Sean Wilentz

Matt Blumberg: Welcome to Country Over Self, defining moments in American history. Each episode we welcome a notable historian to tell us the story of a president and a choice that president made to strengthen the country without regard to the impact of that decision on himself, his power, or his party.

Welcome to Country Over Self, Defining Moments in American History. I'm your host, Matt Blumberg, and I'm here today with Princeton University professor, Sean Wilentz. Sean is the award winning author and editor of numerous books, including The Rise of American Democracy, Jefferson to Lincoln, a winner of the Bancroft Prize and a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, and the best American history essays on Lincoln.

Sean, welcome to Country Over Self. 

Sean Wilentz: Fantastic to be here, Matt. 

Matt Blumberg: So today we want to talk about our 16th president, Abraham Lincoln. I think it's safe to say that, Lincoln is a giant among presidents. And if you asked 100 Americans to name two presidents, he and Washington would be the two, probably every single time.

Lincoln, of course, assumed the presidency after emerging as a dark horse candidate for the new Republican Party in 1860 on the eve of the Civil War. He steered the nation, through the conflict to the successful preservation of the union, which was really his goal. he was reelected in, 1864, in, an election.

He thought he was going to lose at a number of points along the way, which may come up in our conversation today, only to be assassinated and really martyred five weeks after his second inaugural. his Gettysburg Address, his Emancipation Proclamation, his Second Inaugural, are, three of the, great, great speeches and documents in American history.

I, I love, going to the Lincoln Memorial in D. C., when we're there visiting my in laws and standing there reading those, particularly the Second Inaugural, I think gives me chills. every time. so Sean, I'm thrilled to have you on and talking about Lincoln today. And with our theme of country over self, what's the sort of vignette or episode from his presidency that you want to zero in on?

Sean Wilentz: Matt, first of all, it's great to be here. And it's great to be talking about Abraham Lincoln above all. I think we should talk about the emancipation proclamation, not. Because it's about country over self, and it's hard to think about a country over self moment in Lincoln's case, because it's not so much about his personal, political or what have you, career running up against the good of the country, it's rather the situation he was in politically, legally, constitutionally, and above all politically, and then militarily as well, in the midst of the Civil War, and the Emancipation Proclamation Which was nothing that he had envisaged, releasing when he was sworn in on March 4th, 1861.

it really is a break. It really is something significantly different, and it's something I think we ought to talk about. 

Matt Blumberg: let's dive in. what was the context? It was really mid, middle of the war. 

Sean Wilentz: the context is very much It's, it was released on, officially it's signed and so forth on January 1st, 1863.

So the war had been going on for, a year and a half, a little bit more than that. what we have to back up a lot, actually, to understand what, the significance of it was. Because the war had begun with southern secession beginning in, in, in the end of 1860 when South Carolina went out and by the time Lincoln is inaugurated, much of the South, not Virginia, but much of the South had seceded.

And, he was in a situation where the entire country was falling apart. and, he had to try to, that, was a number one on his list was to, stop secession if he possibly could, and to get the states to come back in. that wasn't going to happen. In fact, soon after he's inaugurated, he issues a call for 75, 000 troops, and then, sorry, first comes Fort Sumter, then comes the call for the troops, and Virginia goes out, and that's the end of it.

he's not going to be able to stop secession. what are his goals? What are his, what is he trying to do? people often think that he was interested only in saving the Union and that slavery wasn't very important. And that's just not the case. That just doesn't make any sense. The fact was he had run on a platform.

He, that was distinctly anti slavery. he was going to try to stop the spread of slavery in the territories. This is all very clear. The reason the South seceded was about slavery. it was about slavery. the immediate task in front of him, however, was, of course, to stop secession. But the two were always there.

The two were always joined. The question was, how was he going to be able to, address them? Now, he had many problems in figuring this out. one was constitutionally, because the constitution forbade the federal government from abolishing slavery outright. It would have to be done by the individual states, so he was constitutionally constrained from doing so.

he was politically constrained, because there were plenty of northerners who weren't particularly interested in freeing the slaves, and he had to, respect that as a, as the president of the United States, he had to respect that politically. And so it was really a very difficult situation for him, to figure out what to do about slavery.

And what's so interesting 

Matt Blumberg: is it feels, this far in the distant future from that moment, it feels inevitable. It must have been. And it really wasn't. it was, it was challenging even within the North. 

Sean Wilentz: Absolutely. the idea that the federal government was going to do this, could try to do this, was something that was anathema to a lot of people.

A lot of people, a lot of northerners, they didn't really much what the South was doing, but after all, they didn't think that slavery was such a terrible thing either. there were a lot of copyright, a lot of southern sympathizers, actually, in, in the North, and they were, they voted, those people.

Lincoln won a very, landslide election, actually, in the North, but still, he had a war to win, and to win that war, he had to keep the North united. And, freeing the slaves would have been a very divisive issue as of March 1861. But things developed. Things developed politically that led him towards the Emancipation Proclamation.

What was leading him in that? first of all, he had a war situation. a lot of the constraints that were there, that might have been there, if the South had not seceded, he, were no longer in, in place. In fact, you could say in some ways the South, the Southerners, the secessionists, did the one thing That was going to make it possible for, Lincoln to, issue the Emancipation Proclamation, which would say they seceded, they started a war, they fired on the flag of the United States.

This was not a good idea from, in the long term, in the long term, this is the one thing that was going to end it all. But in any case, he, Lincoln decided that he could seize upon war powers. This has always been an argument, going back to the 1830s and 40s, whether under the war powers that are, invested in the president, that as commander in chief, whether slavery could be ended under that aegis.

And yeah, he decided that it could be. So the constitutional issue was there, it was going to be able to, he could overcome that. 

Matt Blumberg: But presumably he was worried about the court, right? He did not have a friendly court and he did not have a friendly chief justice in Taney. 

Sean Wilentz: He certainly didn't.

And, he was always, he was eternally. fearful that, Chief Justice Taney was going to do to him what he'd done to Dred Scott, that he was going to, overrule anything, and he was already having fights with Taney. Taney was going to die later on down the line, which made it a lot easier, although it said that he had in his, when, he died, they found in his papers already a court case that was going to, get rid of any ending abolition of slavery and getting rid of the Emancipation Proclamation.

But. it didn't come to pass. But sure, he certainly had to worry about that. he had to worry about the politics of it as well. but he was being pushed as well. He was being pushed from a number of directions. Obviously, he was being pushed by the abolitionists. Frederick Douglass and others are saying, this is terrible.

Douglass pans the first Inaugural. He says, the It was written by a man who's just kowtowing to the slaveholders because he's not talking about abolishing slavery. He's only talking about the Union. Where are we in all of this? He's dropped the slavery issue. This is a terrible thing. the abolitionists are pushing, but it's not just the abolitionists.

Congress is pushing him as well. you can really see the beginnings of the Emancipation Proclamation inside of Congress, weeks really after secession. with the First Confiscation Act, the question was, what are you going to do with the, slaves who ran to the Union lines, and, how are you going to adjudicate all of that?

So the Congress is already pushing for something along the lines of, leading towards, what is eventually going to become emancipation. The war is also not going so well, everybody might have thought that it was, everybody thought on both sides that the war was going to last a matter of weeks, and their side would win.

it didn't work out that way. 

Matt Blumberg: Yeah, that's, that's certainly the cynical view of the Emancipation Proclamation was that it was. It was simply designed to, to end the war sooner. 

Sean Wilentz: but it's not only cynical, it's, and he needed Black troops, among other things. There was a big argument of whether you're going to arm, free Blacks and any, and slaves who actually managed to make it to Union lines, whether you were going to, admit them to the army.

And by the time he got to the late in 1862, it Yeah, it was becoming increasingly apparent that they needed, the union side needed all the manpower it could get. And that the one advantage they had actually in, when you, if you're attacking a slave society, if you're at war with a slave society, the slaves can be a, an amazing asset for you.

And, that was self-evident in many ways. But it took a while for Lincoln to come around to that point of view. However, he did, and that was another reason of Emancipation Proclamation, was that it was gonna open up the possibility for black enlistment. which indeed proved to be quite decisive in winning the war.

But it wasn't that he was uninterested in ending slavery. this is people have this idea that somehow this Kentucky born, country lawyer really didn't care much about slavery. He cared intensely about slavery. but he was also a politician. He was a master politician.

somewhat in the sort of the center of the Republican Party, not a radical like Charles Sumner, but not a conservative either. He was going to move ahead with it, but he was going to move ahead with a politician's shrewdness, with a politician's, sense of strategy, and, and a politician's sense of first things first.

But he always, always, he once said that he, he'd always hated slavery. he grew up in Kentucky amidst anti slavery Baptists, so it was there. But it wasn't much of a political issue for him. Now, it's quite true, he was, he had served one term in Congress. in 1846, he was elected to Congress and he serves his one term.

And he did actually propose, offer a bill for the, emancipate, the end of slavery in the District of Columbia, which had been an abolitionist, issue for a long time. And he offers it and it's a mild bill and it doesn't get passed. But it wasn't as if he had nothing to say about slavery before he became, before he became president.

Then in 1854, when the country fell apart really, or the politics fell apart rather, over the Kansas Nebraska Act, he was galvanized back into politics and slavery was the issue. it was, that's what it was all about. and so he goes into his presidency with slavery very much on his mind. And the question was then going to be, where would slavery fit into the general, scheme of things in terms of winning the war?

Matt Blumberg: And that's it. So I love the framing you have there that, first and foremost, who is a politician, what's the strategy? First things first. 

Sean Wilentz: Exactly. Exactly. People, the Lincoln Memorial is a wonderful place, Matt. I love going there too. But there's a certain saintly quality about the, that elevates him.

He's a man in marble and a saint. maybe he was a saint, but he was a politician saint. I actually wrote a book about this called The Politicians and the Egalitarians. And, politicians are on one side and egalitarians are on the other side. And you think that the two are in opposition in some ways because politicians are skunks and egalitarians are naive.

in fact, there are those people who managed to bring them together. That's how things get done in, in, in a democracy. And Lincoln was one of those, one of those, what should we say? He was an egalitarian and a politician. But you misunderstand him. If you see him only as a politician, and you certainly misunderstand him, if you see him as an egalitarian only or as a saintly figure, he could not have gotten done what he got done unless he was, a sort of a political manipulator.

Matt Blumberg: so let's talk about the political manipulation. how did he make it happen? How did he get himself to the place and the country to the place? 

Sean Wilentz: Yeah, let's go back even before the, he's president though. first of all, in 1854 55, it was unclear. The Whig party fell apart because of the Kansas Nebraska Act.

But what was going to take its place? It was unclear. And Lincoln himself really didn't know what he was. He said he'd been a Whig all his life, but there didn't seem to be a Whig party anymore. He was essential in actually bringing together the Republican Party in Illinois. by, and that was a real act of political shrewdness.

he was going to figure out a way to bring the nativists aboard without supporting nativism. He was going to find a way to, get some of the racists to support him, even though he was not going to be a racist. it was a really clever thing that he did. and in bringing Democrats, anti slavery Democrats on board.

that was number one. Number two was his getting the nomination. That When he was, in 1860, everybody assumed that the nomination of the Republican Party, having gone to John C. Fremont the first time in 1856, that it would go probably to William Seward of New York, who was a very eminent anti slavery politician, leader, and so forth.

but was thought of as something of a radical, actually. he made his very famous speech talking about the higher law, which condemns slavery, which people took to be anti constitutional. It wasn't really, but. He had the reputation of being a radical, and it's entirely possible that if he had gotten the nomination, he might not have won the election.

Lincoln was different. Lincoln came out of the Midwest, came out of Illinois, which was then the West, he had a more, much more measured view of how you go about attacking slavery than Seward did. He didn't have any of Seward's baggage, let's put it that way.

and he manages to get the nomination. Now, how he gets the nomination is a, it's a brilliant story. he was thought of as a nobody. He had a one term congressman who was ugly. And he had just, lost, he had just lost 

Matt Blumberg: the Senate race. Exactly. 

Sean Wilentz: He had gone for one thing, which was losing a Senate race to Stephen A. Douglas. However, And this shows a politician's shrewdness. He had these famous debates with Douglass, and they were famous in part because he realized that they were going to be very important for his political future, and he had them published. And he had them published with footnotes that he himself wrote.

And he got them out there. And people knew Lincoln's name, even though he was a one term congressman. He had made the anti slavery Republican case better than anybody in those debates. And he was challenged by Douglass. And Douglass was a terrible racist demagogue, and he stood up to Douglass. Even though he lost the election, he was well known.

this nobody congressman, not William H. Seward, not a man of, great renown, nevertheless, had the foresight to, to get that stuff out there. and then comes the buildup to the convention. And he had a, the story of Lincoln at, in the Chicago convention is a remarkable one, just in terms of political manipulation.

He had his people there, Judge David Davis, among others, I'm giving you more detail than you need to know, but that's okay. saying, he said to them, don't make any deals. Which was to say, make all the deals you want. and he managed to get the nomination, away from Seward. Seward was, was up there for a while.

He seemed to be in front, but then Lincoln eventually overtook him. But that was done through political stealth. the other thing that he had done before that was to give a very famous speech at Cooper Union, in New York, and this was in February 1860. so it's well before the convention, but Lincoln knew that the Lincoln Douglas debates that had been published were not necessarily going to be enough to win over important elements of the Republican Party, particularly in the city of New York.

which is a relatively conservative place in some ways, but also had a lot of abolitionists around. And he gives a speech in, in, in February 1860 at the Cooper Union, the Cooper Institute it was then called, which laid out the case against slavery in a moderate and yet eloquent and passionate way. And he really won over, All these New York Republicans who thought he was just a guerrilla from Illinois who, you know, ugly nothing or, and he managed to win them over, and that was again, that was political rhetoric in part, but he knew what he was doing, he was very shrewd, and then he takes a tour up to New England and he does the same thing.

So by the time you get to the convention, he's already built his base and he's going to be able to win the nomination. So that's already Lincoln the politician even before. he becomes president as president. He has a very difficult, road to hoe because he has to balance the factions within the Republican party.

He's got the abolitionists at one side or Yip, nipping at his heels and telling him to do more. he's got Democrat. There are Democrats, out there that he has to try to, hold at bay, and then he's got to keep his own Republican coalition together. and he managed to do that quite cleverly.

he puts together a cabinet, which is not a great cabinet, but it's at first. but he gets a cabinet which is, from different parts of the party. he actually gets an ex Democrat eventually, Edwin Stanton, who's actually a good guy. But he does everything he can to try to keep his coalition together.

And that's where the Emancipation Proclamation comes in. Because he's worried about issuing it too quickly. he knows he needs, at that point in the war, he needs to have a great military victory. If he's going to get anywhere, and he has to wait until he finally gets there. The Battle of Antietam, which is not a smashing Union victory, but it's a good enough Union victory.

And it's there, it's at that point that he realizes that he's going to be able to do this. and he comes up with this preliminary emancipation proclamation, in September of 1862. So the whole thing is a great political, maneuvering, political act. And for that, I think Lincoln deserves absolute A plus, as presidents are concerned.

Matt Blumberg: His cabinet was opposed to it. 

Sean Wilentz: he leads it to the cabinet. There are some people who are very much in favor of it, some people are not. but he knows he's going to go ahead with it. this is nothing that's not going to be done. And, he'd already issued the preliminary in September.

he talks to the cabinet about it. he has now, again, Lincoln the politician. It wasn't simply his cabinet that was giving him trouble, it was the people of the left wing of the Republican Party were giving him trouble. Not just the abolitionists, but particularly the New York editor, Horace Greeley.

And Horace Greeley, I think it's in August of 1862, writes an editorial called The Prayer of the 20 Million, in which he basically lambastes Lincoln for not doing enough towards getting towards abolition. And he wants to get rid of slavery and, Horace Greeley's a great anti slavery man.

He's a great anti slavery man. So he writes this editorial in, in, in the New York Tribune, and the New York Tribune is his paper, and it's the most widely read paper in the North at any rate. so it's out there, and he's been put, Lincoln's been put on notice, in effect, by Horace Greeley.

And he replies in a very clever way, where he says, Look, I'm not out to, to free the slaves with this war. If I could win this war by freeing no slaves at all, I would do it. If I could win this war by freeing all the slaves, I would do it. I'm here to save the union. Very conservative, right?

Sounding very conservative. Although it is, as far as I can see, it was the first time that he ever mentioned the possibility of freeing all the slaves. Lincoln is very astute about all of that. But nevertheless, he sounds very conservative. and people lambasted, people on the left lambasted him for it.

He has in his pocket the Preliminary Emancipation Proclamation, he knows what's coming. He is making sure that the conservative elements out there won't be too shocked when he issues this preliminary, proclamation. So he's building his support, or he's trying to fend off possible opposition.

very early on in ticking off one element of his party in order to keep another element of his party and the Democrats on board and then he's going to do the thing that exactly the thing that they were talking about which to issue the Emancipation Proclamation. 

Matt Blumberg: It's such a, tremendous balancing act, and you can see the communication strategy, how intentional it was versus, evolutionary, I don't know, but the communication strategy on his part, both to reach the country and to reach the politicians, the political class, was pretty impressive.

Sean Wilentz: Lincoln was very astute about all of that, and it goes, as I say, it goes back to the Lincoln Douglas debates, you can see it. He understood the power of the press, and he understood the power of words. not that he was a man only of words, that's the other thing, is that Lincoln is sometimes portrayed as a great literary genius, which, he certainly had a literary genius about him, although, The Emancipation Proclamation was not part of that.

The great American historian Richard Hofstadter once described the Emancipation Proclamation as a document that had all of the moral grandeur of a bill of lading. it is a very dull document. But it wasn't supposed to be eloquent. It was supposed to just do certain things, issue certain, it was doing what it was doing.

It was not supposed to be a great speech. But, as you said at the beginning, the First Inaugural, the Gettysburg Address, the the Second Inaugural above all, the Cooper Institute Address too, I would say. Even though it's not as stirring as the others, it's a very long speech and it's a somewhat detailed refutation of Douglass and others, of Stephen A. Douglass and others. Nevertheless, the end of it is, the peroration is just spectacular. So he knew how to do that. He knew how to communicate when he had to. 

Matt Blumberg: He did. All right. so he issues the Emancipation Proclamation, that, that sets off a chain of political events and a chain of military events.

Sean Wilentz: Yeah. above all, it, it opens up the possibilities for black recruitment, I think. I think that's the most important aspect of it from the military standpoint. And, there's a real question about how much, how, will black men fight? Some people were asking. Are they, will they be competent troops?

There was a lot of racism in the North as well. People weren't sure of all of that. Lincoln was, and it helped galvanize the, the abolitionists. it changed the character of the war. and indeed, something like a hundred and, was it almost 200, 000? Union troops were, black and many of them were former slaves.

they were important to the Union cause, the Union fight. So above all, there was that. and then, in terms of diplomatic, the diplomatic aspect of this is important as well. there was always a threat. There's always the possibility that the Confederates could manage to get support, particularly from the British.

And if they got that support, if Britain had recognized the Confederacy, that would have given the Confederacy far more legitimacy and far more power than they would have had. And there was always this question in England. the aristocrats always kinda liked the Confederacy anyway, right? because they were aristocrats.

but there was a real question. why isn't Lincoln fighting slavery? there was, it was, once the Emancipation Proclamation was done, then it wasn't going to be any question that through his ministrations with Charles Francis Adams in London, that they were going to keep England out of it.

It wasn't going to be an issue anymore. The Emancipation Proclamation helped secure that as well. but it's also going to, make life difficult for Lincoln when the war starts going badly again. there is the Battle of Gettysburg in 1863. the Union is saved, the Lee's invasion of the North is thwarted, miraculously.

many, are killed, but it's a Union victory. Grant has had his victories in the West, things are looking up for, the Union cause. He gives his address in November in 1863. He gives the famous Gettysburg Address in which he basically, re ignites the Union cause by calling it a, you can use the word anti slavery but it's there, a new birth of freedom, but it's also a war to secure democracy.

that's what's at the heart of the Gettysburg Address. But by the time we get into 1864, things are not looking so good militarily. the Union's suffered terrible setbacks and, it looked like the Union effort was getting bogged down. And indeed, the question was going to be then, How much support did he have in the North?

It was, the South was not necessarily going to win militarily, but it certainly could win if it could break the moral, the support for the war in the North. If more of the morale were undone by the war, that was going to break it above all. and there had been, there had been draft riots in New York in 1863, right around just after Gettysburg.

things were looking pretty dark. Yeah. 

Matt Blumberg: he thought he was going to, he thought he was going to lose many people. 

Sean Wilentz: that's right. There's this famous, famous event where he writes a letter saying, I fully expect to lose the election, but I'm not going to give the country away when I lose the election until afterwards.

we're going to, we're going to, hold to the end. And he puts it in a drawer and he doesn't want anybody to see it until after the election. In the end, he wins. in part, Lincoln's presidency is a, truly a military presidency and what's going on, politics is not just the politics we've been talking about, the war itself is politics.

And miraculously for Lincoln, and for, the world really. William Tecumseh Sherman comes through in Atlanta, basically wins Atlanta, starts the march to the sea. Then it seems the union doldrums were broken. And, it looked like the war was gonna come to a successful end.

It was gonna take a while, but things had really changed. The momentum had really changed, and it helps, it helps win Lincoln's reelection in 1864. it shut up the radicals who were still on his case. they were going to put up their own, they were going to put up Fremont again.

and the conservatives were, kept aboard, and the, and actually the soldier vote, the military vote also helped a lot because the Union soldiers were allowed to vote in the election. but in, in any event, the military victory helped secure his re election in 1864. 

Matt Blumberg: Yeah, so look at a lot of these, episodes.

I, I like to ask about the sort of the impact of the thing we're talking about on the president's reputation and legacy and history. And I'm not going to do that here because I think that's fairly obvious. 

Sean Wilentz: it is moving to think about just to throw it in though. cause it can go both ways.

seeing Lincoln as the great emancipator, yeah, but also that, it, it rather undercuts what other people are doing, and Lincoln did not, achieve all this by himself, so there is that, and there's a kind of paternalist aspect to it, too, you can see it that way, that, the great mass of Lincoln helped free the slaves and all of that's, that can be taken too far, however, there's no question that, black America, Responded to Abraham Lincoln in an extraordinary way and you saw it as after his assassination where literally, throngs of black people showed up at the railroad stations to bid him farewell.

they really felt as if the man, their man had been, killed. so the Emancipation Proclamation is important for his, for all kinds of reasons in terms of his reputation. 

Matt Blumberg: It is. so let me ask you a question. It's an unfair question to ask a historian, but I'll ask anyway, which is, I've often thought about what his second term would have been like if he had actually served it out because reconstruction was such a mess.

and Andrew Johnson and the administration was, was such a mess at odds with Congress. And, it got impeached the whole thing from what you know, and everything you've studied, what do you think? The next few years would have been like with Lincoln at the helm, having emancipated the slaves, having done everything he did.

Sean Wilentz: my quick answer is that it couldn't have been any worse than what did happen. So already we're Lincoln's looking better. look, the first step was getting the 13th Amendment done. And he was not all so sure about the 13th Amendment all the way through. But eventually he comes aboard and he helps get it passed through the Congress.

It's a big deal, which is the amendment abolishing slavery. and just before he was killed, in fact, there's a way in which you can see Lincoln as a martyr in some ways, not just to, the Union cause, but to black civil rights, because the last speech he gives It becomes the first president who even broaches the possibility for black citizenship, that a certain portion of the black male population should be allowed to vote.

This was, this, in retrospect, it looks like, small potatoes. At the time, it was extraordinarily radical, right? And as it happened, In the crowd that night, when he gives that speech, is an actor named John Wilkes Booth, who says, who was supposed to have said to a person next to him, that means n word citizenship, I'll put him through.

And that was the end of that. to the extent that Lincoln had moved on the question of equality, of racial equality, had moved towards the idea of black citizenship, you wouldn't expect that evolution would have continued, would have been exactly the opposite of Andrew Johnson, who was a, a vicious racist, an anti planter man from Tennessee to be sure, but nevertheless a vicious racist who was going to basically bring the Confederates back in, after a time and for that he got impeached.

That Lincoln was moving in a wholly different direction. in terms of specifics, the 13th Amendment is the one thing he, we know that he wanted to get through that he got through. After that. if you could imagine a president being at all in, in sync with his Congress, with the radicals in Congress, people like Charles Sumner, people like Thaddeus Stevens, Lincoln was not that, he was not that radical, but he would have been in sync with them in a way that was very unlike what Andrew Johnson was there, was doing.

and so you can imagine things being done, perhaps more quickly, a lot less, controversy. Reconstruction did get a lot done. even finally, the Congress picked up, but to have a president alongside of them would have been very different. Now, I'm not going to say that the Civil Rights Act of 1866 would have been any, I don't want to go into specifics like that.

Yeah. But it certainly would have been more possible to get done what got done. 

Matt Blumberg: you do have to think that Lincoln. bind up the nation's wounds, was a very different tone than what his successor took. 

Sean Wilentz: yeah, but that's an interesting question though, Matt, because, .

That all, that comes from the Second Inaugural. And the Second Inaugural, to me, has always had a kind of, it's not schizoid exactly, but it has a dual side to it. On the one hand, it's talking about the evil of slavery. And, if, every drop of blood drawn with a lash will be matched by, drawn with a sword.

the Lord will tell us what it does, his judgments are sacred, et cetera. there's no question the anti slavery aspect of it's there, but by the same token, he doesn't want to have harsh retribution against the South, right? He doesn't want it to go in that direction, and bind up the nation's wounds, et cetera, et cetera.

He was hoping, and Lincoln was always had a certain hopefulness about the South, which, proved unjustified in 1861 and might have been unjustified in 18, in 1865. the fact was bind up the nation wounds, lined up the nation's wound, but by 1866, Nathan Bedford Forrest is already getting started in informing what is going to become the Ku Klux Klan.

there was not going to be that kind of submission. Now, how Lincoln would have dealt with that, how would it, which would have been his disappointment, but how he would have dealt with that. we don't know, we can't know, but he wouldn't have dealt with it the way that Andrew Johnson did, which is basically pardon all the Confederates and let them back in. That would not have happened. 

Matt Blumberg: all fascinating conversation about Lincoln. Let's, move to my kind of four closing questions and shift the topic a little bit. so my first question today, we talked about Lincoln. What's your favorite example of a president choosing country over self other than Lincoln?

And let's for this and the next question, let's stay away from any president that's still living today. 

Sean Wilentz: none of them would have been there anyway, so it's okay. as much as I admire many of them, no, I look the classic example and I think it's right. It's again, it's not country over self, but it's, it's.

making a sacrifice for the good of the country, for the good of the world. and that's Lyndon Johnson in 1964. where he basically says to Bill Moyers, famously, when he signs the Civil Rights Act in 1964, we've just lost the South for an entire generation. So for his party, this is a terrible thing.

And indeed, we're still living with that decision even today. I would say, you can't understand the politics of where we are now without understanding how things are going to change, because of the democratic parties through Lyndon Johnson, the democratic parties, full embrace of the civil rights movement.

Matt Blumberg: And that was actually the episode I recorded with, with Julian. it's not for 

Sean Wilentz: nothing that, that, the emancipation proclamation, the civil rights bill of 64, those are great presidential decisions. And, but they also involved, a person now. In Johnson's case, the additional part of it, he was another politician, egalitarian.

he believed in all of that. He was strongly for all of that. But he had to get the bill through the Congress. And I'm sure Julian told you all about that. About how he managed to escape the southern bulls. And, the guys who were really running the Congress. So he managed to get that done.

And, but knowing that it was going to be politically costly. That's right. And, the tragedy of all of that is just too much to believe. Because had he, had he not been for the Vietnam War, Lyndon Johnson might have been able to get even more done than he did.

Matt Blumberg: That's right. Okay. So my second question, the opposite, what's the most poignant example you can think of, of self over country. And again, not in any, contemporary, 

Sean Wilentz: Oh boy, self over country. Nixon is the one I would have thought of. He's not alive anymore. So I can talk about Richard Nixon.

Richard Nixon had a plan for, consolidating federal power that we haven't seen until the likes of the Project 2025 or Trump. yeah, there, I think, I'm trying to think of anything that comes close to all of that in terms of, not in terms of just self advancement, but in terms of portraying the basic ideas of the Constitution and the basic ideas of American democracy.

yeah, Let me think, was the Alien and Sedition Act, was that a great idea? no, it wasn't a great idea. and Adams probably shouldn't have signed them, but he had no choice, politically. He later paid for it politically, insofar as he got his comeuppance, There it is.

I'm trying to think of after this. those are two good ones. Yeah. it was bad and the, oh, and the provisional army, Adams was getting pushed very hard. But in the end, he did the right thing. he brought the war with France. He tried to bring the war with France to an end.

he didn't do the Provisional Army. He left, nothing to do with the Ellington Citizen Acts, but still, he tried to back off, for which Hamilton would never forgive him. And there was a great split. And, Adams ended up being, in no man's land. it was just, unfortunate.

He said there were no Americans left in America, thinking that he was the last American. but, but that's, yeah, only the last federalist. And that was really, but that's very different. That's a political, almost a policy issue in terms of compromising the basic, structure of the country.

yeah, Nixon's the one, as they used to say. 

Matt Blumberg: So my third, Quick question here at the end is about Biden and his decision to withdraw from the race. How do you think history will treat that decision? will will it treat it as country over self? Will it treat it as you were, man, you were too late.

You knew you were too old for the job or does it depend on the outcome of the election? 

Sean Wilentz: Yeah, I think it depends on the outcome of the election. if Kamala Harris wins, he'll look like a genius. Or rather, genius is the wrong word. He'll look like the man who gave up, his own power in order to, just to save the country from Donald Trump.

he saved the country from Donald Trump once, and then he did it again. if Donald Trump wins, he's gonna, if Donald Trump wins, one's just gonna be writing history anyway. it'll be Hillsdale College or something. It won't be the likes of, me or you or anything like that, but let's assume that there's going to be, honest history being written, then he'll look terrible or he could look terrible because he looked like the man who held on for too long, didn't allow the Democrats to come up with a winning candidate and, gave Trump the nod.

I think though, there's a way in which, how to put it, no president likes to leave office, and there was much more, much less pressure in some ways because of one debate, on Joe Biden than others, let's say Lyndon Johnson, right? And it took Biden a while to figure out what he was going to do, but once he did it.

And, he could have very easily hung in there and. crashed and burned. He still thinks, I think, that he could have won. He might have won. I suspect that was impossible. but, but it still took, more than a degree of selflessness to, to back out.

Whether historians will treat him that way, I don't know, but a lot of it will depend 5th. 

Matt Blumberg: Yeah. All right. My final question for you, not a history question, knowing everything you know about this country, our system, our form of government, if you could wave a magic wand and change one thing about it.

Whether it requires a law, constitutional amendment, or it's just a change of culture or custom. if you could wave a magic wand to do one thing that would strengthen our system, Wow. What would it be? 

Sean Wilentz: That's a good one. I used to support the Electoral College because I thought it was a necessary thing to help balance power.

But I think the Electoral College has become, what should we say, dysfunctional. it had a function, but it no longer has that function. And I certainly think the Electoral College should be undone. especially given demographic changes that are going to be occurring. I wouldn't have said this five years ago, but I can, I say it now, not just because my party, everybody's in my party is, has been, gotten the short end of all of that, but I think it's bad for democracy.

at this point. when you have this many presidents who have been elected with a lot of capturing the popular majority in a, almost in a row, except for Obama. that's not a healthy democracy. And, so I w I would, if you ask for one thing right off the top of my head, I would do that.

But then anything else to stop the poison that's been injected into American politics over the last, really, over, since the mid 90s. But, the absolute, there's no law that you can do to make people better than they are. but if there were some way to try to check this, this virus, this cancer that has afflicted American politics, there would have to be a lot of different things done.

but in terms of politics right now, yeah, the, getting rid of the Electoral College should be a good idea. 

Matt Blumberg: All right. I think that's a good place for us to stop today. although I could continue to talk to you for hours, 

Sean Wilentz: next time when we both have more time, I'll come up to Westchester and we'll talk there, and not to knock back a few things and, Continue the conversation.

Matt Blumberg: You got a deal. Sean Wilentz, Princeton University historian and bestselling author. Thank you for joining me today on Country Over Self. Thank you very much Matt. Thank you for listening to the Country Over Self podcast. If you enjoyed this episode, please take a minute to give us five stars and leave us a review.

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