Tag Archives: Abraham Lincoln

That These Dead Shall Not Have Died in Vain: The Impeachers

16 Monday Dec 2019

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Review: The Impeachers: The Trial of Andrew Johnson and the Dream of a Just Nation, by Brenda Wineapple
Random House, 2019. 514 pp. $32

In May 1868, the Senate voted to acquit President Andrew Johnson of the articles of impeachment Congress had brought against him. Tradition holds that the acquittal quashed a vicious vendetta against a defeated, broken Confederacy, and that Johnson stood for the peaceful reconciliation that the postwar nation needed above all. But as Wineapple proves in this riveting, brilliantly researched (and timely) book, tradition is plain wrong.

Rather, the former Confederacy was doing its best to continue the war by other means — killing thousands of African-Americans and Union sympathizers; attempting to regain control of governmental and administrative bodies denied them as former rebels; and clamoring for readmission to the Union without having to fulfill the conditions set forth by Congress in the Reconstruction Acts. As for Andrew Johnson, he tacitly encouraged the racial violence; vetoed the Reconstruction Acts, though he knew he’d be overridden; refused to convene Congress for months, during which he pardoned former Confederates by the carload; restated his ironclad belief that the country “was for white men”; and removed Unionist Reconstruction officials, putting former planters in their place.

Rep. Thaddeus Stevens, Pennsylvania Republican, believed that Andrew Johnson had betrayed the Federal cause in the Civil War and those who’d died for it (courtesy Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division. Brady-Handy Photograph Collection, via Wikimedia Commons)

Consequently, when Thaddeus Stevens, Radical Republican power in the House, and Charles Sumner and Benjamin Wade, his Senate allies, moved for impeachment, theirs was no vendetta. They believed that Johnson had transgressed the constitutional separation of powers to serve a policy that rendered moot the sacrifices of the Civil War and promised further racial violence and political division. Their ideal — which is why they were called Radicals — was political equality for all Americans, especially the franchise, without which an unjust society would never heal or change.

Wineapple details how the effort to impeach came up short, and what that meant for the South and the country at large. She focuses on the combination of racism, self-interest, lack of principle, and political chicanery that shaped the Senate vote, including, almost certainly, outright bribery. The removal of a president unfit to serve (a characterization that even his allies would have agreed with) further stumbled because of the plaintiffs’ murky legal approach. But, as the author astutely mentions in her introduction, even the concept of impeachment was (and, presumably, is) hard to swallow, admitting as it does that our national myths of triumphant democracy need revision, and that we’re capable of electing dysfunctional leaders.

Consider, for instance, her description of Johnson’s leadership style:

Andrew Johnson was not a statesman. He was a man with a fear of losing ground, with a need to be recognized, with an obsession to be right, and when seeking revenge on enemies — or perceived enemies — he had to humiliate, harass, and hound them. Heedless of consequences, he baited Congress and bullied men, believing his enemies were enemies of the people. It was a convenient illusion.
Those closest to him were unsure of what he might do next.

If that summary rings any bells, no wonder. But are those impeachable offenses, then or now? Wineapple doesn’t speak of current politics, but she doesn’t have to. The correspondences are there, but, more importantly, so are the historical lessons. Even with a substantial Senate majority to work from, the impeachers failed — and not for want of passion or skill. Among the obstacles? Benjamin Wade was president pro tempore of the Senate, and since there was no vice president anymore, he’d take office if Johnson fell. And Wade, radical of Radicals, believed in votes for women as well as for African-Americans.

Nothing less than the nation’s soul was at stake, the ideals of liberty on which we pride ourselves. That alone would make a good story. But Wineapple also has the congressional leaders, Ulysses S Grant, Mark Twain, Frederick Douglass, and a host of other larger-than-life characters, any one of whom would make a fitting protagonist for a novel, let alone a player in a historical drama like this.

I wish that Wineapple had explained how Johnson was able to keep Congress from meeting for so many months. I also confess that the actual trial bored me, in parts, but only because the attorneys droned on so long that even the Senate galleries emptied, when tickets had once been so hard to come by. But otherwise, The Impeachers makes a thrilling narrative. Wineapple has researched her ground so thoroughly with private letters and archival papers that she seems to have listened in on public and private conversations from 150 years ago.

Read The Impeachers and be amazed. And, in case you’re interested, the current president pro tempore of the Senate, third in line for the presidency of these United States, is Orrin Hatch of Utah.

Disclaimer: I obtained my reading copy of this book from the public library.

Lonely Hearts: Courting Mr. Lincoln

06 Monday May 2019

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Review: Courting Mr. Lincoln, by Louis Bayard
Algonquin, 2019. 379 pp. $28

“It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of ambitions in politics must be in want of a wife.”

No, that’s not how this richly imagined novel about Abraham Lincoln and Mary Todd begins, but it could have. For Bayard’s tale recalls Jane Austen in its wit, keenly observed social conventions, and chief object, finding love amid the teacups and calling cards, the glances and tacit declarations of acceptance or rejection. But this is Austen with broader humor, because Lincoln arrives in Springfield, Illinois, blissfully unaware of said social conventions, and the way he learns, and his reaction to his studies, is often hilarious.

Then, too, the narrative has a sharper, more serious tone, because the mud-plagued streets of Springfield have nothing like the gentility that Elizabeth Bennet & Co. would recognize, and some of the mud is metaphorical, flung by politicians at one another. The two principals here are lonely, tortured people, for whom marriage, as every reader surely knows, will bring many heartrending trials. And the chief obstacle to their betrothal isn’t Mary’s snobby, married sister Elizabeth, with whom she lives, but the psychological pain with which Lincoln lives.

With that inescapable, tragic overlay, Bayard does a remarkable job of evoking the lightness in both lovers; her wit and intelligence, his qualities that other men lack. As his close friend Joshua Speed puts it, Lincoln says what he believes and believes what he says. This characteristic is so startling that other men beg for his opinion on every matter under the sun. Be it known also that when Mary first meets him, he reminds her of a spindly pine tree, so a little moral strength helps.

Joshua and Mary are the two point-of-view characters, not Lincoln. That choice offers three crucial advantages, which Bayard deftly exploits. First, Lincoln’s intense feelings of unworthiness, which often prompt a deep withdrawal into himself, remain suggested but properly enigmatic, so the reader shares Speed’s and Mary’s frustration that he’s unreachable. Second, Speed has undertaken to school Lincoln in etiquette and social graces; since they both live above Speed’s dry-goods store (with two other men), they’re often together. Though aware that a more refined Lincoln will make him fitter for female company — partly the purpose, for he’ll need a wife if he’s to advance in politics — Speed resents his friend’s success with Mary. Jealous of Lincoln for getting the belle of Springfield, and of the belle for intruding on a perfectly good bachelor friendship, Speed has mixed motives throughout.

That unusual window allows the narrative to explore and comment on the bounds of friendship and courtship in a deep, thought-provoking way. Friendship is much easier to test, define, and judge, whereas marriage is a speculative option, at best. It’s also apparent that Speed is courting Lincoln too, for his own purposes — hence the title. Yet none of that prevents Lincoln’s preparation for social respectability from reaching high comedy, especially when the merchant tries to teach the backwoods lawyer how to waltz.

But if dancing befuddles the long-limbed Lincoln, friendship can be just as awkward:

They had taken their time warming to each other. Joshua at first blamed the difference in their upbringings, but he came to see that it ran deeper, that his own reticence was in the nature of a host unwilling to presume too much on his guest, whereas Lincoln’s was soul deep. It didn’t matter how innocent the question Joshua lobbed his way. How do you take your coffee? Would you care for some hardtack? Would you like Charlotte to wash your linen? Lincoln enfolded himself around each query, then disgorged the briefest and least revealing of replies. Always with the faint air of regret, as if he had been tricked into abandoning his Fifth Amendment protections.

If Courting Mr. Lincoln has a notable flaw, it’s the repetition, the alternating perspective of Mary and Speed going over the same events. To be sure, they offer very different views of them. But even though I understood the literary convention, which Bayard invokes without calling attention to it — the characters wouldn’t, would they? — the narrative still surprised me. I wound up thinking, Wait a minute; I read this before.

But that’s no reason to fault a superb love story, which I highly recommend. And though each of us likely imbues Lincoln with the virtues we wish to see in him, I came away from this portrayal marveling at how our most thoughtful, compassionate president, mortified at hurting anyone or anything, oversaw our country during its deadliest, most divisive conflict.

Disclaimer: I obtained my reading copy of this book from the publisher via Historical Novels Review, where this review appeared in shorter, different form.

His Private Thoughts: I Am Abraham

02 Monday Mar 2015

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Review: I Am Abraham, by Jerome Charyn
Liveright/Norton, 2014. 456 pp. $27.

What an extraordinary, ambitious idea, to narrate a novel in Abraham Lincoln’s first-person voice. But, as with its protagonist, I Am Abraham is not ordinary. And if you think you know this man–the Rail Splitter, Honest Abe, the Great Emancipator, and so on–here’s a different portrait, the man who never appeared before Matthew Brady’s camera. Or, rather, it’s the man while he’s away from the chair in which Brady posed him.

A younger, unbearded Lincoln (Courtesy of the Library of Congress, via the Ohio Valley Civil War Association).

A younger, unbearded Lincoln (Courtesy of the Library of Congress, via the Ohio Valley Civil War Association).

I Am Abraham is the private Lincoln: full of self-doubt, compassion, deep melancholy, a sense of social inferiority, a parallel dislike of social pretension, an iron will that grew with political maturity but which he couldn’t exert at home, and, maybe surprisingly, lust. Schoolchildren may learn about poor Ann Rutledge, the young woman whose premature death left him heartbroken; I remember that. But we sure didn’t hear what Jerome Charyn has Mr. Lincoln remark, that she was “the most voluptuous gal in Sangamon County,” courted by every man who didn’t already have one foot in the grave, and even some who did. Nor did we hear about the effect that young Mary Todd, the aristocratic Kentucky belle, had on the somewhat older country lawyer:

 

 

She was like a quake of raw energy and some kind of sun goddess, and I was quickened whenever I was in her orbit. Sometimes I’d hold her hand, and I could feel an electric spurt. Mary herself said that the two of us had ‘lovers’ eyes.’ I still felt ungainly around her, like some gigantic frog with warts on his face.

It was Mary, Charyn asserts, who saw Lincoln’s potential, and urged him to enter national politics. Without her support and encouragement, he’d have never become anything more than the itinerant horseback lawyer, while she stayed at home with the children. But she had political skills too, which she longed to use, and told him early in their courtship that she intended to be the First Lady, or, as they called it in those days, Mrs. President. However, once her husband became politically powerful, he excluded her from politics, which brought about a split between them. Both lived close to the edge of mental disturbance–depression, in his case, and acute paranoia, in hers. The White House itself was a house divided.

Readers expecting watersheds of history will be disappointed. The Emancipation Proclamation takes up maybe a page, and the visit to Gettysburg, to which Charyn devotes a chapter, moved me, but not in the you-are-there way. Rather, the history here is more personal, as with stump speeches, everyday political confrontations, and the debates against Stephen Douglas–in other words, anything that shows how Lincoln came to form his principles:

 That vile skunk and piss-pot, Chief Justice Taney, had dynamited us all with the Dred Scott Decision–negroes weren’t included in the Constitution, he declared. . . It didn’t matter if [Scott] talked like a duke and read the Bible better than white folks. He wasn’t a human being. I couldn’t pirouette around Dred Scott and palaver about the virtues of the Republican Party. I couldn’t pussyfoot. Or we’d all be pissing in the wind.

Of the other characters, my favorites were Robert Lincoln, the eldest son (and Mary’s darling), and two Union generals, McClellan and Grant. But there’s also the language, which combines Lincoln’s actual words, the patterns of Shakespearean and Biblical phrasing he loved, and a voice of curiosity, self-doubt, and moral questioning that reminded me of Huck Finn, my favorite literary character. Sure enough, in an afterword, Charyn says that he had Huck Finn in mind.

I highly recommend I Am Abraham. Even though you know what happens, it’s a great story, national and personal.

Disclaimer: I borrowed my reading copy of this book from the public library.