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>> abraham lincoln is one of the most written about political figures in american history. what takes your book different? guest: i think it is in the approach. i try to tell lincoln's life face-to-face meetings with people who disagreed with him who came from different backgrounds, different genders, different points of view, different classes. above all, different opinions on the biggest issues of the time. that gave me the opportunity to see lincoln in action. that gave me the opportunity to try to portray a diverse country. >> you have written several books about american history. n several books about american history including about american president andrew jackson. why lincoln and why now? guest: why lincoln is something

people who studied the 19th century grapple with. he seems to have his fingers on every part of the 19th century, at least in the united states and to some extent, around the world. i had written to previous books about the 19th century and each time lincoln was a minor character, which brought me more and more contact with this guy that i had been fascinated with ever since i was growing up in indiana where he spent the majority of his youth. i finally got to the point where i felt i might have something fresh and to say in spite of the thousands of books written. i got to the point where i felt like it fit the news i was covering as a journalist. this is a story about the past. i am not trying to do some analogy or metaphor about the present. lincoln was living in a republic, the basic rules of which we still have today, even some of the buildings were people govern are the same as they were in the 1800s.

that would be really relevant and the more that i got into the book, the more relevant itself. i was writing primarily in 2020 and 2021 as we were having the pandemic and an incredibly divisive election and aftermath. host: where did the title come from, differ we must? guest: differ we must is a phrase that lincoln wrote in a letter to the best friend of his life, joshua speed. we know lincoln as the president who preserve the union and the civil war and signed the emancipation proclamation. he was an anti-slavery politician. his best friend joshua speed had grown up in kentucky in a slaveholding family. he grew up on a farm where his father owned more than 50 human beings by the time of his death, that was the role that joshua speed came from.

he moved to the free state of illinois. he had become lincoln's best friend. he agreed in the abstract according to lincoln that slavery was a bad idea, that slavery was wrong. lincoln said in this letter, he agreed in the abstract it is wrong but you are not politically serious about that. you are not doing what is possible to strike a blow against slavery politically and i disagree your politics. lincoln goes on to write, if for this we must differ, differ we must. he signs the letter, your friend forever, which struck me. he is saying this to a guy who is on the wrong side, at least partially, on slavery, this profound, moral issue. but, lincoln is keeping the guy close, continuing to work on him and a few years later when we can was president, he got value out of joshua speed, who was from the disputed state of kentucky that could have gone either way and the war. speed help keep that state on

the side of the union. host: you mentioned this now and in the introduction of your book that lincoln was a politician and very much a key politician. why was that something so important to highlight? i want rd from your book, abraham lincoln was a politician. people like to intify him in ways that sound more noble, a lawyer, a statesman, a husband, father. this revered american vocation is not revered at all. seen as the province of money, power, cynicism and lies. lincoln preserve the country and took part in a social revolution because he engaged in politics. guest: i think that a lot of us today have an idea of politics as fundamentally dirty. fundamentally bad. and politicians practice their craft, when they build coalitions, when they cut corners, when they make compromises, we consider that

automatically wrong. we are harsh on our political leaders and we should be because of someone -- because some of what they do is fundamentally wrong. as an art, as a craft, politics is what we are supposed to do in a democracy. politics is what democracy demands. we do not have two points of view in this country, even though sometimes it seems like it. we have many points of view, possibly millions and we should, because it is a free society where we all bring our different backgrounds and different ideas and are supposed to think for ourselves. but, we need to build a majority from among all of those viewpoints in order to support our basic institutions through which we mediate our differences. if you do not build a majority, you can't have a democracy and you build that majority through politics this art we look down upon and maybe we should look more differently at. caller: we want to take your questions and comments for

steve. republicans can call in at 202748 8001. democrats, your line is 202-748-8000. independents 202-748-8002. you mentioned this at the beginning, your book focuses on teen different encounters with 16 different people that lincoln had. all people lincoln disagreed with. how did you choose those conversations? guest: i chose those conversations almost as i went along. i initially thought i would do about a dozen. several of the people i thought would be in the book at the beginning ended up being minor characters or not in the book at all. i discovered these characters through research. some are super famous. william henry seward who was his secretary of state and thought he should have been president, i focused on a particular incident in which lincoln was crafting his first inaugural address

and he became his editor. some of the characters are especially difficult for lincoln like general george mcclellan who caused him endless frustration. some of them were people who were entirely unknown to me at the beginning, like william for bill, a haitian immigrant who was lincoln's barber and ended up participating in some way in the creation of lincoln's beard, the most famous political symbol in american history. maryellen wise, a woman who dressed as a man and went into the south and said she thought for the union because and some number of women in fact, did, during the civil war. there was a cheyenne leader named lean bear who i had not third of -- heard of who warns lincoln about the dangers of the way that white settlers were acting and what is now the state of colorado.

there were great leaders like frederick douglass, who in 1860 three after the emancipation proclamation, went to president lincoln in the white house. in august of that year -- excuse me, i am going to take a sip of water. host: i will remind folks you can send your questions and comments on twitter. we are at cspanwj. guest: that was smoothly done. host: host: frederick douglass said emancipation proclamation, great job, you were slow to get there, great job. it is great you are enlisting black soldiers in the army and douglass himself was recruiting black men. he said, you are failing to provide equal treatment. and equal pay for those black soldiers. why is that? he forced lincoln to have that discussion, which lincoln turned out to be willing to have. there are these remarkable exchanges to me, some of which i had heard nothing about and some

of which i had read a little about. in some longer biography. when i explored each individual meeting in every case, i learned something large or small. i felt i overall got a better idea of how lincoln operated and why we remember him today. host: it is interesting. we often remember lincoln for his speeches, the very famous ones, the gettysburg address, the second inaugural. you focus on the book on his personal skills and these private conversations and interactions with people. what is different about those two dynamics? guest:one thing is what lincoln avoided saying. he would also be careful about what he did not say. he would edit himself a lot and that was true in personal interactions and his speeches. he would focus on the one issue he thought would decide the election, which was very frequently slavery, and he would

set aside everything else as a distraction. in personal conversations, he did something similar. he would appear to their self-interest. it is the 1800s. and so he's asking himself, of this white man, what is this person's interest in the issue? how can i show them that slavery is bad for them? he could sometimes be evasive. he was famously honest. he certainly was not someone who often lied but he would leave out things that would be pertinent if he felt it would serve his cause. host: i will bring up an excerpt

from the book. his reticence and eloquence brought up something deeper than rhetorical style. he knew his limitations and those of the system. he did not try to win all arguments, crushed all opponents or solve all problems. he concentrated his power on fights he had to win to keep from losing everything, which was harder to do than say. that didn't always -- that did not always win him a lot of friends. guest: people often got frustrated with him. you could find people who could not deal with lincoln in the end. they cannot reach an agreement. he did end up being a war president, fighting a civil oregon some of his fellow citizens -- civil war against some of his fellow citizens, but you also get a sense of what he had to do to succeed. he was facing gigantic tasks, a

gigantic division in society over slavery, which became a gigantic war, the bloodiest in american history, which it remains to this day, and he needed to focus on preserving the union, and as part of that, ending slavery it turned out, and had to set aside other things. he had to prioritize. he could not always insist on getting everything 100% his way, which is another lesson for now if we are concerned about our democracy. if we are concerned about the direction of our country, we need to focus on a few things that we can unite on and set aside a few things or a lot of things that are not so essential. host: let's get to your questions and comments for steve. jio bakersfield, california, an independent voter asks, n eve inskeep tell us what abraham lincoln would think about donald trump and perpetuating the lie about the last presidential election? guest: i would hate to project

forward and say what lincoln would think about something that happened after his death, but lincoln did deal, when he did speak to people, fairly straightforwardly with them. he dealt with facts, reasoned with them. this is the remarkable thing about his speeches. some of them are quite long. a few of them are short. the gettysburg address took less than three minutes to say. but some would be 2, 3 hours long. the lincoln-douglas debates, with stephen douglas, each candidate had 1.5 hours to speak, and in those speeches, he would not use appeals to emotion necessarily. he would not tell some dramatic story. he would not play on people's fears necessarily. he would reason with them. he took his audience seriously and had faith that they would stick with him and reason through the problem with him. and that is remarkably different

than a lot of politicians are trained to speak today and it certainly is different than the approach the former president has taken, although he will also speak for a long time. host: gary is in jacksonville, florida on our democratic line. caller: good morning. mr. inskeep, looking at the politics of today, you should have differences, but how can one party work with another party when one candidate is a convicted rapist, tax fraud, insurrectionist who we know stole documents, shared national secrets? host: did you have questions for steve about lincoln or the book? caller: how can it work today when one party has a speaker of the house involved in overturning an election and whose leader now is engaged in insurrection?

how can you possibly work differences out when one party is so corrupt? guest: i don't endorse your description of all the facts but i understand what you're saying, that the former president has been accused of a great number of things, and faces trial next year on a number of things and the court proceedings continue, but let's frame the question differently or look at the answer differently. it is certainly not possible for everybody in america to agree on everything and it would probably be bad if we did. how would that even happen? we have a free society where we come from different backgrounds and have many different ideas. it is not possible but it's also not necessary. what we need is something that is very hard but a little more modest, which is for a majority of us to agree to uphold the basic institutions through which we mediate our differences.

it is necessary for a majority of us to accept the basic idea that we don't always win 100% of what we want 100% of the time. it's an ongoing debate and conversation. sometimes we win and sometimes we lose. we may be mad about it but we go on to the next election. in politics, as i once heard a politician say, nothing is ever over, and that can be frustrating because you have to win and keep fighting, but it also can bring some hope in that you are never fully, permanently defeated. you can have the argument in a different way, at a later time, and see how it works out. host: we have another question for you on socl media. steve says did lincoln ever to your knowledge refer to the u.s. as a christian nation? was he a churchgoer? guest: that's an interesting question. i cannot think of a time when he said america is a christian

nation and i spent a lot of time with the collected works of abraham lincoln. there's a database at the university of michigan sponsored by the university of michigan where all the confirmed words of lincoln and letters and speeches are searchable. you can look for the phrase christian nation and see if it's there. i don't recall it being there. you asked if he was a churchgoer. he was not exactly. he would attend church from time to time. he was never a confirmed member of a specific church, meaning there was no specific christian creed he was willing to embrace. he made a number of statements about god and about faith through his life. he once said he endorsed something called the doctrine of necessity, which was an idea that human affairs were controlled by some force outside of the human mind, that some force was working on people to

lead events in a particular direction. he later said he stopped arguing for that point of view, which seemed politically inconvenient, but he never said he disbelieved it, and in later years, he made similar statements or wrote similar things and seemed to refer to that force as god in some of his great speeches like the second inaugural. he makes references to god's will. in some of his private writings, he makes references to god's will. but he was also, as i mentioned earlier, in many ways an evasive person who only revealed what he wanted to reveal and it's hard to say what is deepest innermost faith is or was and there is no definitive answer to that except that he referred from time to time to god. host: jim is in cuyahoga falls, ohio on our republican line. good morning. caller: good morning, mr. inskeep.

when i think i finally bought the last book on lincoln, someone comes out with a very interesting book i have to go out and buy. this is tremendous. guest: thank you. caller: i have a question for you. i am very interested in abraham lincoln during that period of time when he had just become a member of congress, when he and mary todd went to lexington, kentucky and spent some time there. henry clay made a famous speech during that period of time. of course, you know about the todd family, that they were associated with henry clay, and lincoln was so interested, he would call henry clay his beau. do you know if he ever met henry clay? guest: thank you for the question. it's a great one. it seems plausible or likely that he would have met henry clay during that visit you

mentioned but i don't know of any specific evidence that he did he certainly did regard henry clay as his hero. he was a much older man, we should explain for those who are not history aficionados, a great senator and politician and the founder of the whig party, which for the early part of lincoln's political career was his party. in 1847, in the event that you mentioned, henry clay gave a speech against the u.s. war against mexico, which was thing going on. it was an antiwar speech about how it was a wrong war that was being fought for wrong principles and essentially as a land grab to grab some of mexico's land for the united states, which looking back on it today we can say that was

essentially true. it was an antiwar speech and it seems likely to have influenced lincoln, who seems likely to have attended because he was in town at the time, because lincoln went off to congress then and gave an antiwar speech of his own and introduced an antiwar resolution. he was not a fan of that war. host: our guest mentioned mary todd lincoln. you devoted a whole chapter to lincoln's sometimes rocky home life with mary todd. can you talk about that relationship and how that showed up to write your book? guest: it was a difficult marriage and i should begin by saying that that is not entirely mary's fault. we should never say that it was. she was a very smart and talented individual. a very well educated person, better educated than her husband, who had less than a year of formal education, but they shared this ambition when they met in springfield,

illinois in the early 1840's. they had a difficult courtship. they broke up for a time. lincoln broke up with her for a while. ultimately they married. it's clear he relied on her advice and opinions but may be as time went on. she was revealed as first lady ultimately to be difficult for many people to deal with and very erratic. she did fiercely defend her husband. she was fiercely suspicious of the people around her husband, that they were out for themselves and not to support him. he shrugged that off because he figured people were out for themselves, that they acted out of self-interest and that is something he just needed to deal with. she spent too much money on the white house, her clothes. she grieved a very long and publicly when one of their sons died while they were in the white house. the nation sympathized until she grieved so long and loudly that people began to lose patience.

so it was a very difficult relationship from her side, but he could not have been the easiest husband because he was a politician. before that, he was a lawyer. he traveled around for were constantly. when he was not traveling, he was often depressed or lost in a book or in thought. that had to have been a challenging marriage for both of them. but i ended up focusing on an episode on the very last day of his life, when he and mary took a carriage ride around washington, d.c. the civil war was ending in victory. it was not entirely over but it was effectively over and he made a remark that acknowledged that both of them had had great mental difficulties and emotional difficulties over the last several day -- several yes and said we must try to be more cheerful from now on. and it seems to me and it seemed to mary as she recorded this incident that she was looking forward to a different and

better chapter of their life, which he never got a chance to enact. host: lou is in new york on our democratic line. go ahead. caller: hi. thanks for taking my call. steve, i enjoy listening to you on npr. i have two quick questions i would like to get your thoughts on. the first is, as you pointed out earlier, lincoln was a politician. lincoln was a great politician, but at the end of the day, we wound up in the civil war, the largest loss of life in american history, and that to me resonates with today because there are some people and groups that you just cannot convince. they are so locked into their ideology, whether it was lincoln about slavery or some people today on the right locked into an ideology, but at the end of the day, they will resort to violence. i would just like your thoughts on that. the second question i have is that i have a frustration with the other side of the political spectrum as well because i know

for my readings that lincoln was a believer in the constitution and rule of law and in the process that comes along with the rule of law, and when you see people rushing to judgment saying trump should be jailed, you know, their frustration with the legal system, my feeling is lincoln would have been adamantly opposed to that as someone who believed in the system and i would love to hear your thoughts on that. guest: lincoln was a big believer in the rule of law. he so strongly believed in the rule of law as the only thing that saved us from chaos that he was willing to accept slavery. he opposed slavery all his life but acknowledged up until the civil war that the constitution as it was then read and the many laws and states that practiced slavery made it impossible to directly attack slavery, that the most that he could do was try to limit its spread. he said things in those times

that make it seem today to us that he was not really so much against slavery. it's clear to me that he was but he believed in the rule of law and was willing even to choke down difficult provisions of law because he thought that was necessary for the survival of the republic. when i got to the civil war, of course, he in some cases arguably violated the law, even defied the supreme court in a few cases when he felt it was necessary to uphold the broader framework of the constitution. now, you mentioned the difficulties of the civil war. even though he was good at building political coalitions that he did not get everyone to agree. i agree with that and that is true but his job, the necessity was not to convince everybody, it was to build a majority. even in the context of the civil war, he succeeded in doing that. he reached out to people who disagree with him even about slavery but they were willing to

preserve the union and fight for what we would see as the right side and the cause and do what was necessary to keep them on the side throughout that process and because he capped a majority of the country behind the federal government, it became possible and even inevitable that his side would win the war because that was going to have a bigger economy, more money and be able to field more soldiers on the battlefield and that numerical superiority is the basic reason the union won the civil war. host: i want to follow-up on the points you are making about lincoln's stance on slavery with another excerpt from your book, where you say "it was too modest to say he merely responded to necessity. it was better to say he understo the power of circumstances and try to advance his goals within them. he knew the people he wanted to lead and met them where they were. he spoke to things that mattered to them, nudging just enough

pele just as far as they were willing to go. eventually, the antislavery movement changed the circumstances, winning a presidential election in a way no party ever had and winning a second election that came in the form of a civil war. after the war ended, he was killed by a man who believed he was changing history but lincoln had made his impression." guest: thank you for reading them. i feel that that passage expresses something i did not deeply understand before doing this research and it's one of many things as someone who has read lincoln books my whole life did not truly understand about lincoln. he had a modest idea about -- of what humans could accomplish because of our circumstances. he felt america had become a great republic not because we were inherently brilliant or anything but because we have fortunate circumstances at the time of the nation's birth and he had a limited opportunity to

move that country farther in the right direction. he believed in what the declaration of independence said, that all men are created equal, and he understood that the founders who signed that document did not successfully enact it. it best -- at best, it was partial equality for white men, and not even all white men at the beginning, but he felt this was an ongoing process, that you could imperfectly, partially attain that goal, approximate it in ways that would add to the happiness of people of all colors everywhere. that is his phrase from 1858. his job was to work within the basic circumstances he found to move the country in the right direction to the extent that he could and even his greatest long-lasting achievement, the emancipation proclamation, was such a document. it did not free every slave in america.

in fact, it only declared freedom for those people who were enslaved behind enemy lines, meeting the people that he could not free at that minute, but he understood that as the union army advanced, millions would be freed, and his sometime ally, sometime critic frederick douglass understood that document would become complete freedom, that it was a deathknell for slavery. it was a response to circumstances, as you say in that passage, but it was also a visionary act that led indirect ways to the country we live in now. host: tj is in ontario, canada on our democratic line. caller: good morning, mr. inskeep. good to speak to you directly. two questions. one, if lincoln was not assassinated, how would you see the next four years play out as

far as the lead up to reconstruction, knowing that he was the ultimate compromiser and all that? so would it have changed much or would he have truly been like the great man that, you know, his moral compass would have guided us through to a better place? so that is one question. and then the second is simply, if you think about, you know, lincoln's character, you know, his interest, impulses, is there a post-world war ii -- including fdr - forwar -- that you see the same characteristics within him, you know, that

sensibility of his own personal character and willingness to put his feet in other people's shoes? thank you. guest: thanks for your question. i am glad you called in and i love that hypothetical. if lincoln had lived, if lincoln had not been assassinated, what would he have done after the war? sometimes when i think about that hypothetical i am reminded, believe it or not, of a rolling stone cover from years ago that basically posited if elvis had not died at 42, here is what he would look like, and you have to wonder about what his later life would have been like and if he would have upheld his legacy or tarnished it in some way. and so this is really speculation but there are a few things i think we can know and understand. if lincoln was alive for the aftermath of the civil war, from april of 1865 onward over the next several years, if he was

president all the way through to 1869, what would have been different? we cannot say for sure but what we can say for sure is that he would have been a different president governing in a different way than his successor, andrew johnson. andrew johnson a southerner who favored the union and stayed loyal to the union through the war and was rewarded with the vice presidency, but when the war was over, he effectively took the position that he wanted the white dominated south to return to power and for the south to be rebuilt or reconstructed in exactly the same way as it had been before, as close as possible without technical official slavery. he was ok with a kind of racial caste system in a way that lincoln was not. now, lincoln was also come as you said, a compromiser -- also, as you said, a compromiser. he would not necessarily have

insisted himself on the very most radical idea of a new south where there was full and immediate equality and voting rights for every black man or black person. he was trying different things in different states. at the end of his life, he was willing to accept a new constitution for the reconstructed state of louisiana, for example, which only theoretically allowed for black men to vote and in practice no black man was being allowed to vote and the most lincoln was willing to say was i wish they had allowed black men to vote or at least some to vote but at least they are loyal to the union. he was doing this state-by-state and operating on that principle i think i mentioned before where he said that equality is never perfectly attained but it can be constantly approximated, and i think through that period of reconstruction, he would have been trying at least to nudge things more toward the direction

of equality wherever he could, which is a different course than the actual president of those years attempted. host: and what about that second question, whether or not there's been a similar person or figure in u.s. politics post-world war ii? guest: thanks for following up. i hesitate to say anybody is a lincolnesque figure today because he is such a gigantic figure, but there are people who tried to follow him. there are politicians of the right and left who invoke lincoln all the time. donald trump did an interview once, a fox news interview with the lincoln memorial. every president invokes lincoln. some attempt to act as he did. i will mention without saying anybody is like lincoln, joe biden has attempted this kind of politics i described in the book, this kind of politics of reaching out to people you disagree with to find out if there's maybe one thing out of 10 that you agree on and can operate on, and biden was

criticized for this. in his first campaign, he made a few remarks about how, as a young senator in the 1970's, he sometimes works with segregationist southern senators, and he was fiercely criticized for this because our modern sensibilities you should ostracize people like that, you should isolate people like that, you should ignore and announce people like that, but i think biden understood the reality that even if somebody is wrong, like a segregationist senator would be, that person still has a vote, and in this case, one of only 100 and the senate, and sometimes you need that vote and can get it for something good. his idea was to get good votes out of people with bad ideas, which is a thing that lincoln attempted to do and often succeeded in doing. host: there's a question from another steve. there'a t of you out here. on x since we are on the topic

of lincoln, steve -- you have a great name, by the way -- we have the 14th amendment because of lincoln. is there not a more clearly worded amendment more understood than that one? guest: i should mention i guess we can say we have the 14th amendment because of lincoln, but it was drafted and passed after his assassination. lincoln was directly involved in getting the 13th amendment through congress just before his death. then it was sent to the people and ultimately ratified. that is the amendment that banned slavery. the 14th amendment was an attempt to effectively give life to an act -- life to and enact the 13th amendment by giving people equal protection under the law. that meant equal voting rights. it has a passage that is now much under debate and considered by the colorado supreme court among others stating that people

who have engaged in insurrection shall not serve in federal offices. that is the constitutional basis for what the colorado state supreme court has recently done in saying that donald trump cannot be on the presidential ballot because he's not eligible for a federal office. there are all kinds of debates about whether this amendment was intended solely to refer to confederates of the war that recently ended or whether it is meant to deal with insurrectionists of all kinds forever. i would note that it is in the constitution, which is permanent, and it does not say a specific rebellion or insurrection, so it seems to me as a layman, not a supreme court justice, that it does apply now, but it's a fair question as to whether it applies to donald trump in this circumstance. has he been convicted of anything yet, for example? does january 6 count as an

insurrection? these are questions that the supreme court will have to wrestle with, the u.s. supreme court will have to wrestle with ultimately, i think. host: darrell is in kentucky on a republican line. good morning. caller: thank you for taking my call. your comment about the 14th amendment, i think that anyone who runs for president should not be taken off the ballot of each state. he has the right to run. the supreme court should not rule on that in different states. the next question about abraham lincoln, why didn't lincoln have a security guard when he was assassinated by john wilkes booth? guest: there's a lot in that second one. let me address that first one

your. point of view as i understood it is that the people should vote and nobody should be taken off the ballot. i think as a general proposition that is a legitimate point of view. it is a small d democratic point of view. the opposite argument of course is that we don't have an absolute democracy. any of us cannot vote for anything at any time. we have a democracy within the rule of law and the fundament along is the constitution. so it's going to be fair to at least ask a court is this legitimate or not? does the 14th amendment apply in this way because the people, once upon a time, people who lived in this country before us, passed a particular law and made a part of the constitution and we need to operate within that law until such time as we collectively may change it? so i think your point of view is a valid point of view but it's also valid to hear what courts

have to say. your other question was why didn't he have more security guards at the time of his assassination? there are elaborate theories about this. so many what ifs. the simplest is what if general grant and his wife had accepted an invitation to accompany the lincolns to the theater? it is presumed general grant would have brought better security guards than the president had. what if the one guard that he did have had not moved out of his assigned position to get a better view of the play? there are so many what-ifs about this but one thing is certain, and that is that lincoln himself did not concern himself terribly with his own personal security and did not think it would make much difference anyway. there was an occasion during the war when one of his friends, joseph gillespie, a character in my book, one of the people a lincoln disagreed with but made friends with and dealt with,

came to visit him in washington and said he found the president walking alone on pennsylvania avenue and expressed concern for his security and said, what are you doing? why do you not have guards around you? and lincoln said to him, i think having a bunch of armed guards would be like putting up one fence rail on a fence when the whole fence is down all the way along. that was his analogy for it, which as a famous rail splitter, seems like inappropriate analogy -- like an appropriate analogy. host: paul is an indian on our independent line. caller: good morning. i read a book by egeland called napoleon: a political life and he differentiates between politics, which is the name-calling and negative advertising type of stuff, and the political, which is the use of statecraft and political capital to accomplish a goal. in the case of lincoln, of course, the unity of slavery. in the case of napoleon, the

removal of the laws against jews. i'm wondering if you find that analysis engaging. guest: let's figure this out. are you saying essentially the way this guy is using the language that politics is the bad stuff and political action is the good stuff? caller: yes. guest: i think that is fair enough. that is probably not the way i would use the words or draw the distinction and i would even add another thing. sometimes the bad stuff is mixed in with the good stuff and there certainly are occasions where that is true in lincoln's story. if we think about early in the civil war, when lincoln disregarded an order by the chief justice of the supreme court to apply the writ of habeas corpus, effectively bringing a man who had been arrested for rebellion into court to show charges against him or release him, and lincoln declined to do that, saying that

by his own personal reading of the constitution, he did not have to. that is an occasion where lincoln's authority i think was doubtful at best, but arguably for the greater good and arguably necessary in an unprecedented crisis. i think it would be hard to separate the good stuff from the bad stuff. now, with that said, there are politicians who appealed to our higher instincts and politicians who appeal to our darker instincts, our fears and are hatred -- and our hatreds. lincoln understood in appealing to people that he needed to appeal to their self-interest. he needed to tell them this is what is in my issue for you. this is why you should be concerned about that. and so, in a way, he was reaching to their fundamental concerns, their fundamental fears. he was speaking to who they were. having done that, he tried to pull them on a higher plane, the

most moral plane he thought he could get them to, rather than dragging them down. host: jess is in maryland on our democratic line. caller: good morning. i am a fan of yours on npr so i do appreciate your dialogue and insight. i'm currently teaching an english ap course and we were looking at lincoln's speech and i was listening to your information about his style. now, he may not have been a churchgoer, but he sure used a lot of biblical framework and a lot of comparisons in that gettysburg address, so i think what i'm hearing you say is that lincoln the politician used his rhetoric to persuade people to see the greater good through their own interests and that may

or may not have reflected how he felt personally. i think there is some debate on how he felt about slavery, though i think according to doris kearns goodwin, a young man found living like an animal when his father left, i imagine someone that poor have a difficult time not understanding that channel -- that human chattel is wrong. host: -- guest: i think he always felt slavery was wrong and he said so himself at the end of his life. he said i cannot member a time when i did not believe slavery was wrong. as far as his belief in god, you raise a good point. lincoln, whatever his personal beliefs, which we can talk about in a moment, lincoln used god and the language of god and biblical language and biblical allusions because it was a way that he could reach people. there was a kind of universal language in the 19th century,

when a far higher percentage of the country was more overtly christian then would be the case if we surveyed the whole population today. i think even today we can understand how universal biblical stories are and biblical languages. you and i are talking here a couple days before christmas and it's not that everybody here observes christmas but everybody in this country, to some extent, is suffused with biblical symbolism and understands what it is. it is a language that political leaders can use to reach a lot of people and i think lincoln understood that. lincoln also had private writings in which he referred to god. i think it would be very odd to think of him as some kind of atheist but he did not endorse any specific creed. he was not willing to give over his beliefs to any particular chain of belief or line of belief in christianity or any other line of faith, but

there is a private writing called meditation on the divine will, the term scholars give it today, a scrap of writing in which he says -- i'm paraphrasing -- the will of god prevails. now we have gotten into this war where each side believes that god is on their side but that cannot be true in both cases and it may be true in neither. god may have some purpose entirely separate from where the imagined purposes are of either side in this war and that is a profound thought that's reflected in some of his later public speeches after that meditation. host: william is in pennsylvania on our republican line. good morning, william. caller: the civil war was not about slavery. it was about the states fighting one another about money. can he talk a little bit about abraham lincoln's secret family?

and one more thing. i think it is christian and, two, later on, during the civil war, when you guys turned it into satanism -- host: he did not say the country was not christian. he says he does not have any sample of lincoln's writing saying this was a christian country. guest: why don't i pick up on the idea of what the civil war was fought about? he made the assertion, which is very common, so i'm glad he brought it up, the idea that the civil war was not about slavery. i think you said it was about states fighting over money. people say it is about states rights. the civil war was started by southern states over slavery for the purpose of preserving slavery and the reason we know this is because they said so, they publicly said so. one of the most famous examples, and not the only one, comes from

alexander stephens, who was the vice president of the confederacy, who in early 1861, as the war was about to begin, gave what is known as the cornerstone speech in which he said slavery was the cornerstone of this new republic that he and others were trying to found. he says explicitly in this speech that there had been in america up to them an idea of equality and that this idea of equality was an error. it was a mistake. other people at that time saw america as a land of equality where there was this aberration of slavery, this horrible, evil aberration of slavery that conflicted with the founding. stevens is saying the opposite, that equality is wrong, and we should build a new nation on this racial caste system, and this is a guy who was about to become the vice president of the confederacy. we can find other examples.

so i think we can believe the people who started the war and fired the first shot in why they did that because they so publicly said that it was about slavery. host: next up, we have sherry in richmond, virginia on our independent line. caller: good morning. first, i just wanted to acknowledge the people executed on december 22, 1862 under the order of president lincoln because they were revolting. i have a question. did lincoln ever interact with the europeans who came over, socialist europeans? you are talking about circumstances. what circumstances -- like, did lincoln actually care about the circumstances of africans who were enslaved, like the work from -- to sunset? did he care about them being

starved? you are talking about people's self interest. the self interest of the african and indigenous people were to be free. i don't understand how he actually cared about people. guest: the middle one i don't know anything about, so let me take the third in the first. the third was did lincoln care about the enslaved? that's a really interesting question because when you go into his speeches he does not ever say i had a long conversation with an enslaved man. he did have some and there's one that troubled him for years and he wrote two different long letters about. but it seems clear to me that lincoln did care about the rights of the enslaved, believed that their treatment was fundamentally wrong, and believed that all his life, and when i say that he was appealing to the interests of white voters, he was realizing he cannot do anything for a black man or a black woman and lessie got a white voter to understand -- woman unless he got a white

voter to understand why. that's one of the reasons he talked about equality. he talked about the quality of labor, the right to be paid for your labor. he said in one of his speeches that a black woman -- he specified a black woman, in fact. he said a black woman has the same right to be paid for your labor as i do or as you do, meaning the audience he was speaking to. that is a powerful statement and that is something that would resonate with white workers who wanted fair pay for their labor, and so it seems clear to me that he absolutely did believe in -- he absolutely did have concern for the horrible conditions that enslaved people were kept in. he has another speech where he talks about the structure of laws. he attacked the system, the slave system, and described it as a lock with 100 keys that could not be unlocked without

the concurrence of every key. he talked about the way the law after law after law was being added on top of a black man so that he could never have the slightest prospect of freedom. it seems to me he clearly did feel strongly about that. you have to remind me what the first question was. host: it was a story you lay out in great detail in your book about the 38 men. guest: we should talk about that. i really appreciated learning more about this. there are several different ways to understand this story of the execution, which is one of the things that is a criticism of lincoln. he oversaw the largest mass execution in american history is the way it is normally said. there were native people in minnesota who rose up in rebellion and had reasons to. there had been a treaty which white settlers were violating, which so often was the case throughout american history and of 19th century especially. there was a brutal revolt.

they killed women and children as well as men and then the revolt was put down by white troops and more than 300 men were captured and 303 of them were sentenced to death. and there was a general on the scene who wanted them all to be executed, said they all had committed sex crimes, raped women and so forth, had done terrible things, and lincoln said wait, wait a minute. send all the trial transcripts to me. and they were sent to the white house, where lincoln had two lawyers review them all, and the vast majority of them, more than 260 of them, lincoln commuted the sentences and forbade their execution. he did allow 39 and then one more was -- got a reprieve so it was 38. 38 executions went ahead for people who had been found not to participate in combat but to

have participated in massacres. and this is applying a fundamental principle of the laws of war. a soldier in any context is not supposed to be held morally responsible for being a soldier, for engaging in ordinary combat against another soldier, and lincoln felt those men should not be killed, but he approved the death sentences for others who had brutalized civilians, defenseless people in some way. now, we can still say that execution was fundamentally wrong. we can question the fairness of the military tribunals in which these men were tried but lincoln attempted to apply the rules of war here and it's a complicated story where there is a mass execution but an even larger mass commutation and i have heard that story told in different ways. it can be told as a story of his grace or his wisdom as well as a story of cruelty. it depends on how you look at it.

in dayton ohio on our democratic line. caller: good morning, steve. the history there is not too clamorous to a lot of people in this country. my question is, would your book be considered too woke? [laughter] guest: i don't have any idea if anybody is going to ban this book. i'm just trying to tell the truth. when i start one of these books i will suspend -- i will spend a couple of years researching. collectively i spent about a decade or more than a decade researching the 19th century, and i tried very hard to be fair and to be nuanced, and to get across the complexities and realities of people's lives. is that woke? i don't think so.

is it right wing? i don't think that either. i think it is the truth is i have found it. it is often a complicated truth. it is often a tragic truth. but it is also the story of how we got here. it is the story of how we inherited this great country that we have an opportunity to do something with. so, while it is difficult history, i find it on the whole inspiring. host: thank you so much. this is steve inskeep, who is the cohost of "morning edition," and author of the book "differ we must: how lincoln succeeded in a divided america." announcer: span's "washington journal" our live for him to discuss the latest issues in government, politics, and public policy from washington, d.c. and across the country. friday morning, you two are republican governor spencer cox

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