‘Abraham Lincoln in his Times’ with Lincoln Prize recipient David S. Reynolds

David S. Reynolds: I really hope students are inspired by Lincoln. And you have to realize that the more you learn, the more potential advance you can make in this world.

President Bob Iuliano: Hi, and welcome to Conversations Beneath the Cupola, a Gettysburg College podcast. I’m Bob Iuliano, President of the College and your host.

President Bob Iuliano: In our last episode, I was joined by two Gettysburg College professors who discussed the lasting impact of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s words on how we could apply the lessons learned from his life and legacy to our ongoing conversations on issues of race and identity today. In this episode, we will dive into the life and legacy of another leader who transformed his time through actions and words: Abraham Lincoln.

President Bob Iuliano: Joining us is David S. Reynolds, whose book Abe: Abraham Lincoln in His Times, was just announced as the recipient of the 2021 prestigious Lincoln Prize. It has also been identified as one of the top 10 books of the year by the Wall Street Journal, and recognized as among the best books by the Washington Post, the Christian Science Monitor and Kirkus.

President Bob Iuliano: Gettysburg College helps administer the Lincoln Prize, which has been awarded annually since its founding in 1990, to a work that enhances the general public’s understanding of the Civil War era. Dr. Reynolds powerfully accomplishes this in his biography by bringing to life the social, cultural and political environment that helped shape the person Lincoln would become, and the path of progress Lincoln so masterfully forged for our nation. Outside of his work as a biographer, Dr. Reynolds is a critic, historian, and distinguished professor at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York.

President Bob Iuliano: David, first off let me begin by offering you my hearty congratulations on such a well-deserved honor. Your biography is a stellar work, worthy of celebration. Also, thank you for joining me today to speak a little more about the character of President Lincoln and how some of the issues he faced in his time mirror those we are grappling with today.

President Bob Iuliano: So David, Abe is not your first book. You’re an accomplished scholar and biographer. Give us some context for your scholarly interests, and ultimately what got you focused on Lincoln as a person.

David S. Reynolds: I was an American studies major in college at Berkeley where I got my PhD, and I got very interested in 19th Century American culture. So my first book with Harvard Press was about religious writing, popular religious writing of the 18th and 19th Century in America.

David S. Reynolds: Then I got very interested in other aspects of popular culture. Then I became fascinated by Walt Whitman, the poet who encompassed America and so forth, a truly democratic poet. I wrote a book called Beneath the American Renaissance in which I took the seven major writers, Whitman, Emerson, Thoreau, Melville, Hawthorne, Poe, and Dickinson, and I related them to their contemporary popular culture.

David S. Reynolds: When I came to John Brown, I wrote a cultural biography of him, placing John Brown, who was an abolitionist, in the same culture really. But I was thinking more and more about Lincoln because Lincoln was always there in my mind. He always came into the discussion, and then Norden approached me about doing Lincoln’s selected writings. So I came out with that a number of years ago, and it all naturally led to the realization on my part that despite that some 16,000 books on Lincoln, there never really had been a book which used the cultural material that I had been investigating to evaluate him in terms of that cultural material. I thought it would be both interesting and perhaps a contribution to frame him within his culture. So that’s how I came to do it.

President Bob Iuliano: You’ve used the phrase cultural biography, and I know that the Whitman work was a cultural biography as is this. Just to make sure that I understand what you’re talking about when you use that phrase, it’s exactly what you just said. It’s situating the person or the people in the context of their time and understanding how they were influenced by that time. Do I have that basically right?

David S. Reynolds: That’s basically right. I am convinced that we are all profoundly shaped by our culture, and not just in an exterior way but actually we imbibe and absorb our immediate culture, but also the way our immediate culture intersects with the larger culture as well, in our case the larger American culture. There have been many wonderful books on Lincoln and biographies that follow his life and that study certain aspects of his surroundings, the political debates and so forth and so on. But there had never been one that really ensconced him, put him right back into his culture to see what Emerson would call the cultural air, the air around him that he was breathing and absorbing into him, which shaped him. Then eventually, he fed back into it and shape the culture himself in a very powerful way.

President Bob Iuliano: It’s easy to think of culture monolithically, at least though I think we understand that’s not true even today, notwithstanding the power of mass communication. As you think about Lincoln’s experience, was there a culture or multiple cultures, the culture of Springfield as distinct, say from the other moments in time that you’ve studied that really influenced him? I guess what I’m trying to ask you, David, is how do we understand culture in that moment in time? How bifurcated was that?

David S. Reynolds: Well, it was really multiple cultures. Two important elements of that particular time period was the so-called Cavaliers versus the Puritans. The South, particularly Virginia, had been settled by these royalists or people in England who believed in institutions and the institutional church, particularly the Anglican Church and in Maryland the Catholic Church, and so forth. But whereas new England had been largely settled by Puritans who were rebels against institutions. A lot of people during the Civil War actually regarded this less as a conflict over slavery then as a conflict between two different civilizations, the Puritans and the Cavaliers.

David S. Reynolds: It so happens that Lincoln, he was fascinated by his personal background, and he traced on his father’s side back to Samuel Lincoln, who came over as part of the great Puritan migration to New England, Massachusetts, settled in Ingham, Massachusetts. Then they slowly spread West through New Jersey and Pennsylvania and then down South and then over to Kentucky.

David S. Reynolds: Then on his mother’s side, there was illegitimacy there in the background that he didn’t know exactly who his ancestor was. But he was related on that side to it a Virginia planter, who Lincoln called an aristocrat or something, almost a typical Cavalier kind of thing.

David S. Reynolds: So Lincoln felt both sides coming into him. He didn’t like to make much of either particular side, which is why he emphasized there was a Quaker somewhere in his background. But he didn’t like to parse out the particular wires of the Puritan on the one end and the Cavalier, because he didn’t like to emphasize ... It’s the same way he didn’t like to talk about the Confederacy.

David S. Reynolds: He might refer to the so-called Confederate States or something like that, but he didn’t even want to include the idea of a separate nation in his mind and certainly not two different civilizations. Then later on in the 1880s, when he was recovered, Henry Grady said the average American was Abraham Lincoln because he did combine the Puritan and the Cavalier.

President Bob Iuliano: When Lincoln declined to be specific about this, was he making a political judgment that his appeal would be more transcendent if he avoided being seen as in one camp or the other, or was he making an ideological statement about his concept of unity, or maybe was doing both, David? How should we think about that?

David S. Reynolds: I think that he was being political in the sense that he wanted to reach as many voters as possible. He lived in the middle of Illinois at that time, which was kind of a meeting place, frankly, of the Southern, more Cavalier-oriented people who had mainly come from the South to Illinois. On the other hand, the more Puritan settlers of Northern Illinois that had sort of settled Chicago and so forth.

David S. Reynolds: Finding himself in the middle, he really had to appeal to some conservatives and to some more progressives so it was a very political move, and it was also ideological in the sense that he valued, as we all know really, Union really above all. Union, it turned out to be Union with justice for enslaved people. But Union was so, so big to him.

David S. Reynolds: So it was really an ideological thing as well that he didn’t want to separate, at least publicly. He was fascinated by both sides, family sides, privately. He didn’t like to divide the nation into sections, and when one of his generals boasted, “Oh, we drove the enemy from our soil,” and he said, “There’s no our soil or their soil. It’s the nation’s soil.” He didn’t get mad too often but he got very mad at that. There’s no “Their soil.”

David S. Reynolds: Then when Jefferson Davis toward the end said, “Let’s make the peace between the two nations,” he said, “There’s no two nations here. There’s no two nations to make peace.” So yeah, he was really thinking about unity, so it was really an ideological thing.

President Bob Iuliano: So you’re a student of his time. As you did this exploration, did anything surprise you either about your understanding of him or your understanding of the time that you’d studied?

David S. Reynolds: I think what surprised me the most, there’s that whole Lerone Bennett view of Lincoln, which is he wrote a book called Forced into Glory, which argues that Lincoln was fundamentally a racist. I found that that was really, really wrong. He was not racist whatsoever.

David S. Reynolds: He did say a few things early on when he was running for office against Stephen Douglas in 1858, and Douglas was an unrepentant white supremacist, who said, “It’s a white man’s government. The Declaration of Independence only means white people, doesn’t mean blacks, or it doesn’t mean Malays or whoever, or Native Americans. It just means white people.” He was a total white supremacist.

David S. Reynolds: So Lincoln in the debates said, “Well I’ve never advocated African-Americans serving on juries or voting or something.” He almost had to say that he was running for in a state, Illinois, that at that time had what Frederick Douglas called the worst black law of all the United States. If you were a free African-American and didn’t live there yet and if you entered the state, you had to get out within 10 days or else you were going to be fined, possibly put into jail. There was so much racism going on around it that you had to contextualize that a little bit, and you have to look at that.

David S. Reynolds: Personally, Lincoln was living in a neighborhood where there were a number of African-Americans to whom he came quite close, personally close, including William Florville, William Donagan. Then in office, he really gained respect for the performance of African-American troops, and when he met Frederick Douglass and Sojourner Truth and Martin Delany, Martin Delany was a real radical African-American activist, they felt very, very close to him. They came out saying that Lincoln was really one of the least, perhaps the least prejudice person they had encountered.

David S. Reynolds: When Lincoln was assassinated Martin Delany, who was almost way beyond black, what we would call Black Lives Matter, he was really a pre-Marcus Garvey immigrationist and this, that, and the other, he cried for like an hour. He just cried, and he wanted to commission a statue to be constructed only by pennies from emancipated people, and it was going to be a statue of an African woman rising up with her arms out spread to the heavens and crying just thousands of tears, just crying into an urn. That’s the way Martin Delany felt about it.

David S. Reynolds: The statue that was built in 1876 that was recently removed from Boston was funded by African-Americans, and it pictures an enslaved person who is rising up with arms outspread toward Lincoln who’s standing there with the emancipation proclamation. The enslaved person is breaking through the chains.

David S. Reynolds: It’s being criticized for the fact that it makes Lincoln larger on a taller perspective than this crouching figure. But the figure is not so much crouching as he is rising up and is grateful to Lincoln because of that. So it’s really a mistaken reading of the statue.

President Bob Iuliano: Well we live in a town, as you know, Gettysburg, where the interpretation of the monuments around the battlefield is something that has sparked conversation. We had a podcast previously that is about that.

President Bob Iuliano: As you looked at Lincoln’s life and began to understand it in context, was it obvious that he was going to become the person that he did? Were there signs of that in his upbringing, in his early years as a politician, or was greatness sort of, you said thrust upon him? Help us understand whether this was a natural evolution or something that really was a person rising to the existential crisis of his moment.

David S. Reynolds: He did tell a couple of people in his childhood, “Someday I’m going to be president.” On the other hand, maybe a lot of people say that. I remember when I was a kid I said, “I’m going to be the president of Coca-Cola.” I don’t know why I said that.

President Bob Iuliano: David, I was going to be the center fielder for the Boston Red Sox. It hasn’t happened yet. I’m still hoping it’s going to happen though.

David S. Reynolds: What kid does not say something like that along the way? I think … [they] did call Lincoln’s ambition the engine that couldn’t stop. So he did have an ambition, but it was really an ambition less centered on his own personal advance than it was on really trying to make a contribution, which is why in Illinois he keeps running for state legislature, and he’s elected four times.

David S. Reynolds: He serves in the legislature and then he runs for the U.S. Congress. Of course, he serves there. He doesn’t have the most distinguished term in office, but still makes a contribution and then falls from view, goes back into the law.

David S. Reynolds: But what really determines his rise to the presidency is that when he sees the pro-slavery laws of the 1850s, the Fugitive Slave Act and particularly the Kansas-Nebraska Act, which opened up the Western territories for slavery, at that point his conscience just took hold and said, “I have to give.” Because he was always anti-slavery, but he said, “This is going too far here. This is too much.”

David S. Reynolds: So, he actually runs for the Senate. He doesn’t make it the first time. He doesn’t make it the second time. But the second time in those debates with Stephen Douglas is when he gains national fame and he begins to be talked of for a presidential candidate, but he’s not a first choice because he’s not yet well-known.

David S. Reynolds: In a way he becomes the product of the political moment because when John Brown attacks Harper’s Ferry in 1859, suddenly radical Republicans like Seward and Chase, they get tagged with the blame. They had no part in the Harper’s Ferry whatsoever and John Brown didn’t like Republicans or anything like that. But they got falsely tagged as radicals with Harper’s Ferry and with all this disruption.

David S. Reynolds: Lincoln as really a moderate, much more of a centrist, emerges in the middle as a dark horse candidate, but one who becomes very attractive. Then he gets really swept into office. He even admitted it, with the name and the image of Abe, that’s why I call my book Abe, even though he doesn’t particularly like that name. He likes Lincoln. Doesn’t particularly like Abe, but he said, “Without the image of old Abe I was not going to get elected in 1860.” Because he was suddenly the rail splitter with his sleeves rolled up and with his axe and all of that, so yeah.

David S. Reynolds: What was great about that image is that unlike, let’s say William Henry Harrison who ran the log cabin campaign back in 1840, that was really a manufactured image because Harrison lived in a 16-room mansion and so forth. He was the scion or descendant originally of a Virginia Cavalier background. He was not really a log cabin candidate or hard cider. But in the case of Lincoln, he really had once split logs. He was originally from the frontier. So there was a nice joining, let’s say, of the image with the salesmanship in that case.

President Bob Iuliano: So David, let’s pivot to today if we can. We’ve seen in the most recent presidential election both candidates trying to claim the mantle of Lincoln, in many respects. Here in Gettysburg, we had Joe Biden come to town to give a key address, and President Trump was thinking about coming to town to accept the Republican nomination, again, wanting to cloak themselves in the mantle of Lincoln.

President Bob Iuliano: So let’s start with just temporal similarities if there are some, and you’ve sort of described some, I think. Are there parallels between the time that Lincoln lived and the time that we’re experiencing with polarization, questions of race being foregrounded as acutely as they are now? Do you see parallels between these two moments in time?

David S. Reynolds: Yes. I think it’s true what a lot of people are saying, that we live in a time that’s more polarized than any time since the Civil War. The difference then was that the nation literally became divided because the Confederacy, 11 states literally formed what they considered their own nation with their own president, Jefferson Davis, with their own Congress, their own constitution. They regarded themselves as their own nation, and that led to a bloody civil war.

David S. Reynolds: We’re not quite there yet and I don’t think we’re going to get there. But the difference between Lincoln and people today, our previous president, President Trump really played unabashedly to a political base while he was in office. It was very clear. It was very, very unabashed. He often used c attacks on the opposing party and so forth.

David S. Reynolds: Biden has tried to reach out to people who did not support him in the election necessarily, tried to reach out to the other side, not that he’s becoming a Republican or anything like that. But he’s trying to be a centrist, and I would say left centrist, because he also disturbs certain progressives because he doesn’t go far enough in a progressive direction.

David S. Reynolds: It reminds me of Lincoln, who was attacked from the right as being, again, beyond, what we would say beyond AOC and beyond Black Lives Matter, as being this total, he wants to create a total racial reversal in this country and everything like that. Then attack from the left is being too slow to make slavery the particular object of the war early on. Early on he made it really a war to repair the union. So he was attacked from both the right and the left and he kept on.

David S. Reynolds: He mentioned Blondin who was this tightrope walker who walked across Niagara Falls many times, frontward, backward, at night, in chains. He did it on four-foot stilts and he did it with a man on his back. He did it pushing a wheelbarrow and so forth. So he was quite a tightrope artist.

David S. Reynolds: A couple of times Lincoln was approached by people who said, “Can’t you make this more of an abolitionist to war from the very beginning?” And he said, “If I were a Blondin crossing Niagara, would you tell me step left step right? No, no, no.” And they said, “If we lose Kentucky, we’re going to lose everything.”

David S. Reynolds: So, particularly early on he had to be very careful about what he said about slavery publicly, specifically, because he hated slavery. But there were these five border states that could have toppled into the Confederacy. And he said, “If we lose one of these one or two of these states, we’ve lost the war.” So in a way, events forced him to that.

David S. Reynolds: But a lot of people say the Gettysburg Address, I included, is quite radical, although in a very eloquent, poetic way. But he was criticized for here giving this address where so many people had died and yet advocating equality for African-Americans. They didn’t call them African-Americans at that time. But how dare he insult the dead for saying this at Gettysburg? Yeah, he was saying that, but he was saying it in a very, very lovely, eloquent and poetic way.

President Bob Iuliano: As I understand the way historians look at the Gettysburg Address, it really was an effort on his part to reconceptualize the way the war had been framed. Is that a fair statement?

David S. Reynolds: Yes, because it’s not at all that preamble to the Declaration of Independence had been ignored. No, that was very commonplace among Republicans, anti-slavery people going all the way back.

David S. Reynolds: But to put that in the very first sentence forced a nation founded on the principle that all men are created equal, we would say all people or all men and women, but to put that in the very first sentence and then really the rest of the address is not much longer. It’s about 272 words or something. It’s a very short thing. But to put that right up front, almost as the thesis of the entire nation, and in his mind, he and other Republicans at that time put African-Americans in the category of men, of all men are created equal. So yeah, he does reframe the nation there. Absolutely, yeah.

President Bob Iuliano: One last question that connects Lincoln to today, he operated under a set of principles. Do you see any of those principles offering us guidance about how we can navigate this period of polarization or this period in which we are reckoning continuously with the racial legacy of this country?

David S. Reynolds: Principles, malice toward none, charity to all, defined let’s say in the broadest sense, defined to include the marginalized, to include people of color if you going to apply it today. I think that if Lincoln were alive today, he would apply malice toward none and charity to all to everybody, not to just one group.

David S. Reynolds: I think another principle is the principle of language. I told you early on, he had used ad hominem and rhetoric when he was very young and all that stuff. But in his public statements as president, the reason that we quote him to this very day, better angels of our nature, malice toward none, of the people for the people, by the people. These phrases, language makes a difference. Language makes a difference.

David S. Reynolds: He loved to recite Shakespeare. He loved poetry, not to brag or show off his poetry, but just this poetry meant something to him because the way the poetry condenses words and condenses meaning and the way that his best phrases himself approach a new kind of eloquence that becomes memorable and almost poetic. Also it’s healing poetry. It’s not ad hominem. It’s not pouring gasoline on any kind of political flame. Respecting words and language and being rather careful about one’s words while in office, I think that’s really something that he teaches us.

David S. Reynolds: Our podcast immediately preceding this one was a study of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s words and how they helped encapsulate the cause for which he was fighting, but did so in a way that was broad, inclusive, and powerful. I’m hearing you saying that there are clear parallels and the way in which they both respected language and used that purposefully to advance things that mattered to them.

David S. Reynolds: So in that, last question David. We are of course, an educational institution. Lincoln did much of this on his own. He was self-taught completely. What lessons would you urge our students?

David S. Reynolds: We have this wonderful thing called the First-Year Walk, David, where our first-year students retrace the steps of Lincoln. We go into the National Cemetery and the Gettysburg Address is read to them and they get to reflect on it. Because at the day of the Gettysburg Address, when it was delivered, our students walked with him from the town center to the National Cemetery. So how should our students, what lessons would you urge our students to take from Lincoln’s life, from his self learning, as they begin to think about their own academic career, their own lives and their responsibilities to a society that I think very much needs them?

David S. Reynolds: I think the lesson that I would take is if you look at Lincoln, okay, he had less than one year of school, but he was almost insatiably curious, both about books and about mathematics, Euclid, and also the way machines work. On the law circuit he would stop and ask a farmer, “How does that machine go? Can you describe it to me?” And he was very interested. And, “What breed of cattle is that over there?”

David S. Reynolds: He developed a certain curiosity about the world around him that was just amazing. Students should know that it’s very important to get education as much as you possibly can. Absolutely.

David S. Reynolds: But also realize that a lot of what you learn in life is through your own effort to feed your mind about whatever area you’re interested in. It doesn’t have to be my area or somebody else. Whatever area is interesting to you, to pursue that and say, I’m really going to learn about this. This is really interesting to me. That’s what he loved. He just loved doing it.

President Bob Iuliano: It is a statement about what we seek to do here, David, in a liberal arts and sciences college, helping students to learn how to learn and hopefully cultivating that spark of curiosity. Because I do agree with you. That’s a lesson of Lincoln’s life, and I think it’s an enduring talent, skill, orientation to the world that will hold anyone in good stead.

President Bob Iuliano: David, you obviously have that instinct towards curiosity. This is a remarkable book. It is thoroughly researched. It is thoroughly readable. For someone who does not ... I was not terribly well versed in Lincoln’s time, and I left the book terribly well educated.

President Bob Iuliano: So thank you for the service to society in producing this book. Thank you for spending time with us today. Again, congratulations on the many accolades rightly being received by Abe.

David S. Reynolds: Thank you so much, Bob. It was wonderful to talk with you. You raised some just great questions. I really hope students are inspired by Lincoln. He’s such an inspiring, particularly in that last issue that you raised, and you have to realize that the more you learn the more potential advance you can make in this world, the more you can help yourself. So yeah. Anyway, thank you so much for having me.

President Bob Iuliano: Our pleasure, David. Thank you.

President Bob Iuliano: Let me conclude with a Slice of Life from Gettysburg College. In a year marked by so much change brought about by the pandemic, it can cause us to lose sight of the remarkable work being done on our campus. Every year we provide our first-year students an opportunity to present on a topic emerging from their first year seminar. It’s called the Celebration of First Year Engagement, and it is a highlight of every academic year.

President Bob Iuliano: The sessions that took place earlier this week did not disappoint. The breadth of the topics being presented was remarkable, from the health benefits of tea, a personal favorite given the role tea plays in my life, to the study of Lilith, the first witch, to an examination of different models of congressional apportionment, to a study of the concept of person personhood as reflected in the Blade Runner universe.

President Bob Iuliano: The students were alive, excited about the opportunity to speak to their work, inspired by their faculty to dive in deeply into a topic often completely unfamiliar to them before the course. Composed and articulate, and perhaps best of all, now increasingly comfortable in the work of analysis, critique, and presentation that underlies much of what we hope to instill in our students during their time here.

President Bob Iuliano: Yes, it’s been a challenging year for society on so many fronts. But when I see these students only one semester into their college education, I have renewed confidence that our society will be in capable, empathetic, and passionate hands.

President Bob Iuliano: Thanks for listening. If you’ve enjoyed this conversation and want to be notified of future episodes, please subscribe to Conversations Beneath the Cupola by visiting gettysburg.edu or wherever you get your podcasts. If you have a topic or suggestion for a future podcast, please email news@gettysburg.edu. Thank you, and until next time.