>> to 7 p.m. or you can shop online at greenlight bookste.com and find the link directly to the book by page in the chat and arrange curbside pickup or get the book shipped to you if you are anywhere within the u.s. also a reminder in case you missed any part o tonight's event and want to indulge in a really watch or share with friends and family that missed out, tonight's event has been recorded and will be on the yoube channel in the next couple of days. thank you so much again, everyone and have a wonderful rest of your evening. >> now on c-span2 booktv more ce television for serious readers welcome to another biography event. i hope everyone is staying safe,

wearing masks and reading many biographies. i'm the director of the leon levy center for biography, a whole unique institution hosted by the graduate center of the state university of new york and founded by shelby white and the foundation in 2007. i want to thank shelby for her steadfast support for the biography it is her vision that has made this program possible. please note the next event is coming up in two days on this thursday october 15th aware of victor and i will interview larry tie on his biography of joseph mccarthy. tonight we are here to celebrate the publication of abraham

lincoln in his time a new biography of lincoln by david reynolds. this is his book launch and it has received * reviews in and publishers weekly and elsewhere though we encourage everyone to look it up on amazon or your own independent local bookstore. david reynolds is a professor at the graduate center and the author of walt whitman america a cultural biography, winner of the bancroft prize. his other books include beneath the american renaissance john brown abolitionist and mightier than the sword, uncle tom's cabin and the battle. he's the regular book reviewer for the "new york times" book review and "the wall street

journal." david will be in conversation with one of the leading historians since 19th century america. the pioneering works include the ruling race 1982, slavery and freedom and interpretation of the old south, the radical and the republican frederick douglas, abraham lincoln and triumph of antislavery politics. and his latest book freedom national the destruction of slavery in the united states 1861 to 1865. they will have a conversation for about 45 minutes and then take questions for ten or 15 minutes. please click on the question box below to type in your questions and jim will be sure to get to as many of you as he can and he

will try to end the program after about one hour eastern time. thanks to the foundation for funding and all of the other events. i now turn the conversation over to you. thk you. >> thank you for asking me to do this. real appreciate it and happy to do this because first of all, congratulations on your book. it is a terrific book. congratulations o the reviews. they've been terrific. david is one of my favorite cultural historian. it looks like i lost -- >> no, you're fine. this is one of my favorite and

that's because he brings to the study cultur history a certain virtue that isn always present among the cultura historians. first is a genuinelywesome cultural history from high to low and everything in between. he chose to gat effect. one ofhe effects of that vast knowledge is that he's always been sensitive to the conflict and the contradiion in the culture and says this is what american culture is like. ifhere are egalitarians there are anti-egalitarians. there are religious

conservatives and religious radicals. he brings that sensibility to bear also and including his greatest finally associated with that of the democratic sensibility that dsn't care much about that distition. and i think that it shapes the kind of subject for the american democracy and harriet beecher stowe. but also enormously popular and finally he quotes around 718

being attuned to the culture from opera and skespeare to the religious sensibilities of the age and ihink all of those viues show up in this book. let me begin b asking a fairly simple question what is t differenceetween the cultural biography and t best biographies by david. what they do generallys follow

his li, sometimes his litical context but they are kind of standard volume. michael does a wderful job then there's the kind of classic and donald says in the preface th is a biography from lincoln's point of vi because he didn't have much connection to the society and culture of his era. he was selfducated and donald even says he entered the pridency the least prepared of any president we've ever had and i guess i'm taking the opposite point of view emerson said of all the great heroes in history,

lincoln stands alone and you mentioned this just now from the highest to the lowest. emerson felt the same way about shakespeare that it uses all the scraps then he transforms them into something new and lincoln early on was a big fan of popular humor sometes but he also memorized the long poems and he didn' do this to impress peoplet cocktail parties. he did it becau the passages meant something to him and once

he read a passage aouple of times he had them memorized so in the middle of the presidency he would break out and one of the great shakespearean tragedies even on april 9th, from 1865 when lee was surrendering and lincoln was on a boatoing to virginia to washington and everybody around him was cheering. i guess today we would have sd missionccomplished but lincoln said i would rather talk about shakespeare. i would rather talk about longfellow. and they spent several hours discussing poetry from shakespeare and longfellow and others i his mind was on the 750,000 americans who died in the civil war.

that's where his mind was it wasn't mission accomplished or i'm the greatest or whatever. he was thinking about tho that had died. and it's quite movin and that's part of where his democcy comes from and hisbility to identify with people of all classes and allackgrounds. >> help us unrstand in the context of he fits into the culture d the middle-class marriage and was it a typical middle-class marriage and in an interesting section.

>> let me ask questions about this theme. why abraham -- >> he didn't like it when people called him abraham or honest abe. he knew that in 1860 he became belod so it feedsnto my whole idea in the book about the way that he identifd with average americans and the way they s him and loved him. so people ound him knew that he only wanted to be called lincoln. not even m president or abraham. he signed his name abe lincoln.

it's a tossup. >> honest abe or father abraham. >> that was another one. but there's a lot of nicknames for him. >> one of the things that runs all the way through the book is the cultural difference between the -- and he developed this own sense of himself as well as the culture at large and as well as the people at the time.

n you tell us all about that? >> a lot of people bac then thought the civil war w about the age old difference between the new england puritans, new england early on had been settled by the generation of puritans who were escaping persecution in england, on t one hand, andhe cavaliers who were supporters in eland and when cromwell and oers came to power, cromwell was a puritan. they were fleeing to ameca and settled to the south. so charles sumner to other two r people were saying it's basically a fight between new england, which included an anti-slavery standpoint by the way and the cavalier that

depended on the kind of hierarchy institutions and including the institution of slavery. lincoln was aware but someone at the time said the great thing is that he combines the puritan and cavalier and i can't explain that in the book because his earliest ancestor on his father's side came over in 1637. they were puritans that became baptist eventually, but on that side he comes back to puritan new england and on his mother's side there was illegitimacy in the background. he wasn't sure who his grandfather was, but he was convinced that it was virginia planter, a man of sort of aristocracies of the south, that

kind of thing. so in a way, he associated with a sense of honor, so both the puritans and the cavalier are running through even if they didn't want to identify with either side because it's more of a puritan background. it turns out only one of his great-grandmothers, rebecca powers but they said he was from quaker background. they were accepted by both the puritans and they were kind of a buffer. you would think that they would hate the quakers because they were antislavery but no, they were also has a vast. even during the civil war they were conscientious they didn't want to go to battle over the opinions although they morally opposed it.

so they were okay with the south but they were also sort of beloved in the north early on and of course they had been persecuted and hanged. but by this time in the middle of the atlantic states and pennsylvania and they were kind of a buffer between the puritans and the cavalier and i discuss in my book how lincoln kind of emphasizes that in his background. >> i am surprised again to see how many people at the time but they've understood they didn't like this image and they were

stereotypes of each other's section and how they stereotype each other. >> i think they can even in our culture as back then become caricatures. these were definitely caricatures by the time in the 19th century when all of this was being talked about m, both e dismissed but that image overwhelmed a lot of people there would be nothing but hate. it was kind of a ridiculous point of view but it was

accepted. >> and they saw and they were also very materialistic and kind of low. when it's the party aristocratic and they were on their porches.

>> that runs through the book. he has a short history viewed as the difference between the good and the cavalier. >> it is still there to some degree. let me ask another theme that shows up. once it shows up, it's there and i remember it loomed a bit larger but in the middle of the 19th century, niagara falls was

a huge deal and a lot of people used it including lincoln himself. but there is an incident in 1858 that also happens and becomes a metaphor that you see. [inaudible] >> it was a great tourist attraction they then went over the great lakes back to chicago and he lived in illinois. he was stunned by the spectacle

and part of my book is influenced by the school of thought called post-humanism and that is the effect that nature and things and today, even right now we are very much experiencing the post-human experience because we are speaking the way we do because of things and other times it is a hurricane. he was immersed in the very beginning. he totally lived off of the forest and was surrounded from the beginning i kind of savage nature and when he sees niagara

falls its overwhelmed by the energy and power of it but it makes him a thing can kind of a post human way the spectacle has been here ever since ancient rome. all the civilizations. this has been a constant throughout history. so in a way he was expanding backward in time but thinking of this thing in front of him in niagara falls and thinking how immense it was. it made him think of all of the people coming to view it because at that time as you mentioned they ran into it and were channeled and part of my book is also how he channeled so many streams of culture. i'm not saying he became niagara

but he became a channeling focus. he would push a wheelbarrow across and carry a man on his back across niagara falls. he would do flips and walk across on 4-foot stilts. but lincoln said that's me. several times he compared himself to write in the middle. why? because he was living in such a divided time he knew the worst thing he could do is poor more gasoline on the flame of division to step off that tightrope and people would say why can't you make this a more anti-slavery war from the very beginning and he said if i were

blond anblonde and carrying thee nation's future in mind wheelbarrow would you be yelling walean left, lean right, jump u, jump down or keep right in the middle because this is the best way to do it and it preserves the union. one reason why, he said if we lose kentucky we are going to lose everything. there were border states that still had an enslaved people and they were loyal to the north. we lose some of these states we lose the war. so he had to stay in this tight rope to keep the states in the union. >> it seems to be between his deep moral conviction and the need to build and then hold

together a political coalition that a lot of people didn't share as the anti-slavery. so it's between morality and strategy. >> he was morally opposed to slavery. he was struggling to get ahead politically and strategizing early on and even during his presidency he had to sort of behave a little more conservatively.

>> that shows up now. he grew up he had no reason to doubt but race is a different thing. in the middle of the 19th century one of the things they were actively trying to do is

the issue is slavery. they trip over themselves and one of the things you do and so few people can do is place the view of race in the context of the larger culture. why don't you talk a little bit about that in particular the significance that you attribute. >> i mentioned earlier in the debates with stephen douglas but

he was a thoroughgoing racist and frederick douglass. and at the time he had this law that went into effect that frederick douglass called the worst black law of any state in the union that you couldn't enter for more than ten days or you would be fined and kicked out of the state. it was a terrible kind of environment and even cherry picked certain things but then later on during his presidency.

he kept corresponding with several of them while he was in the white house and then while he was in the white house, frederick douglass who first thought he was quite conservative on slavery met him a couple of times and it came out of this thing this is the least prejudice white person i think i've ever met and the same thing with sojourner truth and she said before i die i want to meet this guy and she had a delightful time with him and felt very, very close to him. and martin who was a black nationalist and militant became lincoln appointed him the

highest army officer. he didn't get to a server because the war was almost over and when lincoln died, he cried for like half a day and he proposed a monument that would be an african-american woman kneeling with 4 million tears coming out of her eyes and each being paid for by a penny from each of the enslaved so on a personal level very close and he also grew to respect the way they fought. if you've seen the movie glory there were other battles in which they felt were the same devotions and sometimes even

more energy and self-sacrifice so he really, really admired that. but he also relied on a popular humorist who was fighting the war on race on the cultural front and he impersonated the copperheads who were the opponents, they were the conservative democrats. back then the democrats were mainly conservative so he impersonated and today it's hard for us to read this humor all he was doing was impersonating these racist copperheads. people would laugh about this and several people said he was

just as great a force as sherman order and in defeating slavery because he was so popular and lincoln would carry in his jacket the papers and the sketches and would read them and he once said i would give up my presidency if i could write like this guy. so it shows how deep his history of racism was because he makes them look very, very ugly and disgusting and it's almost as if saturday night live skit say against a political figure were accepted as a huge cultural force. i think today we are so dispersed in the culture.

it seems to mean mos me most ofe when lincoln uses the n-word he is doing what you do, he tends to use it in a way that is satirical by putting it in the mouth of his opponent.

when i first encountered his humor in the newspapers it's disgusting and so offensive and then i thought he's being funny. he is disgusting and appalling and i suddenly realized, he was criticizing lincoln left and right and what happens is david ross locke met lincoln back in the 50s and i almost think that in his as you say satirical use of the word sort of impersonating during the debates might have influenced him in this sense because he never had written that way before and he had a long interview because he

heard over the debates and he was a reporter at that time. he met them in his hotel room and they were discussing stephen douglas at great length and detested stephen douglas. i wouldn't be surprised if he heard lincoln impersonating because it was like two years later that he comes out with the first sketch. so it's a direct connection from the very beginning. but it could be a case where lincoln who had a sense of humor anyway and used it against douglas might have prompted something. >> there is a minor strain in the sentiment of the political culture that does that and it's the famous exchange between

william seward the leading republican of the day and he behooves the idea on the grounds no one could be. nevertheless we are catching lincoln increasingly appalled by the explosion of the demagogic racism and particularly for him. unlike what you can say about this from the very beginning he

does grow. in the 1830s he introduced a bill that would give the right to vote to all white men and exclude and yet. at the end of his life he was the first president to publicly endorse the right to vote and he's grown dramatically. he said he didn't mean to use the word and citizenship. i'm going to put this man through.

booth was a white supremacist and so forth. but yes, slowly i think that he did progress. i agree in that sense and others that by 1864 he's already sending a letter. they do -- [inaudible] despite some of the remarks you

mentioned i do not now and never have supported. despite that, much of what he had to say what he had to say is right from the beginning in the speech he says that over and over again. he says those things over and over again whereas when people talk about him they pick these decisions out that are merely

driven by the incredibly demagogic racism. >> i put him in this culture in the 1850s because the reason harriet beecher stowe's uncle tom's cabin made such an impact was a fairly simple thing and it showed that enslaved people were human beings with real feelings, family feelings, with a sense of humor and a love of music. today, to us that seems very old-fashioned or something to think about. but i enslaved people were being treated as things, as property. they were not really human beings. and all of this was supported by the pseudoscience of that era,

some of which said that african people were of a different species, and there was some of that going on. it was all kind of a pseudoscience and even religiously supported by supposedly the curse of hand in the bible and all of that. lincoln cuts right through that in the speech and says these are humans. enslaved people are fellow human beings. even to say that, he doesn't go on and on about it but he says that's my fundamental point of view. even though he progresses, he doesn't really move beyond that basic fundamental understanding of the humanity of enslaved

people. >> just to see if there are any questions as the view changed over the years or a whereas youe writing this book? >> it did change a lot because i had read the wonderful biographies of other people. i really thought that in a way he was like a star in the heavens and wrote a poem saying lincoln will always be the western star in the landscape and that is the way that i viewed them as distant and being surprised and thrilled by the fact he was so incredibly involved in the culture.

i like to always bring it back to lincoln because he is truly at the center of my book and so that was a wonderful surprise. i couldn't place him and my interest was on the political antislavery and the more it seemed to me -- >> in the forthcoming book let

me ask a question before we go on about lincoln's private life. it was a very sensitive and evenhanded [inaudible] but also an interesting. on the other hand it was also very different. in what way was it different or representative? >> it was different in the sense of that american culture back then was quite patriarchal and women give up their property.

there was a thing by which that's part of the reason seneca falls happened in 1848 to protest. mary todd lincoln in a sense was domestic and took care of the kids and all that, but she was very independent minded and she was not afraid of expressing her political opinion. as parents they were kind of unusual because back then people didn't mesh their kids a lot but gave quite a lot of latitude. there were certain limits but lincoln would be in his office in his voice would come in and upset and scatter the ashes and

he is law partner said if his kids shad and his hat, lincoln would rub it on his boots and he would never approve of it. he admitted the time to get pokey what them have fun and enjoy themselves and one of the oldest who used to be a prankster became quite. to others unfortunately died while lincoln was at the white house and had died at age 18 that was mischievous and would come to the cabinet meetings and climb on his shoulders. another very unconventional thing is the fact that during

the law when they lived in springfield, lincoln was away for almost half the year because he was on the circuit. back then the little towns didn't have lawyers, so a bunch of them had to go to these little towns about the size of connecticut. so he is gone about 120 days or years of that was a little unconventional the big spaces and their togetherness and it sort of developed a sense of independence on the part of mary todd lincoln you and i could answer quickly and i will run through those is there any

evidence that he was willing to let the winner appoint [inaudible] and there's no reason he would have made the observation until september so my sense is that it never came up. >> no, no, it never came up. i will say that he had written in august, he had written a note saying it kind of looks like i am going to lose and he wrote a note to his cabinet and he sealed it in an envelope. it appears at that time because it was going very badly. and i just want to have a fair election and smooth transition. he assumed he was going to lose. but we don't really know about the supreme court. >> did he keep a diary of any

kind? >> no, unfortunately. even the diligent michael burling game has not. here's one what's your opinion of the material? he was going to quit acting and retire. i'm going to go buy a gun. you are not allowed to retire. it takes a little latitude here and there but i think that he did a really great job.

>> i don't really believe that about guns. >> how woul >> how would you describe lincoln's leadership? >> his leadership style was relaxed, casual and at the same time could be very firm. at the beginning of the war just before it broke out six or seven people around him said we have to strike a compromise here. let them if they fire on fort sumter it's worse and he called up 75,000 troops. it was war. another good thing about him was

he managed to negotiate with people on kind of a friendly level even people like mcclellan who ended up being very ineffective on the battlefield. he managed to finesse that relationship enough that he could work his way through it could no longer be thought with squirt guns full of rosewater. it had to be a hard war. grant and sherman were the two people he finally ends up with them and they finally invade and

finish off the civil war so i think that he did a great job and he also finessed his cabinet pretty well. >> two things that strike me as i was reading the book is he came into his relationship without putting his ego on the line. mcclellan was horrible to him. >> even his cabinet. they said you can hire him as your secretary of the treasury.

listen, he feels so much more superior he says really that is exactly the kind of person i want around me. he didn't want personal loyalty. he didn't hold hard feelings and is the one that ultimately ends up on the supreme court so even after he fires sam and chase and he knows he tried to replace him, we know all of that but he didn't hold any sense of personal disloyalty but it was in a very difficult circumstance he didn't care about this stuff and the other thing was

ideology. you do a very nice job of showing how when the radical republicans were sort of demanding that he only hire someone who will fight and win battles and if they fight with battles don't care if it's a democrat or, if a radical general like let's say piedmont can't do it. >> in the lincoln douglas debates and so forth this was his favorite general and the same with sherman frankly he was

quite racist and he thought that frankly. he was a wonderful general he writes that amazing note and hires her and says i'm heard in ways that lead me to believe because for a dictator. all of the generals. it's a wonderful letter. >> the one that he writes to grant i wasn't sure you could do

this. i just want to go on the record of saying i was wrong and you were right. let's take one last question because this is a different one. how was i reconstruction have bn given? >> now we get into the counterfactual history. my belief, and i don't know if you agree with me he certainly would have handled it much better than andrew johnson did he would have wanted to support the freedmen's bureau and 40 acres and a mule and he was

such a belief in free labor and formerly enslaved people. advanced with politically and economically. as you say it's all counterfactual. there would have been a lot less drama between the white house. >> i don't know about the 40 acres and a mule.

it was the mainstream of the republican party politics even that sherman order everybody talks about it's very clear that this is a contingent grant of land now that was taken over by a lot of the railroads and that kind of went to hell later on but he had the concept probably 40 acres and a mule that was like a metaphor for the

advanced. whether in the long run it would have changed because john hope franklin in passing said sooner or later the federal government was going to lead this out and controlling the south would return to the white majority and so whether it would have turned out all that different in the end is hard to say because it might have stayed more or less the same until then with less drama and no impeachment.

.. >> let me give you an alternative scenario to be in his own standing believe that there was a majority in the south that was hostile. it's not hard to imagine the republican party would have had an easier time building that by racial coalition it is trying to build.

>> it may have made a difference. certainly back then maybe not in the ultimate long run. with the early 20th century and the birth of the nation and all that. >> this has been great thank you again for asking me to do this. >> thank you. i hope all the viewers thank you so much it has been great thanks a lot. >> the viruses bring out and as a suicide pact.

the founders of this country understood that powerfully. and in the 17 nineties died of yellow fever. and for 1 percent of the population have died of covid in the last six months and 10 percent have died. and the federal government for philadelphia so i grew up with this but this is a terrible way to do with infectious disease and collective authority through the democratic process one way to think about it for freedom comes from the government and then to work collectively through the government with

vaccines to help us flourish and deep american history. >> this is aantastic so the first speaker will bjoann mcneil author of the book working however person is the inaugural winner of the our foundation for emerging writers and the structure