Six Encounters with Lincoln: A President Confronts Democracy and Its Demons

by Elizabeth Brown Pryor

Overview

Winner of the Barondess/Lincoln Award from The Civil War Round Table of New York

“Fascinating reading. . .this book eerily reflects some of today’s key issues.” – The New York Times Book Review
 
From an award-winning historian, an engrossing look at how Abraham Lincoln grappled with the challenges of leadership in an unruly democracy

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780143111238
Publisher:	Penguin Publishing Group
Publication date:	02/06/2018
Pages:	496
Product dimensions:	5.40(w) x 8.30(h) x 1.20(d)

About the Author

Elizabeth Brown Pryor (1951–2015) combined careers as an award-winning historian and a senior diplomat in the American Foreign Service. She was the author of the biography Clara Barton: Professional Angel, considered the authoritative work on the founder of the American Red Cross, and Reading the Man: A Portrait of Robert E. Lee Through His Private Letters, which won the 2008 Lincoln Prize, the 2007 Jefferson Davis Award, the 2008 Richard B. Harwell Book Award, and the 2007 Richard S. Slatten Award for Excellence in Virginia Biography.

Read an Excerpt

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 in the 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.

Table of Contents

Foreword vii

Note to the Reader xiii

Introduction 1

1 A Wary Handshake 11

2 Pfunny Pface 65

3 Two Emancipators Meet 119

4 Of Fathers and Sons 153

5 Hell-Cats 213

6 The Hollow Crown 269

7 Epilogue to the Hollow Crown: Lincoln and Shakespeare 329

Abbreviations 337

Notes 339

Bibliography 413

Illustration Credits 463

Index 465

Editorial Reviews

Praise for Six Encounters with Lincoln: 

“Fascinating reading on its own terms, Six Encounters with Lincoln nevertheless confronts readers with startlingly relevant questions. . .the notion that democracy involves compromises resonates today.” –The New York Times Book Review

“Pryor is particularly adept at conveying the impossibility of Lincoln’s task:  to represent a profoundly fractured country in which, as one of Lincoln’s friends put it, ‘the eyes of the whole nation will be upon you while unfortunately the ears of one half of it will be closed to any thing you say.’”  –The Wall Street Journal

“This history aims at deconstructing Lincoln’s mythic reputation as the Great Emancipator to arrive at a more nuanced view . . . Pryor paints a provocative historical portrait while testing common assumptions about an American icon.” – The New Yorker

“In her meticulously researched study of these little-known but arresting encounters with Lincoln, Pryor teases out their meaning with cool discrimination, sensitivity, and a vivid pen. She exposes a human president – socially awkward, obstinate, intolerant – struggling to cope in time of war with the fluid messiness of democratic government. This is a brilliant work that is bound to provoke animated scholarly discussion.”  –Richard Carwardine, author of Lincoln:  A Life of Purpose and Power
 
“A daring, provocative, and exceptionally important book that convincingly challenges many of the assumptions on which Lincoln’s greatness are based. Pryor examines Lincoln’s often startling behavior in heretofore little-known but highly revealing encounters, and from them she expertly weaves a larger narrative of his fitful progress as the beleaguered leader of a nation at war. The research is truly prodigious, the writing graceful and assured. One of the most significant works on Lincoln of this generation.” -Peter Cozzens, author of The Earth Is Weeping: The Indian Wars for the American West

“Deeply researched, telling moments in the life of arguably the most written-about man in history. . .gets beyond the hagiographic portrayals of Lincoln, allowing rare glimpses of the man as vulnerable, clumsy, inarticulate, and very human. . .Kudos to Pryor for offering readers something fresh about our 16th president – no small feat.”  – Kirkus Reviews (starred)
 
“Pryor’s impressive final book will be of great appeal to Lincoln aficionados. . .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.”  – Publishers Weekly

From the Publisher

How do we gauge the success of a presidency? The media has recently found itself asking this question. There are standard measures like passing durable legislation and responding well to crisis. Equally important, at least for the current president, are keeping campaign pledges and maintaining popularity through statements and speeches. President Obama's goal seemed to be stability and incremental progress; President Bush disregarded the headlines, content to let history judge his bold actions. Each administration seems to offer a new lens through which to view the office and its occupant.

When we evaluate the present, we inevitably measure it against the past. This raises an interesting question: just how effective were our most revered presidents? Take, for example, the man widely thought of as one of the greatest among them — Abraham Lincoln. He gazes out from iconic photographs and up from the pennies in our pockets with such reassuring benevolence that we tend not to assess his performance critically. The late writer and noted historian Elizabeth Brown Pryor urges us to do so in Six Encounters with Lincoln, her provocative final book.

An acclaimed biographer of Robert E. Lee and Clara Barton, Pryor found six overlooked episodes that reveal Lincoln's character, his fallibility, and the awesome task he confronted, at times with mixed success. With them she seeks to replace the "mirage" that Lincoln has become with a living, breathing politician. "When we are aware of greatness we want to hear about it over and over again," she writes, "but greatness does not mean perfection." Lincoln's blunders interest Pryor more than his moments of high inspiration.

Four of these six encounters involve interviews between President Lincoln and petitioners: a Union soldier, a Cherokee elder, a group of politically active women, and a southern businessman. The remaining two are set pieces rather than conversations: a bungled flag raising and a military review. Pryor uses each to illuminate some aspect of Lincoln's presidency or character that is under- explored, or uncomfortable, or simply illuminating for its novelty. Several episodes are stretched rather thin, such as the brief interview with the soldier, during which Lincoln used the word "nigger." This leads Pryor to discuss at great length a lamentable fact that was already known: that Lincoln used coarse and racially ugly language throughout his life. But other encounters are more telling.

The military review affords Pryor the opportunity for her most trenchant criticism: that Lincoln was ineffective as a wartime president. She offers it bluntly: "He blundered through military labyrinths with all the agility of an angered buffalo, while thousands of people died." Shortly after Lincoln's inauguration, a group of seventy-eight Army officers came to the White House to meet their new commander in chief. Inexperienced in the customs of military pageantry, Lincoln shook hands rather than saluting, allowed his attention to wander during the ceremony, and generally struggled to project authority. It was a sign of things to come. During the Civil War, Lincoln "wrote orders himself, countermanded decisions, or sent mixed messages, without informing senior leaders — then wondered why his commands were not carried out," Pryor writes. She also contends that his visible agonizing over the war projected indecision to the troops rather than the certainty that they needed. Worst of all, Lincoln had a talent for picking and promoting mediocre officers, culminating in the insubordinate leadership of General George McClellan.

These are fair critiques, yet Pryor does not tell the whole story. Lincoln of course relieved McClellan of his command, eventually recognizing and relying on the brilliant generals Ulysses S. Grant and William Tecumseh Sherman. He did not countermand their decisions. Lincoln proceeded from a key strategic insight: given the Union's larger military and economic resources, time was on his side, despite individual Confederate victories. His military leadership was only part of his conduct of the war; political moves like the Emancipation Proclamation, preventing Maryland from slipping into the Confederacy, and securing passage of the Thirteenth Amendment abolishing slavery had military repercussions. Lincoln's careworn face may have revealed indecision to some soldiers, but in a broader sense it reflected the agony of the nation's most tragic hour. Brisk confidence would have been out of place. And, of course, Lincoln's side won the war. Any fair discussion of his military leadership must show tally marks on both sides of the column.

The flag-raising encounter was a symbolic blunder that Pryor uses to explore Lincoln's love of anecdote. Charged with christening a new Marine bandstand, he managed to pull the flag into a tangle between the pavilion and the flagpole. When the standard finally emerged it was badly torn and missing several stars: an uncanny representation of the fractured country. Lincoln might well have saved the scene for later use; he always had (or thought he had) the perfect yarn or homely story. In Pryor's telling he told such tales strategically, deflecting opponents, delivering a cutting rebuke, or avoiding politically tense moments by taking the floor and then laughing uproariously. At other times Lincoln could be tone-deaf about his stories. A cruel political cartoonist has Lady Liberty asking Lincoln, "Where are my 15,000 sons — murdered at Fredericksburg?" To which the president replies, "This reminds me of a little Joke . . . "

Pryor uses other encounters to portray Lincoln as unsympathetic to women's rights and indifferent to Native Americans. She closes with his interview with a Southern businessman named Duff Green during Lincoln's famous trip to Richmond at the end of the war in 1865. The two discussed Reconstruction, and by most accounts Lincoln was receptive to Green's pragmatic suggestions for rebuilding the South. Yet Pryor is harshly critical of Lincoln's conduct after leaving the ship that brought him to Richmond. He threw aside caution and toured the Southern capital while freed blacks surrounded him in adulation. White Southerners seethed at the display, and Pryor seems determined to view the scene through their eyes, describing "an unwise victor, chuckling over his spoils in a most offensive manner." But whose perception was more important: the vanquished South, which had after all caused the devastating war, or the liberated slaves, finally free after centuries of bondage? African Americans in Richmond had earned their moment of jubilation, and so had the victorious president.

There is a difference between illumination and revision — between saying "He is more complex than you thought he was," and "He is not as great as you thought he was." Six Encounters with Lincoln walks this ridge and leaves too many footprints on the wrong side. A focus on his failures, paradoxically, casts the magnitude of his achievement into even stronger light. Lincoln proved himself both a political genius and a moral luminary — he freed the slaves, won the Civil War, and preserved the Union. For all its trenchant analysis and graceful writing, Six Encounters with Lincoln manages to ignore these central facts. Perhaps Pryor thought them so well established that they needn't be repeated. Yet the result is a book that reads as a misguided effort to cut the Great Emancipator down to size. Pryor is right that Lincoln was not perfect. What she fails to say is that he was as close to perfect as any president we have had so far.

Michael O'Donnell is a lawyer who lives in Evanston, Illinois. His reviews and essays appear in The Nation, the Washington Monthly, and the Christian Science Monitor, among other publications.

Reviewer: Michael O'Donnell

The Barnes & Noble Review

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…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…Fascinating reading on its own terms, Six Encounters With Lincoln nevertheless confronts readers with startlingly relevant questions.

The New York Times Book Review - Alice Kessler-Harris

12/05/2016
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.)

Publishers Weekly

01/01/2017
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

Library Journal

★ 2016-11-23
Six little-known anecdotes about President Abraham Lincoln during fraught times and what they show about his character.Former U.S. senior diplomat Pryor (Reading the Man: A Portrait of Robert E. Lee Through His Private Letters, 2007, etc.), who died in a car accident in 2015, painstakingly unearths hidden episodes in the life of Lincoln as he was trying to manage a riven republic and civil war. The author gets beyond the hagiographic portrayals of Lincoln (one contemporary noted, "the murderer's bullet opens to him immortality"), allowing rare glimpses of the man as vulnerable, clumsy, inarticulate, and very human. In his new role as head of the armed forces on March 12, 1861—just days after his inauguration and the secession of the Confederate states—Lincoln had to view the parade of federal troops through the White House, led by Gen. Winfield Scott, who was not entirely trusted. Unfortunately, the meeting underscored the inexperience of the new leader. Another odd incident: during Lincoln's ceremonial role of hoisting the U.S. flag over a new Marine bandstand set up on the South Lawn of the White House in late June 1861, the huge flag ripped, severing the upper stripe and four of its stars—not a good omen. From here, Pryor launches into an elucidating look at Lincoln's "legacy of fun" and his love of storytelling—not to mention how his face was ripe for caricature. In August 1862, Sgt. Lucien P. Waters, who "abhorred slavery," managed an interview with the president to air his grievances about the Union's frustratingly slow advances and ask for a furlough; Lincoln, glum and exasperated over the issue of slavery, muttered about the "damned or Eternal niggar, niggar," shocking Waters and revealing Lincoln's conflicted state at the time. Another anecdote demonstrates his discomfort engaging one-on-one with women. Kudos to Pryor for offering readers something fresh about our 16th president—no small feat. Deeply researched, telling moments in the life of arguably the most written-about man in American history.

Kirkus Reviews