Lessons From Lincoln With Steve Inskeep

MICHEL MARTIN, CNN CONTRIBUTOR: Thanks Bianna. Steve Inskeep, thank you so much for joining us.

STEVE INSKEEP, AUTHOR, “DIFFER WE MUST:” Oh, it’s great to talk with you.

MARTIN: before we dig into the book, I did wanna ask you about kind of your dual identities. I mean, you are a hard news journalist, you’ve been a journalist for years. But you’ve also been writing books for years, most of which focus on history. what does one do for you that the other does not? Or, or why is it that you are able to do both or want to do both?

INSKEEP: I was gonna joke about the need to make a living but I think that there’s something a little deeper to it than that. I feel that when I’m writing history, I’m covering the same story often that I’m covering as a journalist, and each one feeds off the other, and in a sense, makes it easier. where I’m at right now is that even more than usual, it feels like the news stories play off of history and build off of history. And so each of these two sides of my career changes my perspective on the other. Writing history changes which news stories I think are important and which are not really that big a deal at all. 

MARTIN: Well, the thing – the other thing that was interesting to me is that your previous books have been about people that – people or subjects that people may not know very well. Abraham Lincoln is a different story. how did you come with this idea of writing about him through the lens of his different encounters with different people?

INSKEEP: You’re exactly right, This is a super famous topic, but he’s someone that I have admired and been interested in ever since I was a kid growing up in Indiana, which is where Lincoln spent most of his youth. And you get lots of Lincoln propaganda when you’re there. And that is, gets to what I wanted to do with this book, Michel. Lots of people know something about Lincoln. I feel that in the course of this research, I discovered something about America or a lot of little things about America and about Lincoln as a politician, as opposed to a kind of secular saint, that were new to me. These 16 meetings with people who differed with them or disagreed with them, I think expose a lot of the diversity of America at that time. They’re people of different classes, different races, different genders, even though it’s a time when white men had virtually all of the power and attention. And so I think it exposes America a little bit. And I think showing him in combat, or in debate, or in alliance with various kinds of people also reveals Lincoln in a new and different way. The way that you, if you watch an athlete on the field, you can truly see their art because you see them in action. This is showing Lincoln in action with other people.

MARTIN: and the title of the book is “Differ We Must.” So really the core of it is people with whom he had disagreements. Some of them were enormous disagreements, enormous moral disagreements. And one of the things that you talk about is how he kind of kept them in his life, or stayed connected to them. Let’s start with Frederick Douglass. Lincoln received Frederick Douglass at the White House cordially a lot of people could make political hay out of that. Like, what are you doing entertaining this black man at the White House? You know, how dare you. That kind of thing. So anyway, so tell me about his encounter with Frederick Douglass, and why did you include it in the book?

INSKEEP: You’re exactly right that people could and did make political hay out of that. In fact, one of the many reasons that Douglass was famous, he, of course, had escaped from slavery, he was a writer, he was an order, he was an abolitionist and anti-slavery activist but he also was someone who could be smeared in conservative newspapers all the time. They would say that the Republican Party, the main anti-slavery party, was following the agenda of this Black man, Frederick Douglass.. He considered Lincoln’s Republican party to be too moderate, and he constantly criticized Lincoln as president for moving too slowly against slavery. And yet, at the same time, Douglass was pragmatic as Lincoln was, and understood that the Republican Party stood the best chance of dealing a blow against slavery. And so he was broadly supportive of the Republicans, and he worked with Lincoln, even while disagreeing with Lincoln. And that’s what this meeting was about. Douglass, after the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863, volunteered to help recruit black men for the Union Army and did a lot of that, but then felt that Lincoln’s administration had made a liar out of him by failing to provide the equal treatment that had been promised that Douglass himself had promised. And so he effectively went to the White House to protest to Abraham Lincoln, who showed some of his leadership style first by taking a meeting with this guy who publicly criticized him, really fiercely, called him racist and other things. Second, by admitting that he had in fact, been slow to provide the equality that he knew was called for. And third, explaining why political reality required him to do things in a certain timing and at a certain time, and also committing to making things right. Douglass, for example, was upset that Black men were not even receiving equal pay to white soldiers. That was corrected by the following year. So they had a kind of alliance in spite of really broad differences about how to attack slavery.

MARTIN: And what did you draw from this encounter? How did you – what does it mean to you?

INSKEEP: It shows me a political leader,who was patient, who kept his eye on the long term, who reached out to people who disagreed with him, who didn’t feel it was necessary, that someone had to agree entirely with him, who reached beyond what we would call the political base to make alliances. We just talked about Frederick Douglass, who was an abolitionist, escaped from slavery. The title of the book “Differ We Must,” is from a letter Lincoln wrote to a man from a slave holding family. The best friend of his life, Joshua Speed, who by his adult life agreed in the abstract, according to Lincoln, that slavery was wrong. But Lincoln felt that he wasn’t really serious politically about doing anything about it, wasn’t serious about restricting it or ending it. But then he wrote in the letter, “If for this, you and I must differ, differ, we must.” And he signed the letter, “Your friend forever,” which strikes me as a hard thing for many of us to even conceive today. And we’re told that we need to almost ostracize or isolate ourselves from people who hold repugnant views or terrible views. Lincoln kept in touch with everybody, even if he didn’t ultimately agree with them and would get some use or some value out of them. He ultimately got some value out of his friend Joshua Speed, who stayed loyal to the Union when the Civil War broke out.

MARTIN: Interesting. Well, okay. Well, so Joshua speed though, lifelong friend, you know? They had a relationship that went beyond this issue. Talk about Joseph Gillespie.

INSKEEP: This is an unbelievable story that I feel that I uncovered what was, to me, a kind of secret history of Lincoln’s political campaigning in the 1850s on his way to the presidency. He was helping to build this new anti-slavery party, the Republican Party. And he realized there were only so many anti-slavery votes in America. People had deeply mixed views, to say the least. White voters who got to vote had deeply mixed views, to say the least about slavery. He needed all the votes he could get. And in Illinois, that included voters who hated immigrants, who joined anti-immigrant societies that were known as Know Nothing societies, and Joseph Gillespie was one of those people. He had been an old friend of Abraham Lincoln. He also had become a Know Nothing leader in a part of the state where Lincoln really needed votes in the US Senate campaign of 1858. And he leaned on Joseph Gillespie in an effort to get them. Repeatedly wrote to Gillespie with instructions for how to campaign. Even himself appeared on stage at least twice with Joseph Gillespie to appeal for Know Nothing votes. Now, as far as I can tell, as far as the record goes, Lincoln never endorsed Know Nothing views, he never went across his principles by doing that. He found their views repugnant,

MARTIN: you point out in the book where he, I think he said this in a re – in a letter, that Gillespie would use their time together to keep pushing him on these anti-immigrant views. And he wrote one of his personal letters just how tiresome he found it. I mean, it kind of reminds us of like Uncle Bud at Thanksgiving, who keeps…

INSKEEP: Oh, totally, totally.

MARTIN: … you know, beating on some issue and you’re like, could you stop?

INSKEEP: It’s exactly right. But he still was like, engaging with this guy and trying to get people with really bad ideas to cast good votes, votes against slavery, which again, I think is a really hard concept for us today.

MARTIN: I mean, is this kind of a relatively modern idea that unless you’re with me on everything, you’re with me on nothing?

INSKEEP: Oh, there were people then who thought that way. That kind of purist idea or Puritan idea of politics, and we can understand it because we understand how wrong slavery was. Abolitionists felt that the political system was so corrupted by slavery, they wanted nothing to do with it. They wouldn’t even vote, the most radical abolitionists, and some of them even publicly burned the constitution. And so there were people who would think that Lincoln was way too friendly with slave owners and way too friendly with unpleasant people, and would wonder why he was doing this. 

MARTIN: That’s so interesting. Was there, obviously I learned a lot from the book, and there were figures in there who – people I had heard of but didn’t know their history or people I’d never heard of. Was there somebody, something, somebody you wrote about that you just were really surprised by

INSKEEP: almost the last character to be added to this collection. Mary Ellen Wise, one of three women in this book, who is a little mysterious because her story is so hard to verify. But her story was, she was a teenager from Indiana at the start of the war, who cut off her hair, put on men’s clothes, enlisted in the army, and served in the Army as some number of women apparently did. Her service is extremely hard to pin down. Parts of her story make no sense at all. But she was found in uniform in the south, in war zones, and in 1864, went to the White House to say to Lincoln that she was owed back pay, and she needed help collecting it. There are several things that amaze me about this story, and one is that Lincoln completely welcomed the idea – he wanted anybody to serve who could serve. He realized that the union needed to win the war of numbers, to have a larger army. And when a woman showed up and said, I served my country, he didn’t say, get out of here. This is illegal. This is not the proper gender role. He wrote a note to a federal paymaster saying, pay this woman who claims to be owed money, and if there’s anything wrong with it, I will cover the difference myself. And also that he was okay with the public knowing. He was politically very clever. And he was essentially for anyone who would fight for the union. He even issued the Emancipation Proclamation for the express purpose of taking black laborers away from the South who enslave them and enlisting them when they were willing in the Union Army to add to union forces. He talked about that before issuing the proclamation. It’s written right into the proclamation as a purpose of the proclamation. He wanted people to fight for the country. He understood that in an election, you need to build a majority by whatever means necessary to do what is right. And the Civil War was effectively an election by other means, and it was won because the union had the majority again.

MARTIN: You know, this raises the question that has been asked, you know, of other leaders since, which is, was he sincerely against slavery? one of the things – the points your book makes clear is that there are a lot of people who were farther along in their thinking about the equality of human beings than Lincoln was. But this whole question of does it really matter what the person truly believes? Like they believe it in their core? Did you – how did you come out on that? Or do you have an opinion about that?

INSKEEP: I do. Thank you for raising it. That’s very perceptive. We tend to think of race right now as a personal matter, a matter of the soul. Can we show other people that we are pure? Can we denounce anybody else who is impure? And I don’t mean to say that that’s unimportant. But with Lincoln, the question is what difference did he make as a political leader, and of course, it was a gigantic difference. Now, as to the question of whether, what he believed in his soul, it’s clear to me from his writings – although he’s something of a mysterious character – that he always believes slavery was wrong. He believed that when it was to his advantage and when it was to his disadvantage, he still believed it consistently throughout his life. there are also statements he made that are considerably less than allowing for political or social equality of black people. And he even talked about colonization, sending freed men, freed people overseas to somewhere else where there could be free. And yet I’m tempted to see some of those statements as political dodgers to appeal to white voters, because in many of the same speeches, there is a logic that leads to equality. There’s a speech in 1854 where he says, self-government is absolutely and eternally right. And it’s a totally, it’s a, and it’s a total destruction of self-government if a black man cannot govern himself. And there is that kind of logic and that talk of equality again and again. It seems to me that Lincoln believed, as he said so many times, as he picked up from abolitionists in the creed of the Declaration of Independence, about all men are created equal, he referred to that as my ancient faith. And his practical belief was, let’s get all the equality we can get away with now and leave the rest for another time when we can try for some more.

MARTIN: Let’s zoom out on that question though, and talk about the kind of the present moment. You know, your book in a way without really being super explicit about it, is kind of a brief in behalf of political skill in the service of kind of moral right. And I think what I think I – the subtext of this is that political skill matters. So the question I think I have for you is, is there an, is there a – are there other figures, contemporary figures that remind you of Lincoln who do put political skill in the service of moral right. And are sometimes criticized for it?

INSKEEP: Sure. We can, we can name several of them. And I’m not saying that any of these people are like Lincoln, but you’re talking about people who take that kind of approach, who lean on political skill and building coalitions and dealing with other people. President Biden has explicitly made that part of his appeal, that he’s going to be bipartisan, that he’s gonna work with different kinds of people. In his first presidential campaign, he was criticized for saying that as a senator in the 1970s, he had worked with old time segregationists not to do segregation, but to get positive things done. And people asked, why would you talk to these people? And whether it was right or wrong exactly, I think I understand why. Because that old segregation senator had power, and you could either have him voting for you or against you, and he would try to bring them on board. Biden has made a show of attempting bipartisanship when it’s possible. There are other people we could talk about. The previous Democratic president, Barack Obama was more centrist than perhaps he seemed, although he was presented as a kind of radical figure. There have been Republicans through history who have built on Lincoln’s legacy. I think about the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which happened partly because Everett Dirksen, a Republican from Illinois, gathered up conservative votes to get it through the Senate, partly by raising objections and concerns and amendments to this bill that he had always supported all along, but he was trying to bring more conservative voices along. We could go through and find a lot of people who were still playing the game more or less successfully, and who understand that democracy and a republic with separation of powers means you need to deal with the person on the other side, even when they are totally wrong.

MARTIN: You know, historians are sometimes accused of being nostalgic. Do you think you are?

INSKEEP: I hope not. I am interested in the past, but it’s not like I wish I lived in the past, and I think I understand how bad it was, how terrible it was. In fact, that is part of this story that I have to tell, or that I feel I have to tell. Lincoln did not play his role in ending slavery just because he thought slavery was wrong. It was pretty ordinary to admit that slavery was wrong. There were even literal slave owners who would say, of course, this is a terrible practice. It’s too bad I have to keep doing it. The thing that was innovative about Lincoln was somehow getting an overwhelmingly, not a hundred percent, but overwhelmingly white national electorate that had deeply mixed feelings and fears about slavery     and about black people getting that highly imperfect electorate to vote for something better over time. That took coalition building and that took political skill. That’s what made him different and distinct, was not solely his moral belief, which was correct, but his practical skill.

MARTIN: Steve Inskeep, thank you so much for talking with us.

INSKEEP: You’re welcome. It’s a joy to talk to you. Even though I get to do it all the time. <laugh>