a society that was coming apart to the point where they had a war. And it's hard to reach out to people now. There are people we can think of in the news of the last few years who have united despite their political differences. I say this to my Republican colleagues who are defending the indefensible. There will come a day when Donald Trump is gone.

But your dishonor will remain. One example that comes to mind is Liz Cheney, the former member of Congress from Wyoming, who I think would have been and perhaps still is loathed by many people who are more progressive for her views of LGBTQ issues or of any number of other issues.

But Cheney, when the Capitol was attacked on January 6th, 2021, concluded that that was an assault on democracy, that Donald Trump, the then president, was responsible and that she needed to hold him accountable, even though he was a member of her party.

and she was able to work effectively with Democrats who disagreed with her politically about probably almost everything else. You can find Democratic members of Congress who considered Cheney a close friend, someone that they not only worked with or used, but who they really respected and appreciated.

That is an example of people under tremendous pressure who disagree about most things, finding that one thing was more important than everything else in that particular moment and forming an alliance. That sort of thing does happen. But it cost her her career though, Steve. I mean, I would just point that out, right? It cost her her position and maybe her entire political career.

Yeah, it did cost her her position. And we don't know in what form she would return to politics or if she'll be able to return to politics at all. And that is part of the deal. When we talk about people.

reaching across the aisle or reaching across some difference to find some way to get value out of people who disagree with you, which is what Liz Cheney did and what Democrats who worked with Liz Cheney did. When you talk about someone like that, our modern temptation is to say they are weak, they are cowardly, they're doing the politically easy thing, but very often they're doing the politically difficult thing.

and a courageous thing. And part of the reason it's courageous is because there is a risk.

One or many or thousands or hundreds of thousands of representative Cheney's constituents in Wyoming were going to say, not only do I disagree with you, that's morally wrong. I'm going to throw you out of office. And so she took a moral risk to say that something else was more important than the immediate demands of some of her constituents. And I don't know where her political career will go.

but she was effective in that term that she had before she was defeated. She made an imprint on the issue that was important to her, and history will remember that if she's remembered in history. Yeah, and I guess, you know, viewing it through that same lens, I mean, the moral risk that you could say that Lincoln took, I mean, arguably cost him his life ultimately, right? Yeah, it's fascinating because Lincoln,

Lincoln did not demand in his early career immediate abolition. He said slavery is wrong, but I recognize that under the current laws and understanding the Constitution, I can't end it, but I want to restrict it. I want to contain it. And so that makes him seem like a moderate or a centrist of some kind. I think it's better to think of him as a radical because he attacked the system as a whole.

He wasn't trying to take the viewpoint that would make him seem personally pure. Coming up, Lincoln's politicking pays off. Hi, this is Jack Shaughnessy from Seattle, Washington, and you're listening to ThruLine from NPR.

This message comes from Apple TV Plus Original Podcasts, presenting My Devo. From the producers of Anything for Selena and the Pulitzer Prize-winning podcast Suave comes My Devo, a podcast about roots. Dive into the legendary life, music, and lasting influence of Latin America's most prolific songwriter and showman,

Juan Gabriel, El Divo de Juarez. Hosted by Maria Garcia, this is My Divo, an Apple Original Podcast produced by Futuro Studios. Follow and listen on Apple Podcasts.

Support for NPR and the following message come from Edward Jones. What is rich? Maybe it's less about reaching a magic number and more about discovering the magic in life. Edward Jones Financial Advisors are people you can count on for financial strategies that help support a life you love. Edward Jones, member SIPC.

A declaration of radical views, especially upon slavery, will rapidly disintegrate our present armies. I have written this letter with sincerity towards you and from love for my country, George B. McClellan. It's one thing to disagree with someone, but it's a whole other thing to have to work with someone you also disagree with. But Lincoln had no choice when it came to George McClellan, the commanding general of the Union Army that Lincoln himself appointed.

General McClellan, who is one of the most, I think, fascinating characters of the Civil War. And their relationship is just so interesting. I've personally been obsessed with it since Ken Burns' Civil War documentary because I think there's so much there. But can you talk a little about who McClellan was, what his role was in the war, and essentially how him and Lincoln's relationship evolved and ultimately devolved?

Yeah. George McClellan was a very different person from a very different background than Lincoln. Lincoln grew up in a log cabin and his mother died when Lincoln was very young and he had a very kind of scratchy existence trying to come up in the world.

McClellan came from an elite family in Philadelphia, went at a very young age because he was extremely smart to an elite school, the University of Pennsylvania, then went on before he was 16 to the West Point Military Academy, the United States Military Academy, which was itself a prestigious thing to do. And he there spent a lot of time with elite Southerners and adopted their views of society.

His opinion of slavery and of black people was more like a southerner stereotypically would be, a white southerner, than Lincoln's view was, even though Lincoln was the one who'd been born in the south, south of the Ohio River.

McClellan had tremendous organizational talent and skill. He was tremendously intelligent. He could put together an army, but at the moment of combat, it seems to me, psychologically, he couldn't figure out all the angles. He couldn't, because it's impossible on a battlefield, to get all the answers in advance and know that he was guaranteed success, and so he would freeze often and demand reinforcements or refuse to act.

Lincoln found this phenomenally frustrating, as did other people in the country. McClellan kept insisting on going his own way, kept disdaining people who did not have the military background that he had, disdaining people he considered to be not as smart as he was. He thought he was smarter than Lincoln.

He referred to Lincoln as, quote, the original gorilla, basically saying he's this big ape, you know? He's this big, long-limbed, not very bright guy telling funny stories. And is this also kind of an elitist, like that Lincoln didn't come from, he came from more of a kind of not from an elite background? It seems like that was part of it. Yeah. And I think McClellan had the kind of insecurity where he

If someone told him what to do, which civilian superiors should tell the military from time to time, he would be outraged and offended. But if, as also happened, the civilians would say, we have complete faith in you. Carte blanche. Do whatever you want. McClellan then was filled with contempt for them because he was a little insecure and maybe he respected them less for respecting him. Well, so what was their relationship like? And then how did it end?

They had a terrible relationship. They had different ideas of how to conduct the war.

McClellan wanted a big elaborate military campaign and Lincoln just wanted to go straight at the enemy. There are famous personal incidents like an evening when Lincoln came to McClellan's house in Washington to see him, waited a long time for McClellan to come home, and McClellan walked past him and up to bed without speaking to him. But I think more important than those personal slights was their political difference.

Lincoln believed that slavery was wrong, and McClellan only notionally believed that, didn't really believe that slavery was that wrong. There should be emancipation sometime after the war, but we shouldn't mess with slavery as part of this war. There was at that moment a movement, Frederick Douglass was one of its advocates, that the North should...

proclaim freedom for the enslaved laborers of the South because that would destroy their labor force. It would destroy their economy. It would win the war in short order. People were resisting that. Lincoln was on his way to accepting this as a strategy and on his way to the Emancipation Proclamation, while George McClellan was on his way in the other direction.

Enslaved people had escaped across the battle lines into the Union Army camp, and McClellan just had contempt for these people and considered them lazy and shiftless and any number of racist stereotypes you could imagine and felt they were just entirely unfit for emancipation. And he had a lot of sympathy for the white Southern point of view, and he just didn't want to mess with slavery. So then what was McClellan fighting this war for?

McClellan was fighting for the United States, for the Union, and he was not alone in that. There were several states that practiced slavery that did not secede, that did not join the rebellion.

And there are complicated reasons for that. They tended to be states that were farther north and had closer economic links, direct economic links with the north. They had more going on in their economies than just slave labor. But there were also people who believed in the country more than they believed in this particular institution.

And McClellan would seem to be such a person. He was very sympathetic with slave owners, but was willing to fight for the United States rather than against it. And Lincoln, despite all of his phenomenal frustrations with this man, ultimately got a very big use out of him.

But then ultimately what happens? Lincoln's administration went through all these machinations to remove McClellan from command. It was scary and difficult to do because he was very popular with the troops. And there was genuine fear of mutiny, that the Union army would turn against its own government if McClellan was removed the wrong way. They finally maneuvered him out of the way. And then the army immediately lost a battle, a big one.

There was chaos and Lincoln needed somebody to reorganize the army and decided that the only person with the skill to do it was McClellan. McClellan then did command the army for a short time more and won

an important victory at Antietam in Maryland, defeating General Robert E. Lee's army there. I mean, that's a huge victory, arguably one of the key moments of the war, right? Yes, yes. It was a confused and muddled battle with heavy losses on both sides, but Lee was driven back, and that was a victory, and that gave Lincoln the momentum, the right political moment to issue the Emancipation Proclamation.

"On the first day of January, in the year of our Lord, 1863, all persons held as slaves within any state or designated part of a state, the people whereof shall then be in rebellion against the United States, shall be then, thenceforward, and forever free." This to me is an example of the way that Lincoln ultimately worked.

He made use of this very frustrating guy from a very different background who was not in favor of emancipation and managed to make use of him on the way to the Emancipation Proclamation. He got the help he needed out of McClellan to do something that McClellan himself never approved of, so far as I know.

I'm so curious to know, from that time when you were a kid to now, having written this book about him, you know, in a very tense climate when it comes to history telling of any kind, how has your vision of him transformed? And why do you think it's important we are having this conversation in this moment?

I still admire Lincoln for many of the qualities that I sensed or understood as a kid growing up in Indiana. I admired him for his words, for his skill with words, for his skill with people, for his ability to rise in the world from very modest and difficult circumstances, and for his cleverness, for his sense of humor.

I think it's also important to understand the complexities of what he really did, that we would not know his name. History would little note nor long remember him, to use a phrase from Lincoln's Gettysburg Address, if he had not engaged in politics and made some really challenging moral choices.

which we also face in different issues today. As participants in a democracy, we face choices all the time over who to support and what makes the most sense and what is the most important thing we can do politically right now and what has to wait. And that doesn't mean it's ever right for any particular issue that should be corrected to wait. It just means we're forced to make the choices as Lincoln was.

Any political coalition in such a vast and complicated country as this is going to involve uniting with different kinds of people. And that will force choices on some of us, many of us, or all of us to decide what is truly important. What can we accomplish now? What do we have to leave for another day but keep still in sight?

And how do we preserve this gigantic experiment in self-government that we're all a part of?

That's it for this week's show. I'm Randabdet Fattah. I'm Ramteen Arablui, and you've been listening to ThruLine from NPR. This episode was produced by me. And me, and... Fact-checking for this episode was done by Greta Pittinger.

Thanks also to Mary Glenn Denning. This episode was mixed by Maggie Luthar. Thank you to Johannes Dergi and Anja Grunman.

Music was composed by Ramtin and his band, Drop Electric, which includes...

And as always, if you have an idea or like something you heard on the show, please write us at ThruLine at NPR.org. Thanks for listening. This message comes from NPR sponsor Capital One. With the Spark Cash Plus card, you earn unlimited 2% cash back on every purchase for your business. Find out more at CapitalOne.com slash Spark Cash Plus. Terms and conditions apply.