Brianna Datta-Barrow: Well, thank you so much for taking the time to meet with me today and speak with me.
Steve Inskeep: Glad to be here
Brianna Datta-Barrow: I’ve really been looking forward to this opportunity. And I love the book.
Steve Inskeep: Oh, thank you.
Brianna Datta-Barrow: Yeah, very different from how I, you know, was taught about Lincoln growing up in school, as this moral hero.
Steve Inskeep: Oh, wow.
Brianna Datta-Barrow: So, to understand the nuanced political strategist that he was, was a fascinating read-especially with the context you put everything into.
Steve Inskeep: That's cool. Glad you like it. Thank you.
Brianna Datta-Barrow: So, there's many different books on Abraham Lincoln, but Differ We Must: How Lincoln Succeeded in a Divided America takes a very different approach. You understood Lincoln through the lens of 16 different people that Lincoln disagreed with. Why did you take that approach?
Steve Inskeep: It sort of grew on me. I wanted to try to tell his story through his face-to-face encounters with different kinds of people, and that's how I started the book. And in fact, there were mostly different characters in it. I kind of went through his life and was putting together different people who were interesting.
But I realized, as I did it, that the essence of the story and the thing that was relevant to now in our moment in history is not just the difference, but the disagreement. And so he's meeting with all different kinds of people, different races, different genders, different political views, pro slavery, anti slavery. They're not all his allies. Some of them he tries to make his allies. Many of them are his absolute rivals or enemies, even enemies in war.
But always, he's coming to that conversation, that face to face conversation, trying to get something out of it, trying to win them over, which doesn't always happen, or outmaneuver them or manipulate them because he is a politician, or at least learn something from the exchange, which can sometimes feel like a lost art or a lost skill in our time.
Brianna Datta-Barrow: So, I'll go to my next question then. So, you published this book back in 2023. Was there a conversation or a moment that you had that sparked your desire to write this book?
Steve Inskeep: Well, it began during the pandemic. I started the research in early 2020, and I'd been thinking about Lincoln for, well, really all my life. I grew up in Indiana. Of course, Lincoln spent most of his childhood in Indiana, his youth in Indiana. And so you get a lot of Lincoln propaganda growing up, I've always been interested in him. And of course, millions of people are and I had, like, books of his speeches, and would sometimes just read them, and I loved his use of language, his sense of humor and his clarity and a lot of other things.
So I'd always been interested in Lincoln, but it's intimidating to try to write a book about Lincoln, because there's so many 1000s of others. What could I possibly say that is even a tiny bit original, but I wrote two other books about the 19th century, two other histories, one about Andrew Jackson the Cherokees, and one about John Charles Frémont, who was this famous explorer, and his wife, Jesse Benton Frémont, and Lincoln kept coming up, and I began to think that maybe I did have something a little different to say.
And you know, you can read it and decide if you think it is particularly different than any other book that's out there. But one thing about history in general, and Lincoln in particular, is he's super famous, and there's all this information about him, but then you bring yourself to that conversation, and in that very rich record, what compels you and what feels relevant now at your moment in time, and among the various mysteries that there are about Lincoln's beliefs and actions even now, what compels you to think about them?
And so, you know, I dove in.
Brianna Datta-Barrow: I can't imagine how long that research must have taken you.
Steve Inskeep: It was a couple of years. Yeah, a couple of years.
Brianna Datta-Barrow: Yeah. It was a fascinating read, though.
Steve Inskeep: Thank you.
Brianna Datta-Barrow: There were several very interesting characters, from Joshua speed to Frederick Douglass, William Seward to the Frémonts. I was particularly moved by Owen Lovejoy and the devotion to his brother and taking on his brother's cause. Of all these 16 relationships you wrote about, which one do you feel best demonstrates Lincoln's political pragmatism?
Steve Inskeep: Wow. One that's really straightforward and impressive to me is his meeting with Frederick Douglass, and this is relatively late in the Civil War. It's after the Emancipation Proclamation has come out. Frederick Douglass, of course, had escaped from slavery and was an advocate for abolition, and he was both an ally and a critic of Lincoln, an ally because he knew Lincoln was on his way to the right thing, a critic because he didn't think he was getting there quick enough.
And Douglas came to complain to Abraham Lincoln in the White House to say, Hey, thanks for the emancipation proclamation and all that. And good idea enlisting black soldiers in the army, something that Frederick Douglass had urged long before, but I'm outraged that these black men are in the army, risking their lives for a little more than half the pay of white soldiers.
And they had other disadvantages as well. And Lincoln had to kind of admit that this was true, and to say that, you know, we're working on it, you. It's a new thing to have black men in the army, and it was hard even to get them in, and so we didn't exactly get them in on equal terms, but I think it was worth the experiment to see what happened, and that it would be good for black people and good for white people. And ultimately, they did get the pay raised.
And Douglass comes away from that meeting saying that he thinks he writes in a letter, actually, that he thought Lincoln's point of view was reasonable. That's the word that he uses. Obviously, Douglass did not change his moral beliefs. Equality is what he's after, and this was not equality.
And Lincoln wasn't even going to say, I'm going to fix it today. He's like, I'm going to fix it as soon as I can. But Douglass understood that, because even though he was very moral and very right in his argument against slavery, he was also pragmatic. He was politically pragmatic, as Lincoln was, too, and they were doing what was possible.
You asked for one. But I just want to mention briefly that a number of these 16 people were on the other side of the discussion entirely. There's a couple of them that were slave owners, and another one that wasn't a slave owner. He was a northern man, but his point of view was basically arguing for the South. And Lincoln would engage with those people too.
We are sometimes told not to take that risk, because you might get contaminated somehow by this awful person. But Lincoln didn't even accuse them of being awful people. He would often think that they're good people, or they're nice people, or at least people he can get along with, but they're in an evil system. They're part of an evil system. So he didn't make politics personal. He was always thinking about what advantage he could gain in the situation.
Brianna Datta-Barrow: That's fascinating, and I loved the greeting that Lincoln gave Douglass when he first arrived at the White House.
Steve Inkseep: Just standing up and greeting him. Yes, and not only saying welcome, in a way that immediately in Douglass' account made Douglass feel welcome. And it was very rare that a black man had approached any president on terms of equality, if it had even happened.
But then Lincoln went on to acknowledge that he'd been reading in the newspaper speeches of Frederick Douglass, including at least one where Douglass had torn up Lincoln, which Douglass did a lot he wrote really disparagingly of Lincoln. And one of the remarkable things about that encounter, to me, is that it happened at all.
That Douglass openly, fiercely criticized the President of the United States who didn't say, I want retribution for this, or I'm shutting you off, or I won't see you. And there's a lot of presidents who would not have taken that meeting. He said, Fine, come over, because there's some business we can do.
Brianna Datta-Barrow: I think that was what struck me so much, was just the warm greeting after all of that. Yeah. So your book uses Lincoln's political strategy, not just as a historical study, but as a lens on the American experience itself. Why do you think that Lincoln's ability to navigate conflict and disagreement still matters so much today?
Steve Inskeep: Oh, wow. I mean, part of it is just the story that he was part of. Right? He happened to be president in the Civil War, and it worked out for the better. I think we would nearly all agree. Maybe there are still some people who wish it was otherwise, but he was there for such a crucial moment of history, and that makes it matter. And it's a story that resonates on so many different levels.
For Americans, we have what you could call a civic religion, in a sense, the things that we believe in as Americans. And I don't mean in terms of faith, but in terms of faith in the country, if you will. And Lincoln is central to that. It's actually kind of amazing.
When you start researching Lincoln, you realize that every word he has ever known to have spoken or written has been collected into a set of books, and every artifact that he's known to touch have touched, is collected somewhere, including some of them in the very building that we're in, as I understand it. And it's almost as if he was Jesus Christ. Any little, any little swatch of the shroud, any little slice of the cross, is something that people hold on to, because he represents something really important about this country, and I think that for many Americans, he also is a kind of Christ, like figure who died for the nation's sins, if you will.
And I'm expressing many people's points of view here when I say this, and so people feel that story very strongly. But his practicality also is important. The fact that he was a country lawyer, that he was an ordinary guy, he's a seemingly ordinary guy who rose to great heights is very inspiring and says something, says something about America. And ultimately, the fact that he was a politician too is important.
I mean, Doris Kearns Goodwin has this super, super famous book Team of Rivals, and I was trying to do something a little bit different and a little broader. But anybody who writes about Lincoln owes something to Doris for that book. And there are other books that we could go through that just talks about. How shrewd he was, how practical he was.
David Herbert Donald and other great biographers of Lincoln, talks about how, you know, ducks and weaves and so forth, and that's a lesson for us all, because we don't all get to be saints.
We don't all get to be perfect. And in fact, democracy is an art of imperfection. Nobody ever gets everything they want in a democracy. So, you get everything that you can and hopefully move forward in the right direction.
Brianna Datta-Barrow: Compromise.
Steve Inskeep: Yeah.
Brianna Datta-Barrow: At its core, what do you believe that Lincoln's story reveals about who we are as a nation?
Steve Inskeep: I think that what Lincoln's story tells us is what we would like to believe about ourselves on our best day. And I alluded to some of those things, the idea that someone could be born in poverty and rise to the top. Now, we can look around and say, well, the odds are really against that there's a lot of inequality in this country, and I can't argue with that, but it's inspiring to have that ideal in front of us.
I'm thinking of, well, this is a weird analogy, but I'm just going to make it. I don't know if you've ever seen the movie Hoosiers.
Brianna Datta-Barrow: I have.
Steve Inskeep: Of course you have. She's like, yes, of course. In Indiana, what are you talking about Inskeep? Well, I love that movie, and it's loosely inspired by a true story of a tiny town and their basketball team that went and won the state championship at a time when all the big schools played against the small schools and everything else. It's really inspiring. I guess it's also kind of sappy and over the top and everything else, and Gene Hackman and Barbara Hershey and Dennis Hopper and everybody else is in that.
But what that says to me, something about something real, something true about Indiana. It is what we would like ourselves to be.
Brianna Datta-Barrow: Yeah, we love an underdog.
Steve Inskeep: and Lincoln's story is what we would like ourselves to be as Americans.
Brianna Datta-Barrow: Love that. And, yeah, just learning about, I didn't know that his parents couldn't read, and he taught himself to read, and how he studied people, yeah. Very fascinating.
Steve Inkseep: Less than a year of formal schooling. It just blows your mind.
Brianna Datta-Barrow: Beyond deepening an understanding of who Lincoln was, what do you hope that people take away from this book?
Steve Inskeep: I hope in our divided times, they take away an idea of the complexity of civic life and of politics, and there's two things in particular. One is not to ostracize or isolate the people who disagree with you, because they still have a vote and they may well beat you at the next election, and so you want to engage with them, and that doesn't mean they will always agree with you or that you're going to be converted to their side, but, but you need to work on that.
And there's a related thing, which is the importance of coalitions. Lincoln brought all kinds of people into a coalition to save the country, including people who were on the other side about slavery, literal slave owners. And I think we would all agree again, I hope nearly all of us would agree that they were doing the horribly wrong thing in an absolutely evil system, but they were still citizens of the country with a certain amount of power that Lincoln made use of, and ultimately they played a role in ending slavery, and that's part of the complexity of democratic life.
Brianna Datta-Barrow: Differ we must.
Steve Inskeep: Indeed.
Brianna Datta-Barrow: Thank you so much for your time today, Steve, thank you for speaking with me.
Steve Inskeep: I'm glad to do it.
Zach Bernard: “America was a beacon of freedom that was also an empire, a nation of immigrants that was suspicious of immigrants, a country of faith that was all about the money and a land of equality that made people unequal in the eyes of the law.”
That's a quote from Differ We Must: How Lincoln Succeeded in a Divided America. We talked to him before he took the stage at the ACPL’s, One County, One Book, community discussion. You heard him here on WBOI.
