Tracing Lincoln’s unlikely comeback
Gary Ecelbarger wants to throw a few words at you — words you’ve probably never imagined in connection with Abraham Lincoln.
Like “failure.” And “ambitious.” And how about this one? “Middleground” seeker.
Maybe they aren’t concepts you’d normally associate with Lincoln, the great president of the American Civil War, and a man whose birth will be celebrated in 200th anniversary commemorations throughout 2009.
But Ecelbarger, a North Tonawanda native, has spent the past five years studying a pivotal 16-month period in Lincoln’s life, and he thinks those vocabulary words fit — so long as you understand the context.
The context happens to be the period from late fall of 1858 to the spring of 1860, and that is the territory Ecelbarger explores in his new book, “The Great Comeback: How Abraham Lincoln Beat the Odds to Win the 1860 Republican Nomination,” just out from St. Martin’s Press.
That time span saw Lincoln’s metamorphosis from a struggling man who had been twice defeated by Stephen Douglas for the U. S. Senate into a successful candidate who wowed crowds with compelling speeches and then captured the presidential nomination of the fledgling Republican Party.
“His rise was truly unprecedented,” said Ecelbarger. “You’re looking at an incredible comeback.”
Ecelbarger, who lives in Northern Virginia with his wife, Carolyn, a Georgetown professor, and three children, will give a talk on Lincoln in the North Tonawanda Public Library at 2 p. m. Nov. 29. The event is open to the public.
Read on for a Q-and-A with the author, who graduated from North Tonawanda High School in 1981 and has since written or co-written seven books.
It’s been quite a year for talk of meteoric rises in American politics. Is Barack Obama — or even Sarah Palin — a modern-day Lincoln, coming out of nowhere to win a spot on a major-party ticket?
“Nothing compares to Lincoln. And I’ll give you an example. The only way Barack Obama could have paralleled Lincoln’s career is if he had lost his [2004] Senate race — if he had lost two races and then run for the presidency. It’s inconceivable to think he’d even have a chance, today, running as a two-time loser.”
Why do a Lincoln book — and why one with such a specific focus?
The idea of doing it as a narrow time frame is important with Lincoln, because he is the subject of between 14,000 and 16,000 books. Several of them go from cradle to grave — so I can’t reinvent that wheel.
I’ve had a lifelong interest in Lincoln, ever since I went to Meadow Elementary School in North Tonawanda — I remember pulling books on Lincoln off the shelves.
[But] I’ve always been interested in what I call ‘Lincoln Before the Beard.’ The question is, how does a two-time Senate loser win his party’s political nomination just one year later? It’s an intriguing question. We always assume Lincoln’s greatness. The rest has been obscured.
What I found was a good rolling story of compelling drama.
So Lincoln was personally ambitious? That seems out of character with what we assume we know about him.
His law partner, William Herndon, said that Lincoln’s ambition was “the little engine that knew no rest.” [Yet] there’s always the conception that Lincoln was almost a passive, reluctant president. That he just went with the flow.
His ambition was what drove him. But what was unique about the 1850s was that you weren’t supposed to look ambitious. You weren’t supposed to be out there to seek public attention. You did it more as a statesman or a spokesman.
[Lincoln] had to fuel his ambition without appearing to be ambitious. This was all planned strategy.
Your book shows how Lincoln, working to win the Republican Party’s nomination in 1859, managed to present himself as a candidate that occupied the middle ground — even on issues such as slavery and abolitionism.
He had a great middle-ground message, and everybody in his party liked him. He had a nice message. But he also never stepped on toes.
You could draw a parallel here, to be even and balanced about it, to John McCain, the “middle-ground” candidate of his party.
But it will do damage to any current politician, to compare them to Abraham Lincoln.
He was a once-in-a-millennium president.
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