American POTUS: Boss Lincoln featuring Matthew Pinsker

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Transcript

0:28

welcome to American potus. It's my pleasure to welcome on this episode, Matthew Pinsker with his BA from Harvard and doctorate from Oxford. Matt holds the Brian Pohanka chair in American Civil War history at Dickinson College, and he serves as both Director of the House divided project and as a distinguished lecturer with the organization of American Historians. Matt is the author of Lincoln Sanctuary Abraham Lincoln, and The Soldier's Home, and the recently released book, which we will discuss today. Boss Lincoln, the partisan life of Abraham Lincoln. Matt, it's great to see you. Thanks for joining us on American potus.

squadcaster-6131_1_04-20-2026_155749 1:03

Alan. Thanks for having me.

1:05

Well, I'll tell you, Matt, this book is getting rave reviews. Really terrific and well deserved, sir.

squadcaster-6131_1_04-20-2026_155749 1:11

Well, thank you. I appreciate It, I've been really gratified by the response.

1:15

At the beginning of this really terrific book, you state that Lincoln had a peculiar talent for party management. That it was a driving force in his political career. So I wondered, in those early days of parties, what did party management really entail and what made Lincoln so very, very good at it?

squadcaster-6131_1_04-20-2026_155749 1:31

Well look, I call him Boss Lincoln, not because he was like boss Tweed. He wasn't some corrupt party hack in a back room, chewing on a cigar, taking bribes and dispensing patronage. But he was a commanding behind the scenes figure and parties and need that. In those days, the parties were not as professional. Or as regular as they are now. So they were kind of patched together with this, um, of newspapers. The media back then wasn't fair and balanced like it is now. They were openly partisan. was a good, Communicator, reader and organizer of newspapers. they had conventions. Of course, they mattered a lot more then than they do now. was a great, convention organizer, and manager and then, you know. Was a campaigner. He was somebody who not just spoke, but he could also organize and mobilize voters. We have all kinds of records from his papers where he's giving instructions on How to solicit votes at the precinct level, and he kept notebooks with election returns. He once gifted a set of election returns to Mary Todd when they were courting. He was a numbers guy and, he took it all very seriously and worked very hard at understanding the mechanics of campaigns and elections.

2:59

How did Mary respond to that gift?

squadcaster-6131_1_04-20-2026_155749 3:01

they Got married, Alan, what else can I say? They fell in love during a presidential campaign. She was a daughter of a prominent wig figure, and she was friendly with Henry Clay. The two of them Lincoln and Mary were both, very engaged in politics throughout their lives, but especially as a young couple. It's what bonded them.

3:21

I can see that's very true, very true of both Politicos in their own way. So looking at the world of politics, you say that there were two political approaches. There was, altruism and fusion. Can you tell us what those approaches meant and which of those you think best describe Lincoln?

squadcaster-6131_1_04-20-2026_155749 3:40

Right? Most of politics has continuity, but the language, the terminology evolves. So What, we would call the base, they would talk about as an ultra approach ultraism, meaning that you're trying to reach and mobilize your own supporters. It's inner focused. It's about purity. And then what we would call swing voters. They talk about as fusion. you know, to reach across,, the aisle. Not so much to cooperate with your partisan opponents, but to co-op some of them. That was what Fusion was about. They're kind of, opposite strategies. Lincoln was a wig fusion, then he became an ultra Republican, although not as a anti-slavery radical, but more as somebody who understood how to draw, lines around the party, to keep out, pretend Republicans like Stephen Douglas. We could talk about that later if you want. But then. Ultimately, what made him such a great wartime president was that he learned how to alternate between those two strategies with a kind of fluidity that has really never been matched. That was how he built the Union party.

4:52

Would fusion equate to a term we use sometimes nowadays? Kind of the big tent approach.

squadcaster-6131_1_04-20-2026_155749 4:58

It can, it can describe that. But what I try to emphasize in Lincoln's career is not how he cooperated with, everybody, but how he co-opted certain people. Sometimes it was through patronage offers, not bribery, but Nonetheless, you know, jobs, and sometimes it was through measures. They called it men in measures. It was through policy accommodation. He worked very hard to stitch together coalitions. I wouldn't call it a science, but it was a craft, and he worked really diligently at shaping those, frames together to make a house or build a party, as you might say.

5:39

So when he first entered the Illinois legislature, how did he so quickly establish himself as a leader of the wake party?

squadcaster-6131_1_04-20-2026_155749 5:46

You know, Lincoln runs for his first office when he is 23 years old. He is living in Illinois for less than a year. He is away from his family. He's only had a year of formal schooling. nobody. The youngest guy on the ballot, and he loses, but he proves early in his career that he's a workhorse, not just a show horse. And that's how he came back two years later and won a seat in the legislature, and then almost from the beginning of his service in the legislature, it's that workaholic mentality. Drafting bills, consulting on committees, working with other legislators on issues of their priority combined with his other. Kind of show horse qualities and talents, like public speaking and debating. That just made him a kind of indispensable figure. And of course, he was so devoted to campaigns and elections, and ultimately that's what. him ahead of his wig peers. He was good at everything and I wouldn't call him selfless, but he had a larger vision than just his own career. He was thinking about how to build party? and I think his peers, they just appreciated that, everybody appreciates that when they see somebody who's committed to the mission or the organization and not just their own, narrow benefit.

7:03

You know, a time that's not talked about as much as other parts of his career is Lincoln's time and Congress. What did you see in that one term he served in Congress that told you about his political priorities, his political methods?

squadcaster-6131_1_04-20-2026_155749 7:17

Well, usually his single term in Congress gets forgotten because he authored no bills that became law. He was there for a single term. It was kind of unhappy in some ways. It was at the end of the unpopular Mexican war and. He came out against the war after he was in Congress in a way that probably alienated some of his voters back home. But the truth is, in my book, I argue none of those things were his priorities. His top priority was to try to help the wig party gain national power, and he devoted his whole term, uh, in effect beyond just his ordinary duties working on the WIG national campaign. It's remarkable what he did. He's using his franking privilege, signing his name to 15,000 documents, campaign material to send across the country. He does a speaking tour in New England. A freshman congressman from Springfield, Illinois, and there he is on the stump in Massachusetts. And he was, of course, working very diligently to try to solicit, support for Zachary Taylor, both before Taylor won the nomination. And then after Taylor won the nomination as the general election candidate. He was incredibly effective and Taylor won. It was only the second time and the last time a wig candidate won the presidency, and Lincoln was a, I wouldn't say a major part of the victory, but he was a significant part of the victory for a first term Congress.

8:45

But then of course Taylor wasn't quite what Lincoln expected as president. And then Taylor dies while in office

squadcaster-6131_1_04-20-2026_155749 8:52

Right? Taylor was no politician. He was a great general, but he wasn't a great politician. And Lincoln immediately sensed he was making political mistake after political mistake. He didn't understand the rough and tumble behind the scenes and very adept at Maneuver. And Lincoln was frustrated with him from the beginning.

9:11

So after Lincoln's one term in Congress, we sometimes act as if he went back home and practiced as a lawyer and didn't really, involve himself in politics. But as you show that most definitely was not the case. Uh, what was going on with the wig party during that time? Why did it essentially disintegrate? And what role did Lincoln play in establishing the new Republican party in Illinois and around the country?

squadcaster-6131_1_04-20-2026_155749 9:35

Right. What I say in the book is that Lincoln wasn't losing interest in politics after he left Congress. He was losing interest in wig politics. The wig party was in decline. And it was a frustrating experience. He still kept at it, but you could see his frustration. He tried to hold the party together. In 1849, the wigs in Illinois and they had a tough road., They only had one congressional seat that had been Lincoln's. They had no statewide offices. They never won a statewide office after a certain point, and they didn't control the legislature. so they weren't strong enough as a party in a democratic majority state to ask for a cabinet seat. So when Taylor won the presidency, the only thing they could really vie for was a sub cabinet post. It was called the general, land office, they vided for the commissionership of the general land office. It was sort of Illinois WIS by default, but the party leaders were arguing over who should get it. And so Lincoln stepped in at the last minute and tried to take the job for himself as a way to save his faction of the party. And he ended up losing that patronage battle to a guy named Justin Butterfield, an attorney from Chicago, that did not. Lincoln to the point of walking away from the Taylor administration. He kept being a loyal and dutiful supporter. He kept doing regular things for the party. He wasn't as public for sure, but he was active. He was ghostwriting for a wig congressional candidate in 1850. He was helping to organize, campaigns, but as. Taylor gave way to Fillmore after Taylor died. Fillmore and Clay were, engaged in this kind of, feud, and then Clay died and Webster died. And Lincoln is recognizing that the future of American politics has to grapple with the slavery question. And, by 1853 and 54, he's moving towards support for what they're gonna call an anti-slavery fusion. he's still, by the way, active as a lawyer lobbyist, so he is in the middle of politics. And one thing I point out in the book that I know, you know, but. Some people forget, is that the first town ever named after Lincoln was Lincoln, Illinois? It was named after him in 1853, five years before the Lincoln Douglas debates, 10 years before the Emancipation Proclamation and. It was named after him in deference to his acumen as a lobbyist. It was a railroad junction, and so it just goes to show you he was pretty powerful. He was a leading lobbyist. He was a wig organizer who was frustrated with their limits, and he was moving toward organizing an anti-slavery fusion that was already on the horizon before the Kansas Nebraska Act and all the upheaval that that created in 1854.

12:35

You certainly gave me a new perspective on that whole time. Let's skip forward now to Lincoln's improbable election to the White House, and you say, and tell me what you mean by this, that the newly inaugurated President Lincoln quote, want everyone still clinging to the nation to recognize that ordinary partisanship could save them, that they should sink the patriot into the partisan. Now what do you mean by that?

squadcaster-6131_1_04-20-2026_155749 13:02

So it was Stephen Douglas in January of 1861, who, gave some remarks, on the Senate floor, urging everyone to sink the partisan into the patriot. He wanted, a bipartisan approach to the secession crisis. Now, the thing is, that was not Lincoln's approach. And I know that because Seward writes him and quotes from Douglas without telling Lincoln. He's quoting Douglas, and he says, we need to sink the partisan into the Patriot. And so what I did in that phrase that you read from the book is I explained that Lincoln's version of this was different. He wasn't trying to be nonpartisan or bipartisan. he was telling people is that they could be patriotic and partisan at the same time. He was pushing a Republican agenda. And he was telling everybody, you just have to realize our democracy is partisan and we're going to disagree, but we can still find common cause. And the phrase that I use to try to illustrate this, I use it in the book and I also use it in my classroom. I tell people, you have to ask yourself. What was Lincoln's Union? You know, union is a phrase that can mean different things. So to the Confederates, to the Southerners, to John C. Calhoun, it was a compact of states. To most people today, they think of it as just. We, the people or the nation. But Lincoln is precise, And when in his inaugural address, he said, secession is the essence of anarchy. And then the next sentence defined, its opposite. He said, a majority held in restraint by constitutional checks and limitations is the only true sovereign of a free people. The opposite of secession is the union between the majority and the minority, the winners in an election, and the losers, the that's forged after an election. During an inauguration when a majority rules, but it respects constitutional limits on behalf of the minority. that? was what Lincoln was offering. He was saying, let me be a Republican. I'll protect your rights as Democrats or Southerners, but I will still pursue my Republican agenda. If you don't like it, then in four years you can replace me.

15:23

We know as he enters office, he faces the most difficult job facing any president in our history. What skills and lessons from all those pre-war years of politics of that political life do you think helped him through the Civil War? Both in the political and the military realms.

squadcaster-6131_1_04-20-2026_155749 15:39

So first I think politics gives you a tough skin. it gives you a thick skin. Lincoln was, used to being insulted and attacked. It didn't phase him. he spent most of the war getting attacked by his friends, let alone the Confederates. And he was unfazed by all of that. It also gave him confidence. I call him Boss Lincoln because he was so confident in his own leadership, and that authoritative quality. That was there from the very beginning. He made mistakes and he stumbled, but he never doubted himself. And from the beginning he defied some of the advice and suggestion of his, leading peers, cabinet officers generals. He forged his own path. And, that's the end result. That's in my way of thinking. The most important lesson of the book, for leaders and of Lincoln's experience from partisanship that helped him become a great wartime president. He understood the difference between listening to people information, consulting widely, for facts on the ground, and then. Leaning on people for advice. He didn't do the latter. He always sought information, but he never sought advice. He wanted to process and make decisions on his own. That's why I pose Boss Lincoln as a kind of contrast to the idea of the team of rivals. You know, that famous book from Doris Kearns Goodwin? don't think he forged much

alan-lowe_1_04-20-2026_155749 17:11

Yeah.

squadcaster-6131_1_04-20-2026_155749 17:12

from those rivals, but I do think he used them. And I think he produced, decisions that he communicated to them and they, in most cases supported. But at the end of the day, I think he was a loner or at least an independent as a decision maker, and, and that's something that we need to understand in order to appreciate his success.

17:33

Two of the big decisions Lincoln made during the Civil War, the issuing of the Emancipation Proclamation and the use of black troops in the Union Army were very controversial, big issues for the whole nation. How did he take those issues and reframe them throughout with both Republicans and Northern Democrats?

squadcaster-6131_1_04-20-2026_155749 17:51

See, like this is a classic example of his battle of Wills with his leading cabinet officers. So you know, from the beginning of the war, secretary of State, William Seward, who had been the front runner for the Republican nomination, he pivots toward that kind of non-partisanship that I was describing a few minutes ago when he quotes Douglas to Lincoln saying, let's sink the partisan and the Patriot. called that no party now. Seward is kind of embracing the no party now strategy. Let's work with Democrats and let's tone down our republicanism. Let's not talk about slavery. Let's focus on union and union alone. And then on the other edge of the spectrum in the cabinet was Salmon Chase, the Secretary of Treasury. was an anti-slavery radical, but in the war he called himself an unconditional unionist. He said. We should launch an unconditional union party with emancipation as its Cardinal principle Lincoln. Puts himself in a different category. He supports building a union party, but he reframes emancipation and black enlistment not as cardinal principles for that party, but as, policies that are necessary for military victory because he knows that's what will make. union coalition, sustainable across party lines. It's what will enable them to co-opt some war Democrats and some border state conservatives. And that's how he outlasted his rivals and that's how he held the coalition together. It's ultimately how he won reelection.

19:29

So holding that coalition together, building that union party, and winning the election in 1864, what clues from that? What lessons can we take from that to see how Lincoln might have tried to handle the South during reconstruction?

squadcaster-6131_1_04-20-2026_155749 19:42

At the end of the book, I talk about how he was already looking ahead, his last speech, the one he delivered on April 11th, 1865. He's basically laying out the agenda for how to build a union party across the south. I show how he begins to evoke some of the same words and phrases he had used when he formed the Republican Party out of the remnants of the Democrats and the wis and the know nothings. And that's how he's talking about reconstruction? as a coalition building effort to take former slaves who are now voters and white. Unionists White former Confederates who are willing to commit to a unionist future as well as some others, to try to stitch together a coalition that can govern those states back into their, constitutional responsibilities. And ultimately, you would imagine he was willing to commit to this Union party, for the future. It may have never reverted back to a Republican party if Lincoln had lived. course we don't know, but That's what he laid out as his vision for the South on April 11th, just a few days before John Wilkes Booth shot him.

20:47

It is so sad that, among many other things we lost with Abraham Lincoln's death, that he was never able to try to implement that union party-like policy in the South. That might have been a different result for reconstruction and.

squadcaster-6131_1_04-20-2026_155749 20:59

Johnson called himself a unionist and when he got into that, battle Royal with the Radical Republicans, it was Andrew Johnson, the Unionist versus Stadia Stevens, and the other radical Republicans. Once again as Republicans, that's what the election of 1866 was about. Johnson swing around the circle and the fight over ratification of the 14th Amendment. You know, he lost that. The radicals took control of the, Congress in Washington and we had impeachment and that's the kind of, crisis that emerged when Lincoln died. I can't guarantee that he would've succeeded where Johnson failed, but we all know he was a much better unifier than Johnson was. but As great as Lincoln was, the challenge of reunifying the country around racial equality during reconstruction might have been even too much for Lincoln.

21:57

Yeah, that's, that's very true. Now, I, I know Matt, this is an unfair question. You wrote an amazing book. You just published it. You're out talking about it, but I wonder what's next for you? I.

squadcaster-6131_1_04-20-2026_155749 22:09

Well, I've been working this year on a new substack series, called What Would Lincoln Do, trying to draw Lessons from Lincoln's Experience for our Crisis in this 250th year. Of our nation's anniversary, and I've been finding it really rewarding. And one of the things that has been most, inspiring to me is that, I've been taking some of the stories from the book and, drawing them out deeper, talking about profiles in democracy, the people who supported Lincoln, whose stories are so compelling and who made his leadership possible. Like, um, deacon John Phillips, I mentioned him briefly in the book. He was 104 year old man from Sturbridge, Massachusetts, self-described Jeffersonian Democrat who had voted for. George Washington in 1792. And then in 1864, he gets his 79-year-old son to take him out of his sick bed so he can vote across party lines for Abraham Lincoln to help save the union. Deacon John Phillips was his name. They made a national story out of him and Lincoln wrote him a letter thanking him for his contributions.

23:18

Such important stories to hear. We'll definitely check out your substack. Matt, thank you so much for joining us in American potus. Congratulations again on a really terrific book, and it's been great talking with you.

squadcaster-6131_1_04-20-2026_155749 23:29

Alan. It's been a pleasure.

23:30

And thanks also to all of our wonderful American POTUS listeners, really appreciate your support. Make sure you check out all of the American POTUS episodes and all the episodes of American flotus, the podcast we produce in partnership with the First Ladies Association for Research and Education. Also, be sure to email me with your questions and comments and suggestions. My email is American potus host@gmail.com. That's American potus host@gmail.com. Thanks so very much. I'll see you next time on American potus.