All the Powers of Life: The Political Life of Abraham Lincoln, 1856-1860 by Sidney Blumenthal

Simon & Schuster 784 pp.

The list of the most written about people of all time changes every decade or so, with Lincoln, Churchill, Christ, Napoleon and Muhammad Ali jostling for the top spot (With Donald Trump, it appears, moving up on the inside). Early in the 21st century, though, Lincoln is leaving all other contenders in the dust.

Lincoln literature is flourishing, with many of the most important books on his presidency published in just the last thirty years:  Garry Wills’ Lincoln at Gettysburg (1992), Doris Kearns Goodwin’s Team of Rivals (2005), and James McPherson’s Tried by War:  Lincoln as Commander in Chief (2009) are definitive on aspects of his years in the White House.

What has been neglected, for the most part, is the first fifty years of Lincoln’s life – how he became our greatest statesman.  Even David Herbert Donald’s Lincoln (1995), regarded by many (including Sidney Blumenthal) as the best one-volume biography, devotes relatively few pages to the decades before he became a figure of national import. 

Blumenthal’s first three volumes (of a proposed five) about Lincoln before his presidency may be the authoritative work on the evolution of our greatest president’s political thought.  The first, A Self-Made Man: 1809-1849 (2016), puts Lincoln the politician in bas-relief. It rescues young Abe’s early years from the hagiographic haze of popular biographies by Carl Sandburg and James G. Randall (and reinforced on the screen by Walter Huston, Raymond Massey and Henry Fonda). 

Lincoln, we now know, was no folksy cracker-barrel philosopher who backed reluctantly into a political life. As his Assistant Secretary of War Charles Dana put it, Lincoln was “a supreme politician. He understood politics because he understood human nature.”  In Blumenthal’s judgement, The Great Emancipator “did not hold himself above the political give-and-take or dismiss the deal making -- or ‘log rolling,’ as it was called -- as repugnant to his higher calling. He did not see politics as the enemy of his principles or an unpleasant process that might pollute them. . . .” Lincoln “completely embraced party politics. His politics was not separate from his idea of democracy.”

David Herbert Donald’s well-known assessment that “Lincoln’s ‘basic trait of character’ was his ‘essential passivity,’” is, argues Blumenthal, wrong-headed. In fact, Lincoln “leaked [information] to favored reporters, played newspaper editors against each other, and even offered the post of Minister to France to ‘His Satanic Majesty,’ James Gordon Bennett, editor of the New York Herald, a vicious critic, to help win his support for reelection.” He went so far as to write articles favorable to himself and his policies under the bylines of journalist friends for respected publications such as the Atlantic Monthly.

Volume Two, Wrestling with His Angel: 1849-1856 — the title is taken from Genesis 3:02, in which Jacob struggles all night with a messenger of God — places Lincoln squarely in the turmoil caused by the rapidly expanding country between the Mexican War (which ended in 1848) and the Civil War (which, lest we forget, resulted from the ongoing battle between free and slave states over new territories). 

In these years, Lincoln “constantly measured himself against [Senator Stephen] Douglas,” and in his own eyes came up short (though Lincoln towered over the 5’4” Douglas, who was called “The Little Giant of the Senate”). They debated several times, and each man recognized the other as shrewd and ambitious. But, Lincoln felt “With me, the race of ambition has been a failure – a flat failure; with him it has been one of splendid success. His name fills the nation; and is not unknown, even in foreign lands.”  The passing of the Kansas-Nebraska Act in 1854 made possible the extension of slavery to the western territories; the old Whig Party, of which Lincoln was a devoted member, was unable to proclaim itself either for or against slavery and lost all support from abolitionists in the North and pro-slavery people everywhere.  

A new party emerged, pulled together from disparate elements that shared a hatred of slavery. Lincoln became their man and began a meteoric rise that would see him eclipse Douglas, who had been the most influential Democrat in the country, not excepting President Pierce.  “When Lincoln proclaimed himself a Republican,” says Blumenthal, “it was among the most significant events in the coming of the Civil War.”

This third volume, All The Powers of Earth: 1856-1860, begins with the 1856 election of James. J. Buchanan, the last of the line of nonentities to sit in the White House between Andrew Jackson (1829 -1837) and Lincoln. Devoid of intelligence and principles, Buchanan could do nothing to dispel the dark clouds gathering on the horizon.

Lincoln appears as a supporting player for the first several chapters of All the Powers of Earth. He enters the narrative as though through a side door, then, slowly, he becomes the narrative.  Forged by adherence to the principles of Henry Clay (Kentucky senator, Secretary of State, and “Lincoln’s beau ideal of a statesman”) and Daniel Webster (Massachusetts senator and twice Secretary of State, the finest orator of his time), Lincoln would move beyond them and all other influences to become the author of his own story and the main force behind the creation of a new party that transformed American politics and then America itself.

Blumenthal highlights the issues behind the rising tensions in pre-Civil War America by following the fortunes of three key political figures.  If you began reading All the Powers of Earth not knowing its subject, you might, after a couple of hundred pages, think it a triple biography of Stephen A. Douglas, Jefferson Davis, and Abraham Lincoln. About halfway through the book if you placed a bet on which of the three would become president, Lincoln would likely be your third choice.  By the middle of the decade, as war approached, Douglas and Davis were the most prominent and influential political figures in the country; no doubt they’d be appalled to know they are remembered for losing to a man they despised.

Jefferson Davis seems to have been put on earth to be compared and contrasted with Abraham Lincoln. He was born in 1808 to Kentucky gentry; Lincoln was born eight months later in a one-room log cabin less than 100 miles away from Davis’ birthplace. Possessed of charisma and unrelenting will power, Davis rose to national influence by the mid-1850s as Secretary of War to President Franklin Pierce, but “for all intents and purposes … Davis was the acting president of the United States.”

The actual president, Pierce, a man charitably remembered, if at all, as a mediocrity, was an alcoholic and sycophant. Elected as a dark horse candidate of the Democratic Party, Pierce was “a Northern man of Southern sympathy” easily influenced in matters of state by Davis, with whom he had served in the war against Mexico. (Even during the Civil War Pierce sent encouraging letters to Davis, an action that to a less tolerant president than Lincoln could easily have been viewed as treason.) Pierce’s tenure was a moral vacuum filled by Davis’s vision of a vast Southern empire encompassing the slave states and the Caribbean.    

Loathsome though his principles were by today’s standards, Davis, at least stuck to them. In contrast Lincoln’s northern rival, Stephen A. Douglas, was a model of amoral pragmatism.  Blumenthal calls him “the single most disruptive character in American politics,” a fiercesome debater practiced in the art of illogic, a sly demagogue quick to attack his opponents with lies and racial slurs.

Lincoln’s seven debates with Douglas during the 1858 Senate race captured the imagination of the country with transcripts sent to newspapers by the game-changing invention, the telegraph.  The Lincoln-Douglas debates were a preview of the issues of slavery, federal vs. state power, and the future of the western territories that divided the nation and would soon erupt into a conflagration that even the most zealous could not have imagined. (Douglas had stoked those flames earlier in the decade by promoting the Kansas-Nebraska Act, which destroyed earlier legislation that established a balance between the free and slave states.)

Lincoln lost the Senate race, which caused him to despair. He could not know that the debates had thrust him into national prominence and made him the symbol for an emerging and soon to be dominant political party.

Only after more than 1,800 exhaustively researched pages, on, literally, the last page of All the Powers of Earth, does Lincoln become president.  It’s not enough to say that no other historian has given more attention to the forgotten back roads over which Lincoln the lawyer and judge found a path to the White House; it would be more correct to say that no one has even attempted to.

Blumenthal has not attempted to write the last words to be read on Abraham Lincoln. He has, rather, given us the first.

Allen Barra writes about books and film for Truthdig, the Atlantic, the Daily Beast, the Guardian, Salon, and the New Republic. He was recently cited by the National Arts and Journalism Awards for his literary and film criticism.