Abraham Lincoln is our national lodestone, toward whom we as individuals collectively turn again and again for inspiration and insight, especially when facing a challenge, crisis, and possibly failure. Lincoln is America’s mentor and never fails to fascinate. But who were his mentors? To more fully understand Lincoln’s leadership, Michael Gerhardt turns his perspective to those this complicated president chose as teachers. Lincoln’s Mentors is a uniquely revealing story of Lincoln’s political education, his trajectory from the obscurity of “Spotty Lincoln" to “Great Emancipator.”
An “original, insightful” examination of how Abraham Lincoln learned to lead—and made an extraordinary political comeback (The Wall Street Journal).
In 1849, when Abraham Lincoln returned to Springfield, Illinois, after two seemingly uninspiring years in the U.S. House of Representatives, his political career appeared all but finished. His sense of failure was so great that friends worried about his sanity. Yet within a decade, Lincoln would reenter politics, become a leader of the Republican Party, win the 1860 presidential election, and keep America together during its most perilous period. What accounted for the turnaround?
As Michael J. Gerhardt reveals, Lincoln’s reemergence followed the same path he had taken before, in which he read voraciously and learned from the successes, failures, oratory, and political maneuvering of a surprisingly diverse handful of men, some of whom he had never met but others of whom he knew intimately—Henry Clay, Andrew Jackson, Zachary Taylor, John Todd Stuart, and Orville Browning. From their experiences and his own, Lincoln learned valuable lessons on leadership, mastering party politics, campaigning, conventions, understanding and using executive power, managing a cabinet, speechwriting and oratory, and—what would become his most enduring legacy—developing policies and rhetoric to match a constitutional vision that spoke to the monumental challenges of his time.
Without these mentors, Abraham Lincoln would likely have remained a small-town lawyer—and without Lincoln, the United States as we know it may not have survived. This book tells the unique story of how Lincoln emerged from obscurity and learned how to lead.
“Abraham Lincoln had less schooling than all but a couple of other presidents, and more wisdom than every one of them . . . Gerhardt explains how this came to be.” —The Wall Street Journal
“Gerhardt has devised an ingenious solution for demystifying America’s most enigmatic president . . . These pages trace how a poor backwoods farm boy rose to become among the most eloquent defenders of America’s highest ideals, as well as a steely and tenacious source of unity when the nation needed it most.” —Russell L. Riley, co-chair, Presidential Oral History Program at the University of Virginia’s Miller Center
MICHAEL J. GERHARDT is Burton Craige Distinguished Professor of Jurisprudence at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. In 2019, he was one of four constitutional scholars called by the House Judiciary Committee during President Trump’s impeachment proceedings. He has testified more than twenty times before Congress, has been special counsel to the Senate Judiciary Committee for five Supreme Court nominations, and has served twice as CNN’s impeachment expert. His op-eds have appeared in the New York Times, The Atlantic, and the Washington Post. He lives with his wife, Deborah, and their three sons in Chapel Hill, North Carolina.
Table of Contents
Introduction The Search for Lincoln's Teachers 1
Chapter 1 Finding His Mentors (1809-1834) 9
Chapter 2 Finding the Path to Congress (1834-1844) 47
Chapter 3 Clay Man in the House (1844-1850) 93
Chapter 4 Learning from Failure (1849-1856) 147
Chapter 5 Becoming President (1856-1860) 201
Chapter 6 "He was Entirely Ignorant not only of the Duties, but of the Manner of Doing Business" (1860-1861) 261
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