Must-Read: : A Springfield Education: “The Political Life of Abraham Lincoln: A Self-Made Man, 1809-1849 by Sidney Blumenthal
Simon & Schuster, 576 pp….
…This is a splendid book, and on a Lincolnian theme—the political Lincoln—that was in sagging need of a facelift…. Lincoln so closely resembled the Manchester School of Richard Cobden and John Bright that people spoke of Cobden as the British Lincoln, and Lincoln kept on his office mantelpiece a lithograph of Bright. Lincoln had had entirely too much of governmental intervening, over and over again, to protect the interests of slaveholders to find much charm in a government-directed economy….
Blumenthal’s work of building the context for Lincoln’s political activism in the presidential elections of 1836 through 1848 is a miracle of detail and his six chapters on Lincoln as a congressman in antebellum Washington are worth the price of the book alone. Blumenthal continually reminds us of what happened next door, as in this single ominous sentence: ‘Eight days after [Charles] Sumner was bludgeoned nearly to death, Lincoln stood on the stage at Bloomington to found the Illinois Republican Party.’ Never have we had such an exquisite warp of the ins and outs of political life in the 1830s and ’40s laid across the weft of Lincoln’s individual trajectory.
Rarely has a Lincoln biographer come to his task with such elegance of style…. Here is a great book, on a theme that too many people disdain to regard as great. That they are wrong about the theme, and wrong about Lincoln, is the burden of Blumenthal’s labor, and no one can come away from reading A Self-Made Man without understanding that, or without eagerly anticipating the ensuing volumes.