Book Review: Boss Lincoln, by Matthew Pinsker

 

Lincoln the Emancipator.

Lincoln the Liberator.

Lincoln the Martyr.

Lincoln the Republican.

Lincoln the Democrat.

Lincoln the Colonizer.

Lincoln the Traitor.

Lincoln the Southerner, Atheist, Compromiser, Racist, etc.

Our beloved, bellowed, hallowed, and hated Sixteenth President has endured a host of labels, from contemporaries to modern luminaries seeking to crystallize his legacy, for better or for the worse.

One of the most consequential, if not greatest presidents in our history, it’s no surprise that more books get published exploring the man, the myth, and the manifest destiny of this seminal figure of American history than any other.

Lincoln the politician is certainly well-known and well-read. If you want to make a difference in government, you have to get elected. Lincoln understood this obvious yet deceptively simple principle. Politics is the game if you want policy to hold your name.

Some negatives about Lincoln come from opportunists, some within his own party. Many have lingered from critical revisionists who have cast shade on his place in the presidential pantheon.

Yet one of the latest books written describing the inner and outer workings of this commanding president, one of his most plenary, extensive roles throughout his political life was: Lincoln the Party Organizer, Lincoln the Hoss, or, to quote Matthew Pinsker’s latest book:

Boss Lincoln

Taking a unique, quieter biographical tour (and tour de force) of our nation’s greatest President through the view of his political workings, Matthew Pinsker reveals to us the quiet yet profound underpinnings of Lincoln the party man, who wanted to broker then build a movement, starting with his adopted state of Illinois to the national party campaigns, that would end slavery while also making room for internal improvements and ending the Jacksonian “democracy” hold on American politics.

Lincoln was a boss, a political operative who knew that you had to pick your fights to win, and that he was willing to win every fight.

Pinsker’s work is a godsend also because, through reviewing the Illinois rail-splitter turned Whig turned anti-Nebraska fusionist turned Republican turned 16^th President, Pinsker documents extensively Lincoln’s true committed principles to ending slavery, despite craven revisionists attempt to recast his commitment to “All Men Are Created Equal” as a mere cynical afterthought.

He wasn’t just a mere moderator interested in stopping its spread. From early in his political career, who was committed to a nation that lived up to its founding creeds. Unlike the cynical portrayals of detractors and woke scolds, Lincoln was a measured, mature patriot, one who wanted to end slavery, but recognized the difficult political terrain determined to prevent that new birth of freedom.

Sadly, in Lincoln’s day, many voters were starting to sour on the fundamental premise—and promise—of the Declaration of Independence, that indeed All Men Are Created Equal. What sense did it make for the American public, and its government, to deprive men enslaved throughout the country of those same rights?

Pinsker’s work takes a look at Lincoln’s local, even arcane or rudimentary attention to politics: how Lincoln organized county and state conventions; how he networked with former and current lawmakers to hone and polish a clear and convincing political platform for the Whigs, then the anti-Nebraska factions oppose the spread of slavery via popular sovereignty, and finally the Republican Party. From the early 1840s, when he rode circuit as a federal attorney, then ran and served one term in Congress, Lincoln was committed to freedom under law before God for all men.

Pinsker also provides in depth review and reporting on the legislative horse-trading that took place to get allied US Senators elected for Illinois. Lincoln was a prime candidate in 1854 as well as 1858. He was enough of a team player, however, that he pulled strings and twisted arms for a decent anti-slavery Democrat (later Republican) Lyman Trumbull elected.

It’s important to remember, as Pinsker reminds his readers, that state legislators, not American voters, elected US Senators until passage of the 17^th Amendment. In order for a party to get their man, the state convention would nominate their preferred candidate—as a directive to legislators once they sat for their first legislative session. Party bosses and grassroots paid close attention to legislative races, ensuring that they could get a necessary majority across both houses and get their man into the US Senate seat.

 

Pinsker gives us a glimpse into vote-counting, electioneering, and the all-too-frequent fear that non-citizens would vote in key elections to turn. Pinsker’s commentary on Election 1858 was particularly revealing, detailing how Stephen Douglas, the incumbent Democratic US Senator facing re-election, was possibly positioning Irish immigrants from Chicago (who mostly voted Democratic) to move into Central and Southern Illinois, to help decide key state legislative races.

Illinois’ election integrity issues were not strong then (just as they fail now, certainly), and faithful Republican Bossman Lincoln warned state party leaders and local precinct captains to watch out for illegal voting! The issue which dominates our politics today consumed the party faithful of all parties over a century and a half ago, too!

Lincoln followed voter rolls, kept tabs on who voted which way from election to election, too. He worked with statewide maps, working hard to ensure Republican majorities in the state legislature come Election Day, 1858.

Lincoln’s commitment not just to principle, but to practical application and pragmatic approach, are underappreciated as well as commendable. It’s no surprise that this “Dark Horse” candidate in the 1860 GOP Convention at the Wigwam scored an upset nomination victory, then took the White House in November For decades, Lincoln played an effective team player, supporting other presidential aspirants with due diligence during his political journey from Whig to Republican, from Henry Clay to John C. Fremont, with no shabby interest in his own well-being or ambition. Throughout his account, Pinsker recognizes Lincoln’s ambition, yet even the failed legislative candidate, House candidate, and US Senate candidate conceded that despite his political will, the way to higher office didn’t seem manifest, until it did, at just the right time.

Pinsker’s review of Lincoln’s wise yet subtle political calculations, from assembling his cabinet, to assigning military duties and appointing generals, reveal how the political calculations of a small-time party-boss from Sangamon County (a county which he would never win as President) had forged him into the necessary, essential, and irreplaceable leader who doggedly fought to keep the Union together precisely by focusing on the moral and political necessity of abolishing slavery.

Pinsker enlivens an otherwise dry, oft-ignored academic subject. Pinsker reviews and responds to the marginal political notes and subtle posturing and policy-making of Lincoln in his early days, then weaves together a compelling account which enhances the myth of the man, while also showing the humble means of a rail-splitting railroad attorney who had sustained multiple political losses would build a strong and enduring Republican Party and become the 16^th President of the United States.

If the machine of politics interests you, this book is a “boss” of a read.

If you enjoyed Spielberg’s film Lincoln, you will definitely enjoy reading Boss Lincoln.

Even if you care little or know nothing about politics, Pinsker’s detailed account of Lincoln the Boss will guide you without losing your way.

Letter to the Editor: Southerns Were Fined After the Civil War

Here's another letter in response to my Townhall.com article on Reparations:

During Reconstruction, Southerners were required to pay their share of federal taxes for sizable budget items that if funded by an independent defeated foe would have constituted reparations. For example, after World War II, Germany and Japan were not required to pay any part of the interest expense on US war bonds, or any portion of the federal benefits to US war veterans. In contrast, after the Civil War Southerners had to pay their share of such costs in the form of federal taxes.

More than half of federal tax revenues for at least the first twenty years after the war were applied to three items: (1) interest on the federal debt, (2) budget surpluses, and (3) veterans’ benefits. Although compelled to pay their portion of taxes to fund them, Southerners derived virtually no benefit from the three budget items.

One way Southerners were essentially fined after the war was in the payment of interest on federal debts. While nearly all federal-debt bondholders were Northerners, Southerners who held debts of the Rebel states or the Confederacy collected no interest because the Thirteenth Amendment repudiated their claims. Moreover, interest on federal debt had to be paid in specie, as opposed to greenbacks, which traded at a discount to specie. Therefore, the amount of taxes paid in greenbacks to meet the interest obligation was a larger sum than the interest paid in the form of specie. The differential was an extra cost to the taxpayer, but a bonus to the bondholder.

A second way that postwar Southerners were penalized was in the redemption of federal debts. Budget surpluses after the war were mostly used to pay down such debt. Nearly all the federal bonds representing that debt were sold during the Civil War as the US national debt increased more than forty-fold, from $65 million to nearly $2.7 billion. Most bonds were purchased with greenbacks that traded at discounts to specie of as much as 60 percent. By 1869, the remaining debt was $2.5 billion, and Congress gave bondholders a windfall by requiring that bonds be repaid at par in specie, as opposed to greenbacks. Surpluses were also set aside to redeem greenbacks at face value for specie after 1875, even though greenbacks could have been purchased for as little as forty cents on the dollar in summer 1864. Few Southerners held greenbacks at the end of the war because it was a federal currency.

A third way Southerners were disadvantaged for decades after the war was in the manner of financing the budget surpluses used to retire federal Civil War debt. The surpluses were funded by protective tariffs that generated more income than necessary to operate the federal government. Dutiable items were taxed at about 45 percent. The purpose of the excess was to restrict competition for domestic producers, almost none of which were located in the South. It was a form of corporate welfare that remained in place until Woodrow Wilson became president in 1913.

Protective tariffs were injurious to farmers, white and black, who sold primarily to export markets, which were intensely competitive and where prices could not be artificially inflated by US government fiat. Moreover, American tariffs motivated Europeans to buy cotton from India, Brazil, West Africa, and Egypt, where they could more competitively export their own manufactured goods to pay for the fiber. Such diversion of European buyers away from US growers was detrimental to Southern cotton farmers.

One annoyed victim of Reconstruction-era US tariffs was Georges Clemenceau, who became the French prime minister during World War I. While working as a correspondent for a French newspaper in New York, he wrote, “Protectionism is rampant in [the United States]. . . . People have been made to pay ridiculous prices for articles of primary necessity.” Perhaps after observing the impotence of Southerners’ objections to federal budget and taxing policies punitive to their region, he was influenced to later insist on German reparations after World War I. If so, it led to disastrous German leadership consequences after the Weimar Republic was bankrupted and the Nazis gained control.

A fourth way postwar Southerners bore a discriminatory burden was in the use of their federal taxes to pay for Union veteran pensions. Because they were in rebellion against the central government, logically no Confederate soldiers received a federal pension. Ex-Rebel soldiers could collect pensions from their respective states only. Although Southern states quickly enacted aid programs to primarily benefit disabled veterans after the war ended, few had much money for such purposes for years to come.

While some might question whether several budget items not mentioned above could have disproportionately benefitted the South, such items were either vanishingly small or funded by taxes paid by Southerners themselves. Two examples are the Freedmen’s Bureau, which was nearly triple funded by a discriminatory tax on cotton, and the underbalanced public works spending in the South. Additionally, the great majority of spending not delineated above was for military defense and the Post Office. For example, in a typical year like fiscal 1870, over 83 percent of tax revenues went for interest on debt, surplus, defense, veterans’ benefits, and the Post Office. None of those expenditures benefitted Southerners except for a small portion of the Post Office and defense outlays.

For eight years after the war, despite their greater needs, all of the states of the former Confederacy combined received less than 10% of federal public works spending. Massachusetts and New York got more than twice as much public works investment as all of the former Confederate states. Over that period the cotton tax alone generated revenues that were more than seven times the amount of public works investment in the South.

In sum, the readmitted former Confederate states were treated as an exploited internal colony of the Union. Aside from the damaging tariffs and taxes-as-reparations, historian David Cohn summarized:

The agrarian South had been delivered over to non-agrarian interests, and had become a satellite of the banking industrial Northeast. And the already burdened cotton farmers were to bear heavier burdens in the future. They could complain in vain . . . of railroad rates that crippled them, of gouging by trusts and combines operating in cottonseed oil, jute bagging, farm implements, and other adversities. They might work hard, live meanly, and die in poverty to pass on to [future generations] the apparently irrevocable estate of poverty.

In retrospect, the defeated Confederate states may have fared better as a British colony, like Canada, which was then known as British North America. The slaves would have been freed because slavery was outlawed throughout the British Empire in 1833. The Southern states could have purchased manufactured goods at much lower prices because Britain was a proponent of low tariffs. Southern farmers could have exported freely to Europe without fear that Europeans might shop elsewhere in retaliation for high American tariffs. Within twenty-five years after the American Civil War, the British Empire evolved into the Commonwealth of Nations following a culmination of increasingly cooperative commerce among its members, which also would have benefitted the Confederacy had it been a Commonwealth member.

Philip Leigh

Tampa, Florida 

Trump vs. Chief Justice John Roberts: Trump is in the Right

President Trump recently slammed the “Obama Judge” who stuck down his order to block the mobile mob along (which media have called “the migrant caravan) the United States’ southern border. In a rare move, United States Supreme Court Justice John Roberts rebuked the President for his criticism of the federal judiciary:

"We do not have Obama judges or Trump judges, Bush judges or Clinton judges. What we have is an extraordinary group of dedicated judges doing their level best to do equal right to those appearing before them. That independent judiciary is something we should all be thankful for."

It’s understandable that the Chief Justice wants to counter any disparaging condemnation that independent judges have gone rogue. Certainly, no one wants to believe that one branch of government has abandoned its responsibility to impartial governance.

However, that’s exactly what is happening under the Trump Administration: social justice activism from the bench. Federal judges write their orders imposing sweeping outcomes, the rule of law and supremacy of the United States Constitution be damned! No one should delude themselves into believing that the federal court system is rigorously, unabashedly transparent and unbiased. John Roberts’ unforced error on forced judicial activism has opened up the much-needed debate.

Trump rightly punched back:

Sorry Chief Justice John Roberts, but you do indeed have “Obama judges,” and they have a much different point of view than the people who are charged with the safety of our country … We need protection and security.

The President of the United States is not just chief executive to enforce the law, but he is charged with the supreme responsibility of protecting the rights of citizens and securing our nation’s borders from foreign invasion. Progressive attorneys and liberal judges need to revisit Article Four, Section Four of the United States Constitution if they have a problem with the President’s role.

Indeed, many of these judges are acting like “Obama judges” (not just the ones appointed by Obama): desperate progressives shoring up a Big Government, anti-constitutional legacy at all costs. President Trump has been repeatedly frustrated and delayed because of this rogue judicial supremacy. Trump issued the exact same travel ban as Obama, relying on the previous order, which targeted the same countries; yet Trump faced months of litigation as lower courts aided and abetted the legal version of “The Resistance”. All of this legal posturing is about re-litigating and defying Trump’s 2016 victory, and it’s nothing short of sickening.

This encroachment of the courts against executive power is not a new concern, either.

During the first months of the Civil War, President Abraham Lincoln engaged in so-called extra-legal measures in order to save the country. He conscripted an army without Congressional approval, and he suspended habeas corpus (a legal right which requires that an arrested party to be brought before a judge to determine whether they should be detained or released) in Maryland. Virginia had already seceded from the Union, and if Maryland broke away, too, the federal seat of government in Washington DC would have faced siege from all sides.

The United States Supreme Court formally intervened in 1861. Slave-owning Chief Justice (and Democrat) Roger Taney ruled against Lincoln’s suspension of habeas corpus in Ex Parte Merryman. The very partisan justice contended that the President had no authority to hold individuals indefinitely during times of war. However, Article 1, Section 9, Clause 2 of the United States Constitution clearly outlines that the habeas corpus writ can be suspended during such times of national crisis. In the end, Lincoln ignored the corrupt ruling which had interfered with his legal executive authority. President Trump should consider following Lincoln’s example and disregard the decision undercutting President Trump’s order to suspend asylum rules for the greater good of the country.

Yet there’s more to Trump’s bold defiance to Chief Justice Robert’s brazen, unjustified defense of the so-called independent judiciary.

Indeed, we have Obama judges, and even judges before that, who have become comfy and arrogant in their power. They are issuing widespread rulings to impose their views on how the world should work, what the government should get away with, and not get away with, and how the United States Constitution can mean whatever they want it to. Enumerated powers has turned into expanded judicial tyranny, and it’s hurting our country.

This progressive impulse afflicts federal judges of all rankings and background, whether installed by Republicans or Democrats. Power tends to corrupt, and absolutely power in the hands of life-long judicial appoints has corrupted a once-august institution deemed to serve as a check and balance against government overreach.

John Roberts has no right to talk. When Obama publicly chastised the United States Supreme Court for the Citizens United decision, Roberts said nothing. He upheld Obamacare’s individual mandate, even though it clearly violated the interstate commerce clause of the United States Constitution. Roberts even joined with the bare majority to strike down the duly approved and enacted initiative process when the state of California clearly defined marriage as between one man and one woman.

Furthermore, contrary to Roberts’ partisan assertion, Trump did not attack the independence of the judiciary, but rather he attacked its clearly un-independent, incessantly partisan, anti-constitutional record—and he’s right to do so. Unlike the unelected, unaccountable elites in our country, Trump says what many of us are thinking, and without reserve or recrimination.

Indeed, we have an Obama-nized judiciary, one which seeks to fundamentally transform this country, ignoring the Constitution and upending the civil republicanism envisioned by the Framers. Fortunately, President Trump has a more constitutionally conservative Senator majority at his disposal for the next years. This majority ensures the rapid confirmation of constitutionalist jurists who will not only slow down but reverse the judicial tyranny tearing our country apart. While conservatives await the timely retirement of Ruth Bader Ginsburg, they should welcome John Roberts’ removal. Trump is making America Great Again, but that includes making the Supreme Court Constitutional Again, a reform which the some of members defiantly resist.

Andrew Johnson: Our Worst President?

                        

I had to share my thoughts on this segment on CBS' "Sunday Morning".

Was Andrew Johnson one of the worst Presidents in our nation's history? Not at all. He was a Democrat who supported the union but was not a fervent abolitionist. He was also a drunk and appeared in public inebriated.

He vetoed legislation which would protect the natural rights of freed slaves. He also removed the 40 acres and a mule accorded to black slaves once set free.

Johnson was a Democrat, but the Republican supermajorities in Congress overrode every one of those vetoes. They then tried to remove him from office because of his violation of the Tenure of Office Act, a piece of legislation which turned out to be legislative overreach into the powers and prerogatives of the executive branch. The law basically required that the President needed the approval of Congress to remove members of his cabinet. Such a law was unconstitutional, and Johnson disregarded it, then the Congress tried to remove him from office through impeachment and then trial in the US Senate.

Johnson barely survived, removal, by just one vote.

It's hard to believe, but after the Civil War legislative supremacy was a growing concern, and Johnson stood against the abuse and diminution of the executive branch's power and authorities.

Still, nothing justifies his racist views against black freedmen, and many liberals need to understand that Lincoln brought a Union Democrat onto his 1864 ticket because he needed to win re-election to ensure that he could finish the war and ensure the end of slavery. Also, Lincoln needed to a fusion ticket to bring in wayward Republicans and Democrats who would fight to preserve the union, which would furnish and complete the fight to end slavery.

Trump Plays Cryin' Chuck and Alzheimer's Nancy--Again

Bill Mitchell looks on the bright side all the time with President Trump.

He is not afraid to trumpet good news, even when it looks like the President has taken a bad turn or made a poor decision:

So, did the President make a YUGE mistake reaching out to the Democrats?

Well, let's recall what happened to Alzheimer's Nancy when she hosted a press conference about the "Dreamers" in San Francisco earlier this week:

Eek!

Check it out: the "Dreamers" have become the Democratic Party's nightmare.

Can you imagine how these illegals must feel, knowing that the Democratic Party has been taking these "kids" for a ride, only using them as political foils for their perverse little power plays?

Yep ... and President Trump took advantage of the newly-created weakness overwhelming the corrupt, dishonest Democratic Party.

Bill Mitchell called it (although I had written about it, too!):

By negotiating with Nancy and Chuck, Trump weakened them with their far left activist and donor base.

— Bill Mitchell (@mitchellvii) September 22, 2017

Ouch!

The badly-damaged Democratic Party just got worse!