Of course, we prefer to remember Lincoln the Statesman rather than Lincoln the Politician. Statecraft embodies nobility of purpose, shrewdness of insight, and prudential management of public affairs. But we are not doing sufficient justice to either Lincoln or ourselves if we forget how very much Lincoln was a career politician, in the fullest sense of the word. “Politics were his life,” insisted his longtime law partner, William Henry Herndon, “and his great ambition his motive power.” His confidence in his own judgment sometimes reached the borders of arrogance, and when John Hay tried to show him articles in the journals of the day “on some special subject,” Lincoln dismissed him out of hand: “I know more about it that any of them.”
It also does no justice to either Lincoln or ourselves to ignore the Politician, if only because in a democracy, politics is precisely what makes the world go round. Politics is universally tedious, routinely self-interested, and frequently corrupt, but in a polity where the citizenry are the sovereigns, there is no escaping it. So we can be grateful that Matthew Pinsker, who teaches at Dickinson College in Pennsylvania, has at last frankly told us the story of Boss Lincoln, and in much of its massively democratic details.
Party organization was Lincoln’s life, Pinsker states at the outset, and in particular Lincoln was “a party builder,” with a “particular talent for party management,” something which “was the driving force in his political career.” This was no small task in Lincoln’s America, since political parties had only the most rudimentary official structures and, what is even more difficult to imagine, no registration lists, voter surveys, or professional staffs. In Lincoln’s day, one did not actually join a party; one identified with, or affiliated with, a party. Party labor and loyalty were rewarded with patronage; party information was disseminated by newspapers whose editors never blinked in the direction of something called “journalistic objectivity.” He may not entirely have been a boss in the wicked sense associated with William Tweed or Richard J. Daley, but he was a politician to his fingertips.
And Lincoln loved every minute of it. His law practice paid the bills, but it was also valuable for earning him voter visibility across Illinois. He drew up precinct and municipal strategy plans, and the two political mobilization plans which survive in his hand (from 1840 and 1843) show he was quite adept at “how to create effective county-level committees … raise funds, and even preserve local harmony.” He expected patronage rewards, and at one point even bought part-ownership in a German-language newspaper in Illinois to influence immigrant voters. He did not like to lose, and in 1848 he walked away from Henry Clay, the man he called his “beau ideal of a statesman,” and endorsed the vaguer but more successful presidential bid of the unmemorable Zachary Taylor. “The election for him,” Pinsker remarks, “was about winning.”
Tuesday, April 28, 2026
Lincoln the Politician
