How a trip to New Orleans radicalized young Abraham Lincoln

David M. Rubenstein: The 19th century began with John Adams following George Washington as president. Was he popular?

Douglas Brinkley: He was. He was our top legal scholar during that period. He was also our first vice president, and nobody knew what a VP was supposed to do yet. He came into office popular, well liked, with a lot of integrity.

DMR: Adams wanted to serve two terms, but lost the election to his own vice president, Thomas Jefferson. How could he run against his own president with whom he was serving?

DB: During his presidency, Adams became entangled in the Alien and Sedition Acts. He tried to deport French people on American soil back to France. Jefferson was connected to that as his VP, but Jefferson was a Francophile. He and Jefferson had totally different views on what American democracy would be, and it became, I think, the most important election in American history. It gave birth to the political party system of today.

DMR: Before the 12th Amendment, a vice president could run against a president, because of the way the Constitution originally worked. Whomever got the most votes became president, and the second most became vice president.

DB: Exactly. Your VP was always ready to not only jump into being president, but to be the leader of an opposition party. The year 1800 defines where we’re at today—where you have two parties that go at each other.

DMR: How did Jefferson justify the Louisiana Purchase? He thought the government shouldn’t overreach, but buying that much land wasn’t approved.

DB: Jefferson wanted one thing—control of the city of New Orleans. It was assumed that the Mississippi River would be the end of the United States. He dispatched James Monroe, a future president, and Robert Livingston, an entrepreneur, to negotiate with Napoleon Bonaparte to buy New Orleans. Napoleon offered the entire Louisiana Territory for a song, as they say: $16 million and you double the size of America. Jefferson was elated. The problem was that Congress and the Senate were not enthused, and Jefferson had to sell it to Capitol Hill as a national security matter.

DMR: James Madison succeeded Jefferson as president and served two terms. He got into a fight with the British, resulting in the War of 1812. What was that war? Why did the British burn the White House and the Capitol Building?

DB: The War of 1812 is really a second American Revolution. There would be no United States without going through that grand ordeal. The British had designs on Canada, while we were fumbling around as a new nation. In a skirmish, we burned some buildings, which gave the British the excuse to burn Washington, D.C.—what a symbolic act that would be. So they burned the White House and the Capitol Building down. And then, fate: a big storm poured rain and blew off all the rooftops. Everything turned to mud. So even though the British burned Washington, they left in disarray. Madison went down in history as winning the War of 1812. But it was close.

DMR: Madison was succeeded by James Monroe. What was his famous Monroe Doctrine, and why did he issue it?

DB: From 1817 to 1825, Monroe tried to heal the nation after the War of 1812. On the surface, the Monroe Doctrine was about America not allowing the militarization of this hemisphere. Most of the world laughed at or ignored it; you can give a declaration, but if you don’t have a way to protect a hemisphere, it’s foolhardy. But that turns out to be a foundational document of principle that the United States has clung to. It gave the justification of a military doctrine for the Navy: We built the Panama Canal, and therefore, we can protect this entire hemisphere. Some see it as American arrogance. Others see it as an American sphere of influence.

DMR: Why did John Quincy Adams become a member of the House of Representatives for more than two decades after serving as president?

DB: John Quincy Adams wasn’t considered a very successful president. But when he left the White House, he impacted what the next president could do. He ran against slavery and won a seat in Congress. Imagine a former president just grabbing a desk, fighting against slavery for 16 years, being a leading abolitionist. His ability to pinpoint slavery as the issue that we had to rectify in order to be a union was exemplary.

DMR: The first president from the South was Andrew Jackson. What did he try to do as president? How has his image changed?

DB: Jackson was a military man. Coming from Tennessee, he represented “frontier democracy” and became a symbol of the nonintellectual side of America. His stock is sinking because we now consider his treatment of Native Americans—particularly the Trail of Tears—as a genocide. You can argue what that word means, but Jackson was different than other presidents on Native American issues. He wanted an extermination.

DMR:  What was the Alamo?

DB: The Alamo is shorthand now for 1836, when the independence movement of Anglo and German Europeans who had moved to Texas launched and symbolized their desire to break from Mexico. [Mexican president Antonio López de] Santa Anna’s troops defended the mission in large numbers, while a small group was determined to give their lives for independence. At the Battle of the Alamo, these men were besieged, but they held their own, knowing they’d probably die. They lost, but it created time for Texans to regroup and beat Mexico at the Battle of San Jacinto. So, for Texans, the Alamo is a place of manifest destiny.

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DMR: In the 1840s and ’50s, southern states increasingly enslaved people. Some in the northern states felt slavery was immoral and should be abolished. How did the government deal with this tension?

DB: That’s the crucial question in American history. One answer begins with transportation. Economically, the Midwest began connecting to the East, isolating the South. That meant you could ship goods from the Midwest to New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore, or Europe. Before this, you had to go down the Mississippi River to sell your produce. You’d get paid, then you’d work back via the Natchez Trace. Now imagine Abraham Lincoln as a young man going down the Mississippi from Illinois. When he saw the slave markets in New Orleans, his jaw dropped, because he couldn’t believe the inhumanity of it all. It was one thing to think people had slaves. It’s another to witness the horror of the slave markets. Brave voices—from John Quincy Adams to William Lloyd Garrison to Frederick Douglass—started demanding abolition. It created “the great divide.”

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DMR: Why were southern states so interested in having new states admitted to the Union as states where slavery was permitted?

DB: The balance in this period was trying to have an equal number of slave states and free states. So with the Missouri Compromise in 1850, you let Maine in as a free state, but you let Missouri in as a slave state. This, in hindsight, is a false errand. Once Britain did away with slavery, once the North industrialized, people started gathering to the abolitionist crusade, and the writing was on the wall.

DMR: How did Lincoln first come to public attention? What was his position on slavery?

DB: Lincoln lived in Springfield, Illinois. It allowed him to go all over the state because it’s centrally located, so he could travel around as a lawyer. His thoughts on slavery were an evolution, but I think his trip to New Orleans turned him toward finding slavery more morally repugnant. The question was, How does one politically eradicate this without just being a revolutionary?

DMR: Several southern states seceded from the Union upon Lincoln’s election in 1860. What were his feelings on this?

DB: Lincoln was first and foremost a Unionist. He wasn’t rabidly antislavery, but it was clear by his first inaugural address that this was the defining issue of his time. For him, it wasn’t abolitionists versus slave owners; it was Unionists versus Confederates. How could he pull himself—and the nation—out of this jam? One of the great reasons we honor Lincoln is because of how he handled this issue.

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DMR: Why were the Battle of Gettysburg and the Gettysburg Address so significant?

DB: The address wasn’t considered significant at the time, but what we’re awed by is Lincoln’s ability to write deeply, thoughtfully, and eloquently. You can marry the Gettysburg Address with the Emancipation Proclamation. All start to show a philosophy of Lincoln’s, which is that our nation had to rid itself of slavery. We had to stay together as a union, never separate. And that our Republic—our virtues, our liberty—were meant to succeed. No matter how bad another president thinks they had it, Lincoln had it worse.

DMR: How did Ulysses S. Grant emerge as the one Union general able to consistently win battles?

DB: In those days, you wanted to be good on a horse to be in the military. Grant was remarkable, but his other gift was his ability to write clearheaded battlefield reports. He wasn’t seen as a dandy; he was in the mud with the troops. And he’d lived in St. Louis, Galena, and Memphis, and that was the topography we needed to win.

DMR: Why did John Wilkes Booth assassinate Lincoln? Did he expect to become a hero?

DB: Booth was angry at Lincoln. I don’t think he wanted to be captured or was doing it just for headlines. He thought the war would continue if Lincoln was killed—that it might get another round.

DMR: Andrew Johnson succeeded Lincoln as president. Why was he impeached?

DB: It was a mistake, in retrospect, for Lincoln to pick Johnson for VP. But you can understand asking somebody from the South, if you’re trying to unite the country. But just because Appomattox happened didn’t mean all the sentiments healed overnight. Once Johnson came in, his Confederate sympathies started coming up. He started abusing power. He was impeached, and it deeply scarred his reputation. Johnson never purged himself of the Lost Cause of the Confederacy, and that’s what he needed to have become a successful president.

DMR : What were the impacts of the civil rights amendments to the Constitution?

DB: After the Civil War, you started seeing a great boon of Black participation in democracy. It brought Black America to a kind of equal footing, but of course it quickly would get squashed; the South wouldn’t tolerate it. They found ways to circumvent the law and do voting rights restrictions and keep Black Americans from having power. There was a very short-lived period of almost quasi-equality that was gone by the 1890s.

DMR: How did Ulysses S. Grant fare as president?

DB: Grant never ranked highly because there was a feeling that he either drank or played cards, or he wasn’t meant to deal with the bureaucratic inertia of being president, or he didn’t have a legal mind. But we now understand Grant’s attempt to heal the nation through Reconstruction as epic. He was trying to live by the spirit of Lincoln’s inaugural addresses, the Emancipation Proclamation, and the founding documents. But corruption started tainting him a little bit.

DMR: How did James Garfield get elected president, and what led to his assassination?

DB: Garfield was a first-rate soldier in the Civil War, brilliant and charismatic. There are indicators he would’ve been a great president, but he was shot early on. The assassination of Lincoln, followed by the assassination of Garfield, then the assassination of [William] McKinley, all make this a period of political violence—this killing of three presidents in a row. All Republicans.

DMR: How important was the transcontinental railroad?

DB: The transcontinental railroad, I think, is the epic moment during the Civil War that’s not about the war, per se, but Lincoln’s ability to win. It connected East to West, and that was game-changing. That railroad made the steamboat and horse and buggy seem antiquated. By the 1870s, America had become an industrial revolution giant.

DMR: What do you regard as the most significant occurrences of the 19th century?

DB: Our mindset of western expansion and this notion that we can defend the Atlantic and the Pacific. The culmination of the 19th century comes with the idea that we are willing to be a global power. There is isolationism there, but in the end, commerce and trade in a global fashion prevailed.

DMR: What person or people had the most impact on the 19th century, and why?

DB: Lincoln is in a category of his own. To inherit such a debacle, where the entire country was crumbling and whole states were saying goodbye—to persevere through that took a special kind of intellect, cunning, morality, humanity, and decency. We are very blessed to have had a figure like that at that time.