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Summary
Summary
An awkward first meeting with U.S. Army officers, on the eve of the Civil War. A conversation on the White House portico with a young cavalry sergeant who was a fiercely dedicated abolitionist. A tense exchange on a navy ship with a Confederate editor and businessman. In this eye-opening book, Elizabeth Brown Pryor examines six intriguing, mostly unknown encounters that Abraham Lincoln had with his constituents. Taken together, they reveal his character and opinions in unexpected ways, illustrating his difficulties in managing a republic and creating a presidency. Pryor probes both the political demons that Lincoln battled in his ambitious exercise of power and the demons that arose from the very nature of democracy itself- the clamorous diversity of the populace, with its outspoken demands. She explores the trouble Lincoln sometimes had in communicating and in juggling the multiple concerns that make up being a political leader; how conflicted he was over the problem of emancipation; and the misperceptions Lincoln and the South held about each other. Pryor also provides a fascinating discussion of Lincoln?s fondness for storytelling and how he used his skills as a raconteur to enhance both his personal and political power. Based on scrupulous research that draws on hundreds of eyewitness letters, diaries, and newspaper excerpts, Six Encounters with Lincoln offers a fresh portrait of Lincoln as the beleaguered politician who was not especially popular with the people he needed to govern with, and who had to deal with the many critics, naysayers, and dilemmas he faced without always knowing the right answer. What it shows most clearly is that greatness was not simply laid on Lincoln?s shoulders like a mantle, but was won in fits and starts.
Reviews (4)
Publisher's Weekly Review
The late historian and diplomat Pryor (Reading the Man) left behind a manuscript that will cinch her legacy as a creative scholar. She uses six little-known interactions between American citizens and President Lincoln-either individually or in groups-as a means to parse the president's thoughts on important political issues. What makes the encounters particularly fascinating is that the participants recorded them at the time, so they remain uncolored by the sentimentality of post-assassination remembrance. Pryor is intrigued by the ways in which the encounters demonstrate how Lincoln "both responded to and helped shape a new way of looking at democratic inclusion, not necessarily because he wanted to but because he had to." An uncomfortable meeting between U.S. Army officers and their new commander-in-chief in March 1861 serves as an exploration of Lincoln's abilities as a military leader. The recounting of a nearly botched flag-raising during the christening of a new Marine bandstand launches a meditation on what Lincoln's storytelling abilities meant for his presidency. Meetings with the Cherokee leader John Ross and the writer Harriet Beecher Stowe show the president profoundly uncomfortable around people who weren't white men. Pryor's impressive final book will be of great appeal to legions of Lincoln aficionados. Illus. Agent: Deborah Grosvenor, Grosvenor Literary. (Feb.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Booklist Review
Historian Pryor died tragically in an automobile accident in 2015 but had completed this book before her death. The premise offers an interesting take on biography: to profile a famous historical figure through a series of encounters with different and relatively unknown individuals. Each ""encounter"" spins off into a thematically focused chapter on various topics, including race and emancipation. A recurring theme is the president's ambivalence about his role as chief executive. Despite the book's title, none of the six chapters is limited to one encounter, but the method of showing the influence of these random meetings and conversations on the president's approach to key issues does provide a compelling structure. The encounter with the educated Cherokee chief John Ross influenced Lincoln's dealings with Native Americans; those with Harriet Beecher Stowe, Clara Barton, and others had a similar effect on his attitude toward issues concerning women, with whom Lincoln was grievously uncomfortable. In all, Pryor hones in on the essential Lincoln, focusing on his endearing quirkiness, his storytelling proclivity, and his hayseed wit (well and embarrassingly recounted).--Mark Levine Copyright 2018 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
AT A MOMENT when questions about the efficacy of democracy are on everyone's lips, this book eerily reflects some of today's key issues. Among them are the military's part in domestic policy; the protections appropriate to noncitizens (in Lincoln's case, Native Americans); the limits of female citizenship; the meaning of free speech; and states' rights to contravene personal liberty. Abraham Lincoln confronted these and other issues during his tenure as president, often choosing between expanding democratic potential and adhering to constitutional mandates. Deploying humor as a weapon, Lincoln emerges from the history books as a benign and democratic figure, ultimately a champion of slave emancipation. A different Lincoln inhabits the pages of "Six Encounters With Lincoln." Here we meet the skilled raconteur whose tales promote vacillation, and whose humor disguises costly indecision and delay. Many of his contemporaries labeled him cowardly and vulgar, an illegitimate ruler and despot. Elizabeth Brown Pryor, the author of two previous Civil War-era biographies, sees him as none of these, and yet she has produced a portrait of a president whose failures to act often undermine the democratic ideals and the moral values to which he claims commitment. Uncertainty manifested itself in a complicated stance, sometimes fostering democracy and at others sticking to the letter of the Constitution. Convinced that states had a right to determine their economic and social priorities, Lincoln debated the use of military force to coerce recalcitrant states to remain in the Union. He wavered only when states' rights threatened national unity. But once decided, he acted unilaterally to increase the size of the Army without elucidating lines of command. From that followed Lincoln's dragging his feet on the issue of slave emancipation because he hoped that he could bring the South back into the Union with compromise rather than military victory. The dilemma inherent in using force to ensure liberty emerged most starkly in loyal border states that continued to legitimize slave owning. To ensure their commitment to the Union, Lincoln simply turned a blind eye, dashing the democratic aspirations of thousands of enslaved people. In other instances, Lincoln did not hesitate to curtail constitutional rights in the interests of an initially controversial war. He famously ignored habeas corpus, claiming the right to seize suspicious individuals in wartime, and he attempted to control flows of information: acts that placed him at odds with the principle of safeguarding informed criticism in a democratic society. Nor did Lincoln imagine extending democracy to N ative Americans or to women. Pryor tells us that the greatest contradiction he faced was between the ideal of democracy and prevailing negative views of Indians. Like others of his generation, he thought all men were created equal except for Indians and women. He did not hesitate to abrogate Indian treaties, though he sometimes expressed concern for Indian life. He consistently rebuffed or denigrated women's efforts to participate in wartime activities, rarely acknowledging even their heroic work as nurses. Pryor died in 2015, and so she could have hardly intended this posthumously published book to suggest any parallels between Lincoln's ambivalent politics and contemporary efforts to limit suffrage, spread fake news and eliminate federal efforts to protect the civil rights of women, African-Americans and the poorest wage earners. Yet the notion that democracy involves compromises resonates today. Lincoln's dilemmas illuminate how apparently benign federal mandates - like universal health care, paid maternity leave or federal land acquisition - that seem on their face to extend democratic possibilities, can be viewed from within state borders as coercive. Fascinating reading on its own terms, "Six Encounters With Lincoln" nevertheless confronts readers with startlingly relevant questions. ALICE KESSLER-HARRIS, the R. Gordon Hoxie professor emerita of history at Columbia University, is editing a book with Maurizio Vaudagna called "Democracy and the Welfare State."
Library Journal Review
Pryor (Reading the Man) does the impossible in this insightful, lucid book by teaching us something new about 16th U.S. President Abraham Lincoln (1809-65). Using new primary sources that reveal personal encounters with the president, the author points to the ambitions and partisanship that drove Lincoln throughout his life and the often contradictory, conflicted, and convulsive politics and problems of a democracy beset by overbearing self interests, weak federal institutions, vainglorious men, and incompetent military leadership. Pryor scores Lincoln for his constricted understanding of military matters, bungling of the Fort Sumter crisis, misreading of supposed Southern Unionism, and sometimes unprincipled partisanship, among other failures. She argues that Lincoln did not grow into and remake the presidency as many scholars have insisted, and that his speeches belied his inability to communicate clearly and effectively. The man Pryor reimagines is at once complicated, conflicted, and consequential. VERDICT One might argue that by pulling away the shroud of sanctification that covered Lincoln after his assassination, Pryor sees only what those with a passing acquaintance of Lincoln knew. However, she successfully provides insight into a man who revealed and represented the imperfections, imperatives, and possibilities of a democratic people.-Randall M. Miller, St. Joseph's Univ., Philadelphia © Copyright 2017. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Excerpts
Excerpts
1. A WARY HANDSHAKE Of course it was a dismal day. The sky was as leaden as the national mood. Washington, D.C., had suffered incessant storms that winter, and on March 12, 1861, the roads were sticky with mud from the latest squall. Nervous residents could not help comparing the gloomy weather to the turbulent politics threatening the country. Seven Southern states had left the Union since the election of Abraham Lincoln, forming a new Confederate States of America. The outgoing Buchanan administration had only halfheartedly defended federal property against the secessionists, and efforts to find a peaceful resolution to the crisis were faltering. Now it appeared that the new government was following the same uncertain path. "We are a weak, divided, disgraced people, unable to maintain our national existence," the Republican magnat eGeorge Templeton Strong wrote in alarm. The New York Herald agreed. It was a "deplorable state of affairs," complained its editors. "All joy, all hope, is fled." Against this dreary backdrop a curious apparition appeared about midday. At the stolid, neoclassical War Department a large group of military officers in full-dress uniform was assembling, their gold-crested buttons and vivid sashes piercing the dull light. Falling into two columns, they lined up behind Secretary of War Simon Cameron and Lieutenant General Winfield Scott, the Army's venerable chieftain. In perfect formation, they marched to the Executive Mansion along the tree-lined footpath that connected the two buildings. At the door Scott himself solemnly rang the bell. The United States Army had come to call on its new commander in chief. By one count, seventy-eight men paraded into the East Room. Such a large group overfilled the space and they began to snake around the perimeter in an undulating line. The officers were resplendent in dark blue frock coats, tall patent leather boots, gilt scabbards, and black-plumed hats. Set against the shabby yellow wallcovering of the "nation's parlor," their presence was all the more splendid. It was a "spectacular exhibition," noted one of the company; another observert hought he had "never seen an equal number of such fine-looking men in uniform." They stood at attention, kid-gloved fingers lightly pressing the stripes of their trousers, silently awaiting the President. After a few moments, Lincoln entered, accompanied by several cabinet members. Some officers had been influenced by newspaper accounts to expect an afternoon of jesting,and now they were surprised. The man before them was as clumsy as his descriptions, but his face was deadly serious. The new president had good reason to be grave. Since taking the oath of office on March 4, he had been confronted with multiple crises, sometimes on an hourly basis. Two days into the job, Lincoln learned that the Confederate Congress had called out 100,000 troops to protect its territory. The attorney general and the secretary of war had just informed him that there was no legal way to stop the shipments of arms reportedly being rushed to Charleston, New Orleans, and nearby Baltimore. Samuel Cooper, a New Yorker who had served for a decade as adjutant general of the Army, left his post on March 6 and headed straight forthe Confederate capital--taking with him detailed knowledge of personnel, matériel, and federal intentions. On March 11 the rebel government adopted a constitution containing elaborate legal justifications for a separate nation. Adelegation from that "nation" was in Washington at the moment, underinstruction to establish "diplomatic ties." Humiliation was in the air, asfederal institutions unraveled and Southern sympathizers sniggered over everything from congressional defections to the disappearance of patent files. Worse yet, the country was broke. When Buchanan's treasury secretary Howell Cobb followed his native state of Georgia out of the Union, he left the nation bankrupt. Most pressing was the question of whether to withdraw United States forces from Fort Sumter in Charleston harbor. This crisis had been transferred to Lincoln just hours after his inauguration. Since his election, occupation of the fortress had beenan emotional flashpoint: a contest between the South's angry belief that it was no longer governed by consent and Northern determination to protect Union prerogatives and Union property. On March 5 the War Department received a letter from the officer in charge of the garrison, Major Robert Anderson, stating that provisions were nearly exhausted and that Confederate leaders were blockading the harbor, forcing a showdown. Lincoln would have to reinforce the fort or retreat, with all the symbolism that implied. The news came as a shock, for Lincoln had wanted to move slowly, to buy time, allay passions, and reassure nervous Unionists south of the Mason-Dixon Line. As president-elect he had tried to downplay the crisis, terming it "artificial" and claiming there was "nothing going wrong." Once he realized that something was going terribly wrong, andthat matters had moved beyond cool reflection, he hoped the separatist fervorwould burn itself out. His deliberative political style would prove a handicap,as every day the situation in Charleston became more perilous. While Lincolntemporized, South Carolina strengthened its defenses. Anderson told hissuperiors he needed twenty thousand soldiers to defend the fort, a numberlarger than the entire standing army. Now he impatiently awaited thePresident's reply. "I thought the policy of this new admins. would have beendeveloped by this time," he complained the day before the Army reception,adding that Lincoln's promise to "put the foot down firmly" against secession appearedeasier said than done. In fact, the President was getting a swift lesson inthe difference between a campaigner's offhand remarks and the grimresponsibility of actually leading the nation through perilous times. Thedilemma had paralyzed his predecessor--though Buchanan later claimed he hadstood ready to support Anderson, if only he had been asked. No matter howmeek--or even traitorous--Buchanan's inaction seemed, Lincoln now found himselfhesitating in just the same manner. "Is it possible that Mr. Lincoln is getting scared[?]" wrote an influential Illinoisan. "I know the responsibility isgrate; But for god sake . . . I don't want to bequeath this damnable questionto any posterity." The Sumter situation was particularly tricky, for it was not just a question of defending a fort or robustly exerting executive authority. It was coupled with an urgent need to keep those slave states that straddled North and South in the Union.These "border states" included Missouri, the President's native Kentucky, andthe entire region surrounding the nation's capital. Of these, Virginia was mostsignificant, not only because of its proximity to Washington, but in terms of size, industrial output, and prestige. Maryland, whose communication lineslinked the government to the rest of the nation, was also of criticalimportance. The ties that attached these states to the Union were fraying inMarch 1861, and their leaders made clear that any "coercion" against the Southwould result in those bonds being cut completely. The tension between these two issues--the need to restore confidence in the border states,yet firmly uphold federal laws and national dignity--had, in fact, been a theme of Lincoln's inaugural address. That had been a tense day, the proceedingsclouded by rumors of Confederate insurrection or attempted assassination.General Scott had summoned all his imposing powers to ensure the newpresident's safety, calling up hundreds of troops to guard the Capitol groundsand personally commanding the sharpshooters placed on adjacent roofs. Lincolnwas not yet master of simple, compelling statements, and his long messageattempted to placate hostility on all sides, while conceding nothing. Despitean emotional appeal to the shared history that bound together the Americanpeople, the laboriously crafted address received a mixed response, both Northand South. "Never did an oracle, in its most evasive response, receive so many,and such various interpretations, as did the President's inaugural," observedthe New York Times. Within the military it sparked general dismay. "MrLincolns inaugural came to day," wrote an officer named William T. H. Brooks,who was stationed in Texas. "If it can appease or quiet the troubled waters itmust bear a different interpretation from what I can give it." At Fort Sumter,officers saw little in the speech to resolve either their dilemma or thenation's. "We have just received the inaugural and from it we derive no hope atall that there will be any peaceful settlement," wrote Assistant Surgeon SamuelWylie Crawford, despairing that "so many qualifications" in the President'swords would undermine the address's impact. Soldiers wanted to hear a simpledeclaration of intent, but this speech smacked of equivocation. "A steel handin a soft glove" was how Major Samuel Heintzelman described it, a few daysbefore stepping into the East Room to greet the President. "I fear it will leadto Civil War." The Sumter issue pressed on Lincoln to the point that he was physically ill, losing sleep and suffering chronic headaches. Before the end of that tempestuous March, his wife reported he had keeled over from worry and fatigue. One of his aides referred to those days as "the terrible furnace time," when public anxiety was stoked to the limit, and old patterns of governing melted away in the political fire. Lincoln wanted desperately to avoid appearing as stymied as Buchanan yet found himself unable to formulate a decisive policy. He later told Orville Hickman Browning, a Republican ally, that all the "troubles and anxieties of his life had not equaled" those he faced during the Sumter crisis. Excerpted from Six Encounters with Lincoln: A President Confronts Democracy and Its Demons by Elizabeth Brown Pryor All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.Table of Contents
| Foreword | p. vii |
| Note to the Reader | p. xiii |
| Introduction | p. 1 |
| 1 A Wary Handshake | p. 11 |
| 2 Pfunny Pface | p. 65 |
| 3 Two Emancipators Meet | p. 119 |
| 4 Of Fathers and Sons | p. 153 |
| 5 Hell-Cats | p. 213 |
| 6 The Hollow Crown | p. 269 |
| 7 Epilogue to the Hollow Crown Lincoln and Shakespeare | p. 329 |
| Abbreviations | p. 337 |
| Notes | p. 339 |
| Bibliography | p. 413 |
| Illustration Credits | p. 463 |
| Index | p. 465 |