Ever since Theodore H. White’s The Making of the President 1960, book buyers have been treated to the quadrennial offerings of presidential-campaign tell-alls. Many of these offer very little beyond cheap political thrills—White’s 1960 book reads like JFK fan fiction—but the genre is not without its valuable examples. White’s own The Making of the President 1968 is a bracing analysis of a decisive moment in our national history. And political scientists like Gerald Pomper, Paul Abramson, and Jack Pitney have written on elections from a more scholarly angle, bringing rigor and depth to the narrative. But even these works, fine as they are, can only tell us so much. After all, the full import of an election can only be grasped when it is placed in context of the events that preceded and followed it.
So it is unsurprising that the best books on campaigns these days are of the historical variety. The University Press of Kansas inaugurated its fantastic American Presidential Elections Series over a decade ago—and it continues to produce good work, with entries this year on the elections of 1860, 1940, and 1952. My favorite from Kansas is The Real Making of the President: Kennedy, Nixon, and the 1960 Election by W. J. Rorabaugh—the title being a not-so-subtle jab at White for the part he played in mythologizing JFK.
Now from Chicago Review Press comes Lincoln’s Pathfinder, John Bicknell’s account of the 1856 presidential race. It is one of the best historical narratives of a campaign I have read.
The mid-1850s was one of the messiest moments in American political history, and Bicknell is not afraid to get his hands dirty. The scope of his research is impressive—he pored through old newspapers, correspondence between politicians, and the record of congressional proceedings. Bicknell synthesizes all this information into a coherent tick-tock of the events between the election of 1852 and the campaign of 1856, which pitted Republican John C. Frémont against Democrat James Buchanan and Know-Nothing Millard Fillmore.
Some gruesome passages are hard to absorb—like the story of a fugitive slave killing her own children to keep them from having to return to bondage—but these are necessary to get across just how vicious civil society had become. Such grim passages are leavened by Bicknell’s intricately detailed accounts of the politicking that went on behind the scenes at the nominating conventions. These are fascinating tales, for politicos had to balance not only a growing regional divide but also disputes over immigration and (in the North, at least) over how far opposition to slavery should go. Bicknell’s bracing conclusion as to why Frémont lost the general election—“because northern voters still feared disunion more than they hated slavery”—seems right on the mark.
The only criticism I have of the book is its frame, or metanarrative, as suggested by the title. Abraham Lincoln hardly appears in the story, mostly in the early pages as he plans and organizes and campaigns in Illinois, and again toward the end when his name is floated for the vice presidency in 1856. More to the point, Frémont’s reputation as a “pathfinder” to the West—he had led five exploratory and surveying expeditions—hardly corresponds to his actions in 1856. He comes through the pages with surprising passivity and, at times, political naïveté. The real tactician in the Frémont household was his wife Jessie, the daughter of famed Missouri senator Thomas Hart Benton.
Bicknell’s book is not so much about Lincoln or Frémont as it is about a strange incongruity. On the one hand, the nation was starting to tear itself apart, literally. There was violence over Kansas, violence over the Fugitive Slave Act, even violence within Congress. Meanwhile, the political class, though aware of the growing savagery of politics, seemed ignorant of its broader implications. They continued doing all the things they used to do to win political offices, even though the old world was crumbling around them.
That is a big part of why Frémont and Buchanan won their parties’ nominations: They had taken no hard stands on the great sectional divide, so the political class naturally gravitated toward them. Alas, their nominations only made matters worse. Buchanan had been little more than a bland functionary for decades and was unfit for the office of the presidency, especially in such dark times. It is hard to imagine that Frémont, had he won, would have done much better.
Ultimately, this paints Lincoln in all the better light. His 1860 nomination was also a product of compromises. He was the rarest of politicians—a Republican who did not offend a critical mass of his own party. But here was a man who, unlike his immediate predecessors, possessed the wisdom to see that civil war could be an opportunity to reorganize political society permanently and for the better.
It is for this reason that this book is highly recommended. Not only is it a gripping and interesting narrative of the events of the 1856 campaign, but it also serves as a chronicle of how civil society really was falling apart, how nobody seemed to know what to do about it, and how Lincoln was the true pathfinder.
Jay Cost is a contributing editor to The Weekly Standard.
