Thread by @dhmontgomery

Reading HW Brands’ “The Zealot & The Emancipator,” I was struck by a good way to analogize Lincoln’s famous lack of political experience — a single, decade-old term in Congress, and a few even older terms in the state legislature, before an unsuccessful bid for U.S. Senate. 1/

2/ It’s not that Lincoln was an outsider, like Zachary Taylor, elected president on the basis of his war heroism despite having never served in any prior political office and indeed never really expressing any political beliefs. Lincoln was intensely involved in IL politics.

3/ No, Abraham Lincoln in the 1850s was the 19th Century equivalent of a modern cable news commentator.

4/ What Lincoln was famous for was his role as a speaker on behalf of the young Illinois Republican Party. He’d travel around the state, speaking at Fourth of July celebrations and other public gatherings — often paired up with people of other political persuasions.

5/ The public knew and liked Lincoln because he was an engaging speaker with a knack for distilling Republican arguments down into understandable, persuasive chunks.

The 19th Century equivalent of a cable news commentator.

6/ Brands: “Lincoln didn’t run for office again, not yet. Instead he campaigned for Whig candidates around Illinois, which meant taking on [Stephen] Douglas, who was campaigning for Democratic candidates… Political speeches in those days were high entertainment.”

7/ Lincoln was at first primarily famous as a LOCAL commentator, in Illinois. But his debates with Douglas gave him national prominence, and he started doing speaking tours around the country, which won him more support.

8/ When Lincoln expanded beyond Illinois, he first went to other western states, like Ohio and Kansas. “Republicans in Kansas had favored William Seward as the most forthright of their party on the slavery question, but Lincoln won many over on his visit to the territory.”

9/ Despite the fact that Lincoln was not publicly running for president at that time, and was publicly coy about the possibility, people who saw him came away wanting him to run for president; he was sometimes introduced as “The next president” at speaking events.

10/ The key moment for Lincoln’s national political career was early 1860, when the Young Men’s Republican Club of New York invited him to speak there. Some were curious to see Lincoln; others just hoped “the rustic westerner would afford the city folk an evening’s entertainment"

11/ This was his famous Cooper Union speech, delivered at the Cooper Institute in NYC. It was such a success that he was bombarded with other speaking requests in eastern states, turning his NYC visit into a regional speaking tour.

12/ After this, Lincoln was now a national figure (at least in the North), and widely talked about as a presidential candidate. Seward was still the front-runner, but Lincoln cannily positioned himself as an uncontroversial alternative, and won the 1860 nomination.

13/ And so, when nominated for president — at a time when the Democrats had fractured and the Republican nominee seemed the prohibitive favorite — Lincoln was famous mostly as a speaker and debater. He had the bare minimum of conventional qualifications, but it was enough.

14/ You might argue there are better analogies for a modern TV commentator than Lincoln, such as actual media figures like Horace Greeley (who himself ran for president in 1872). But these newsmen debated via the written word. Lincoln was a speaker.

15/ Now, Lincoln was extremely literate, and a huge part of his success — as @baseballcrank points out — was that his speeches were often reprinted, verbatim, in newspapers, exposing people who hadn’t seen Lincoln to his arguments.