“Seward had all the money and Seward had all the bullies. Lincoln didn’t have money or bullies, but by God, he had the people.” — Jonathan Earle
Yesterday, Kurt Andersen fictionalized a 21st-century broken America without an Abe Lincoln as savior. Today we talk about the man himself with Jonathan Earle, author of He Has the People, a new history of the 1860 election that made Lincoln president and probably saved the then young Republic.
Earle’s mission is to bring Lincoln down from Mount Rushmore. He tells the story of a flesh-and-blood politician, a six-foot-four autodidact who, in 1859, was barely known outside Illinois. What changed everything was John Brown’s raid on Harpers Ferry in October 1859. Lincoln recognized as much, spending the winter in the archives of the State Library of Illinois, then delivering a speech at Cooper Union that won over the New York media. Then onto the Republican convention in Chicago where the wily Lincoln ran rings around the establishment candidate William Henry Seward.
In 1860, Abe Lincoln became Lincoln. The rest is history. He Has the People should be required reading for both obscure Republicans and Democrats planning to run for president in a fatally divided election. Earle suspects that 2028 might be as historic as 1860. Perhaps it will deliver another politician with the wit and wisdom to bring a broken America together. Somebody who, like Abe, has the people.
Five Takeaways
• Before Abe Was Lincoln. Earle’s stated mission: take Lincoln off Mount Rushmore and out of the throne Daniel Chester French sculpted, and restore the flesh-and-blood politician — “among the canniest politicians our country has produced, maybe the planet.” The pre-marble Lincoln: born in an actual Kentucky log cabin, wholly self-taught (favorite book: Euclid), the first genuinely Western president, six-foot-four when most men stood five-eight, a storyteller who learned politics riding the Illinois judicial circuit — breaking bread and sharing mattresses with judges and rival counsel — his ambition, in his law partner’s famous phrase, a little engine that knew no rest. In 1859 he was barely known outside Illinois, a one-term ex-congressman regarded as vice-presidential material at best — the Jon Ossoff of his day, Earle suggests: making noise, not yet a name. Americans declare every election the most important in history; Earle’s answer is the book’s premise: hold on — it’s not 1860.
• The 9/11 Before the Election. For decades both parties buried slavery beneath compromises — 1820, 1850 — until a tiny, hated minority of abolitionists forced the question. Then John Brown and twenty-one followers seized the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry in October 1859, intending to arm the enslaved (a plan so improvised, Earle notes, that Brown didn’t bring lunch). The raid detonated inside a presidential campaign — as if 9/11 had preceded the 2000 election, or Pearl Harbor come before FDR’s 1940 reelection — and it scrambled the chessboard: after Brown, every Southerner saw a secret John Brown in every Northerner, every Northerner saw a Slave Power that had run all three branches since the founding, and compromise died. Earle’s verdict, unusual for a historian: the Civil War was inevitable after John Brown — the only question was who would be in charge when it came.
• Chicagoland. Lincoln’s self-introduction was the strangest in campaign history: a tour of Bleeding Kansas (“the Gaza of the day”), then a winter of archival research in the State Library of Illinois, proving the founders believed they had the power to stop slavery’s spread — delivered at Cooper Union in February 1860 in a reedy high voice that nonetheless won Horace Greeley and the New York press: his Obama-in-Boston moment. William Henry Seward — the famous New York senator, the Hillary of the piece — led the first two convention ballots. But Lincoln’s handlers had pulled off the venue coup of the century (Chicago, his home state) and worked the smoky backrooms with offices, favors, and newspapers while their candidate wired “make no promises that bind me.” Seward was soft in Ohio and Indiana; the Republicans needed Pennsylvania, Indiana, Illinois; and a shocked Lincoln man coined the title: Seward had all the money and all the bullies — “but by God, he had the people.” Andrew’s caveat: in Chicago, “the people” were power brokers.
• A Revolution, Reported from Paddy’s Run. The general election was really two simultaneous contests: Lincoln versus Douglas in the North, Breckinridge versus Bell in the South — four candidates winning electoral votes, resolved as 180 for Lincoln (152 needed) on 39.8 percent of the popular vote, the lowest winning share in American history, with a scarcely believable 81.8 percent turnout. The franchise: white male citizens, no property requirement, citizenship easy enough that Democrats met the Irish ships at the docks — simultaneously the widest political participation on the planet and a restriction whose repair (the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments) would shut suffragists out for two more generations. Earle’s narrative spine is Murat Halstead of Paddy’s Run, Ohio — the nation’s first campaign journalist, the only man at all seven of 1860’s conventions, a Seward man who called it straight: this was a revolution — the first antislavery party wresting Washington from “Northern men with Southern principles” like Buchanan, Van Buren, and Pierce. And in the secession winter, Lincoln refused to compromise the victory away: We won.
• Is There a Lincoln Out There? Lincoln tops every presidential ranking, Earle argues, because he grew — the arc Earle compares to Bobby Kennedy’s journey from McCarthyite to tribune of the poor. This Lincoln moved from denying racial equality in 1860 to a final speech — John Wilkes Booth in the audience — endorsing the vote for Black Union soldiers: killed, in effect, for the growing. He held the 1864 election in the middle of the war he expected to lose it (Earle’s pointed contrast: Zelensky’s wartime postponement — “I think that’s a mistake”). To Andersen’s cheerful breakup scenario, the LSU historian — whose Louisiana is one-third African American — gave a hard no: disunion meant “unremitted servitude forever,” and the republic needs Mississippi and Wyoming alike. For 2028: historical contingency always wins — nobody had heard of Obama two years out, and the general public hasn’t heard the next name either. “I do think that there is a Lincoln out there. I do.”
About the Guest
Jonathan Earle teaches history and politics at Louisiana State University, where he has been Dean of the Ogden Honors College since 2014. A historian of antebellum American politics, he is the author of Jacksonian Antislavery and the Politics of Free Soil, John Brown’s Raid on Harpers Ferry, and (as co-editor) Bleeding Kansas, Bleeding Missouri. He Has the People: Abraham Lincoln and the Election of 1860 (Oxford University Press, Pivotal Moments in American History series) draws on t...
