A Self-Made Man; The Political Life of Abraham Lincoln, 1809-1849

New York: Simon & Schuster, 2016. Second printing [stated]. Hardcover. Very good/Very good. xv. [3], 556, [2] pages. Minor sticker residue on fep. DJ has slight wear and soiling. Illustrated endpapers. Frontispiece. Timeline of Manor Events. Cast of Major Characters. Illustrations. Notes. Bibliography. Index. Inscribed by the author on the title page. Inscription reads For Andy With best wishes Sidney Blumenthal. Sidney Stone Blumenthal (born November 6, 1948) is an American journalist, political operative, and Lincoln scholar. A former aide to President Bill Clinton, he is a long-time confidant of Hillary Clinton and was formerly employed by the Clinton Foundation. As a journalist, Blumenthal wrote about American politics and foreign policy. He is also the author of a multi-volume biography of Abraham Lincoln, The Political Life of Abraham Lincoln. Three books of the planned five-volume series have already been published: A Self-Made Man, Wrestling With His Angel, and All the Powers of Earth. Subsequent volumes were planned for later. Blumenthal has written for publications such as The Washington Post and The New Yorker, for whom he served for a time as the magazine's Washington correspondent. He is a regular contributor to the openDemocracy website and was formerly a regular columnist for The Guardian. After 2000, he wrote several essays critical of the administration of George W. Bush. Over time, Blumenthal began to be viewed as an archetype of a new type of journalist who has eroded the divide between the fading boundaries between independent journalism and partisan journalism. The first in a sweeping, multi-volume history of Abraham Lincoln, from his obscure beginnings to his presidency, death, and the overthrow of his post-Civil War plan of reconciliation, engaging and informative and...thought-provoking (The Christian Science Monitor). From his youth as a voracious newspaper reader, Abraham Lincoln became a free thinker, reading Tom Paine, as well as Shakespeare and the Bible. In the fascinating (Booklist, starred review) A Self-Made Man, Sidney Blumenthal reveals how Lincoln's antislavery thinking began in his childhood in backwoods Kentucky and Indiana. Intensely ambitious, he held political aspirations from his earliest years. Yet he was a socially awkward suitor who had a nervous breakdown over his inability to deal with the opposite sex. His marriage to the upper class Mary Todd was crucial to his social aspirations and his political career. The Lincoln of Blumenthal's pen is...a brave progressive facing racist assaults on his religion, ethnicity, and very legitimacy that echo the anti-Obama birther movement. (The Washingtonian). Based on prodigious research of Lincoln's record, and of the period and its main players, Blumenthal's robust biography reflects both Lincoln's time and the struggle that consumes our own political debate. This first volume traces Lincoln from his birth in 1809 through his education in the political arts, rise to the Congress, and fall into the wilderness from which he emerged as the man we recognize as Abraham Lincoln. Splendid...no one can come away from reading A Self-Made Man...without eagerly anticipating the ensuing volumes. (Washington Monthly). Derived from a Kirkus review: In this minutely detailed work, Blumenthal, a former senior adviser to Bill Clinton and national staff reporter for the Washington Post, sifts through Lincoln's early influences to take the sum of the later politician. The humble rail splitter recognized from an early age what slavery meant, beginning in his childhood among the anti-slavery dissidents in backwoods Kentucky and Indiana and continuing with his practical experience as his father's hireling until the age of 21. Indeed, at an early campaign event, Lincoln announced, "I used to be a slave," and although he made the audience laugh, he was deeply serious. As Blumenthal shows, he was "constantly transforming himself through self-education and political aspiration." He was a new kind of man, a professional politician who delighted in the messy give-and-take of the party ring, unlike earlier historians' portrayal of the Great Emancipator as someone "too noble" to get his hands dirty. Blumenthal sees in Lincoln's striving a method of calculation—e.g., his cultivation of the stories of the common man and his courting of the press. Practicing law was the first step in becoming a politician, and Lincoln modeled himself consciously on the image of statesman Henry Clay. Blumenthal works his way through mentors and early influences, such as Springfield's leading attorney John Todd Stuart; former president and now Massachusetts anti-slavery Congressman John Quincy Adams, "old man eloquent" arguing constantly against the gag rule in Congress; and especially future wife Mary Todd, who believed in Lincoln as no other did. The author delves deeply into the incremental building of Lincoln's anti-slavery views, flourishing in the debates with Stephen Douglas. A consummate political observer keenly dissects the machinations of Lincoln's incredible rise to power.