When Yale made the long-overdue decision to dename the Residential College Formerly Named After the Odious John C. Calhoun, a bunch of alumni--who had never before remarked on how odious John C. Calhoun had been--came out of the woodwork to protest that we will be impoverished if we do not memorialize even the bad parts of our history.
It seemed to me it would have been much better—shame on you, Financial Times—to mark the event by reprinting Hofstadter's Calhoun chapter on "The Marx of the Master Class", or the "Young Calhoun" chapter from Sidney Blumenthal's A Self-Made Man—the first volume of his in-progress series: The Political Life of Abraham Lincoln. So I wrote to Sidney asking permission to reprint the "Young Calhoun" chapter on my weblog. He passed it along to Simon & Schuster. Silence...
But the galleys of Blumenthal's second volume: Wrestling with His Angel showed up in my mailbox. It is excellent:
Sidney Blumenthal (2017): Wrestling with His Angel, 1849-1856 <http://amzn.to/2mgAPd9>
Five Orienting Questions:
- Stephen Douglas. What does Lincoln think of Stephen Douglas?
- "property acquired or located in good faith; but..."—what is going on here, both in Lincoln's mind and in how he is attempting to make a persuasive argument to his reader?
- What does Lincoln think of how the Democratic Party he confronts operates?
- Blumenthal portrays Lincoln from 1849-54 as desperately looking for a role and a place in American politics and governance. What were the places open to him as a moral agent in the 1850s? Did he ever really find one--did he ever become a Republican as Seward and Stephens thought of Republicans?
- Is the prominent place of the "house divided" metaphor in Lincoln's speeches and thoughts in the second half of the 1850s at all consistent with his proposed policies—to "do no more than oppose the extension of slavery..." and to preserve the union?