THE UNPOPULAR MR. LINCOLN: The Story of Americas Most Reviled President

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The truth is, Lincoln is only a moderate lawyer and in the larger cities of the Union could pass for no more than a facetious pettifogger. Take him from his vocation and he loses even these small characteristics and indulges in simple twaddle which would disgrace a well bred school boy. Written as Abraham Lincoln approached Washington by train for his presidential inauguration, this tirade was not the rant of a fire-eating secessionist editor in Richmond or New Orleans. It was the declaration of the Salem Advocate , a newspaper printed in Lincoln's home ground of central Illinois.

The Advocate had plenty of company among Northern opinion makers. The editor of Massachusetts's influential Springfield Republican , Samuel Bowles, despaired in a letter to a friend the same week, "Lincoln is a 'simple Susan.

The most esteemed orator in America, Edward Everett, wrote in his diary: They put to flight all notions of greatness. After Lincoln's unseemly arrival, the contempt in the nation's reaction was so widespread, so vicious and so personal that it marks this episode as the historic low point of presidential prestige in the United States. Even the Northern press winced at the president's undignified start. Vanity Fair observed, "By the advice of weak men, who should straddle through life in petticoats instead of disgracing such manly garments as pantaloons and coats, the President-elect disguises himself after the manner of heroes in two-shilling novels, and rides secretly, in the deep night, from Harrisburg to Washington.

Lincoln's Flight by Moonlight Alone," suggested the president deserved "the deepest disgrace that the crushing indignation of a whole people can inflict. Lincoln may live a hundred years without having so good a chance to die. Known almost exclusively by his got-up nickname "The Railsplitter," Lincoln had won the election in November with This absurdly low total was partly due to the fact that four candidates were on the ballot, but it remains the poorest showing by any winning presidential candidate in American history. In fact, Lincoln received a smaller percentage of the popular vote than nearly all the losers of two-party presidential elections.

Immediately, however, even this scant total dropped in the panic of the Secession Winter, as seven Southern states left the Union and worried Northerners repented their votes for the Illinoisan. At the time he was sworn in, Lincoln's "approval rating" can be estimated by examining wintertime Republican losses in local elections in Brooklyn, Cincinnati, Cleveland and St. Louis, and state elections in Connecticut, Massachusetts and Rhode Island; by the observations of Henry Adams of the presidential Adamses that "not a third of the House" supported him; and by the published reckoning of the New York Herald that only 1 million of the 4.

All these indications put his support in the nation at about 25 percent — roughly equivalent to the lowest approval ratings recorded by modern-day polling. How could a man elected president in November be so reviled in February? The insults heaped on Lincoln after his arrival in Washington were not the result of anything he himself had done or left undone. He was a man without a history, a man almost no one knew. Because he was a blank slate, Americans, at the climax of a national crisis 30 years in coming, projected onto him everything they saw wrong with the country.

To the opinion makers in the cities of the East, he was a weakling, inadequate to the needs of the democracy. To the hostile masses in the South, he was an interloper, a Caesar who represented a deadly threat to the young republic. To millions on both sides of the Mason-Dixon line, he was not a statesman but merely a standard bearer for a vast, corrupt political system. Lincoln had never administered anything larger than a two-person law office, and historians have often excused his mismanagement of the war effort during his first eighteen months in office as a period of growing into his job.

It was the Emancipation Proclamation in September of , according to the modern view, that signals the disappearance of the novice Railsplitter and marks the emergence of the ultimate statesman — the Great Emancipator. This, however, was not the view at the time.

Evidence for The Unpopular Mr. Lincoln

The Chicago Times, for example, branded the Emancipation Proclamation "a monstrous usurpation, a criminal wrong, and an act of national suicide. While the Northern press howled, angry letters piled up on Lincoln's desk and spilled onto the floor.

Stoddard, the secretary in charge of reading Lincoln's mail, wrote: Witness, also, the litter on the floor and the heaped-up wastebaskets. There is no telling how many editors and how many other penmen within these past few days have undertaken to assure him that this is a war for the Union only, and that they never gave him any authority to run it as an Abolition war. They never, never told him that he might set the negroes free, and, now that he has done so, or futilely pretended to do so, he is a more unconstitutional tyrant and a more odious dictator than ever he was before.

They tell him, however, that his …. They tell him many other things, and, among them, they tell him that the army will fight no more, and that the hosts of the Union will indignantly disband rather than be sacrificed upon the bloody altar of fanatical Abolitionism.

When I finished the manuscript last year, I was really stunned. You made me want to read it. Jim Durney wrote this one. The review made me want to buy the book as well. Finding time to actually read it? Thanks to Jim Durney for taking the time to read the book and giving it such a wonderful review. Thanks to Brett Schulte for featuring it here. Let me know if I can do something for you guys. If you order directly from Savas Beatie not only will you get an autographed copy of this book, you can support your local Round Table.

Your donation will go toward supporting our organization and our donations toward battlefield preservation. Thank you for the kind words. I expected to like the book but was not ready for the impact it has. It forced me to see Lincoln in a new light and understand how he was seen during those years.

THE UNPOPULAR MR. LINCOLN: The Story of America's Most Reviled President | eBay

Notify me of followup comments via e-mail. Interview with Mac Wyckoff: May Civil War Book Notes. Savas Beatie May Language: James has written intriguing articles. Brett, Thank you for the kind words. Sorry to not credit you for it. Cancel reply Leave a Comment. Subscribe in a reader! This is not the history of Lincoln we were taught in public school. If I was a Lincoln nut, I suspect I might give it five stars. One person found this helpful. Lincoln" is Popular With Me. Lincoln," but cannot resist reviewing it because it is so damned timely.

The recent election season made it clear that no president in recent history, not Nixon, not Clinton, not G. Bush, has been as utterly despised and vilified as Mr. Obama, whose second-term victory has raised calls for secession in several states.

Only Abraham Lincoln could lay claim to such vituperative condemnation, the fact of which I still was only hazily aware until this book arrived. With meticulous, first-hand documentation, and vivid reportage, Mr.

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Tagg makes it clear that from the minute Lincoln arrived on the national stage, he was the object of unrelenting scorn, not only from the South, which DID secede, but from Northern Democrats, his own Republican party, even his own cabinet and Army generals, not to mention every newspaper editor. Lincoln arrived at the Presidency at a time when the office itself was at its lowest state of disrepute. He almost didn't survive the journey to his first Inaugural in , barely circumventing an open assassination plot in Baltimore. Arriving stealthily in Washington, he was pilloried for cowardice! I am halfway through this book, desperately and eagerly awaiting the "Mr.

This is by way of saying "The Unpopular Mr. Lincoln" is a real page-turner, a political thriller to rival any fiction. Since I'm only up to , I have given it a rating of four stars, reserving the fifth for the denouement. Maybe he'll dodge Booth's bullet this time. In any case, Barack Obama is in good company. This is a must-read. See all 21 reviews.

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