Source: CNN
There’s little doubt that Lincoln was one of the most influential and important leaders ever elected to the White House.
Yet his rise from obscurity to president wasn’t all on the up and up, as revealed in Sunday’sepisode of “Race for the White House.”
Getting the Republican Party’s nomination in 1860 and then defeating Democrat Stephen Douglas involved some sly political moves by Lincoln’s team.
He wasn’t above ‘dirty politics’
Lincoln’s 1858 Senate race against Douglas was dirty: Douglas even encouraged votes by providing liquor to those who supported him. It was a devastating loss for Lincoln — but when he sought the Republican presidential nomination two years later, he didn’t shy away from such maneuvers in his campaign.
“Even our greatest president, our most honest president wasn’t above a little dirty politics,” saidPaul Begala, a CNN contributor who was senior strategist for President Bill Clinton’s 1992 campaign.
Lincoln secretly purchased a German-language newspaper featuring favorable articles about him to help curry favor among its readers, mostly immigrant voters, Lincoln scholar and biographer Harold Holzer pointed out in a CNN essay.
Ahead of the 1860 Republican National Convention in Chicago, Lincoln’s campaign team, led by Judge David Davis, met with delegation leaders, sometimes promising Cabinet-level positions in exchange for support for Lincoln.
“They worked their way into every nook, cranny and snook-filled hall they could,” said Allen Guelzo, author of several books on Lincoln and a professor at Gettysburg College.
Lincoln’s campaign aides even printed out 5,000 counterfeit tickets to the Republican convention to pack the halls with his supporters.
“Make no mistake, Abraham Lincoln was chief political strategist: He relied on his aides maybe sometimes to do the dirty work, to be ruthless, to cut deals, but he was the lead dog,” said David Plouffe, President Barack Obama’s campaign manager in 2008.
He contemplated sending freed slaves back to Africa
Lincoln was firmly against slavery — yet his position on what should happen to freed slaves wasn’t so clear.
“The problem arises with the next question: What do you do with slavery, given that it’s unjust?”historian and author Eric Foner told NPR. “Lincoln took a very long time to try to figure out exactly what steps ought to be taken.”
Like this:
Like Loading...
Related
