Ted WidmerrReseñas

A wonderfully written account of the trip Lincoln took from Springfield, Illinois to Washington, DC, in February of 1861 to take the oath of office. Full of details and interesting side characters. It reads like a suspense novel, because we quickly come to understand the fraught times of the early 1860s, with a country beginning to separate and passions running high. Lincoln has received numerous death threats, and this trip involves a number of spies who go out and get a feel for the people, then report back their findings to Lincoln's party. Particularly treacherous is the trip through Baltimore, part of the Confederacy, where many are determined to keep him from Washington DC. Interestingly enough, the pro-Lincoln crowds were almost as dangerous, as they crowded around him relentlessly. Loved this book.

Although tagged as a Biography, this very readable account of Lincoln only covers 13 days of his life. On February 11, 1861 Lincoln began his journey to the Presidency in Springfield, Illinois aboard a train they called "The Special".

The train traveled 1,900, as Lincoln attempted to gather support from the industrial North. These States were vital to the war that Lincoln knew would come.

Lincoln was following Buchannan into the Oval Office. Buchannan's time
as President, known as the worst in history, was filled with corruption and cronyism with the Southern plantations. It was an eye-opener to see how our current political strife parallels what was happening in 1861 :

...the most depressing problem was the one that struck countless Europeans as the central paradox of American democracy. The ideals of the Declaration were hardly self-evident..

...even if Southern militias did not surround the Capitol, there was another way Lincoln's election could be turned back, striking for simplicity. On February 13th two boxes would be taken into the House chambers where they would be opened and the votes counted. But anything could happen in a city that that had effectively ceased to play by any rules. Perhaps the certificates had not been signed and sealed properly? Lincoln's enemies might declare a miscount, throwing the election into the House. Or leading Southerner's might just ask the Vice-President to become an "acting president"...

Before Lincoln left for Washington, Allan Pinkerton (Pinkerton Security) was hired to root out any trouble. Pinkerton uncovered several assassination plots along the route. The South was determined that Lincoln would never reach Washington.

As you read and travel the route with Lincoln, you watch a meek, "homely" man become an orator, who begins to emphasize the world ALL. As in "All men are created equal". While Lincoln was shouting for unity, Jefferson Davis was sworn in as the new President of The Confederacy. Every delay in Lincoln's arrival, for his inauguration, brought the Union closer to dissolution and war. Those who supported Lincoln came in droves to watch his train pass. Democracy was fraying at the seams...Lincoln helped Americans to feel that they were taking back their country from a cabal that was destroying its very purpose.

An excellent look at history-highly recommended

I received this book as a GR's Give Away-Thank you goodreads and thank you Simon and Schuster

Well written and gives a good overview of a president who is only slightly known. While it was short on specific details and does not give a detailed daily step by step, but rather concentrates on the larger spread of his centrist positions. It gave me enough of a feel to continue on my quest to read a bio of each president in order. I can see how he fits in the line, and can now go on to read the next.

This book is regarded by many libraries as YA. It is rather erudite in its vocabulary, and presumes the reader has a better than average grasp of history and politics. I found it a pleasant addition to my rather thin knowledge of that era.½

Gave a flavor of the times as well as Lincoln. While I learned a lot from this book, it was very repetitive.
It also make what recently happened with Trump seem trivial in comparison, but it's not.½

I read this and Brad Meltzer and Josh Mensch's book, "The Lincoln Conspiracy: The Secret Plot to Kill America's 16th President⁠—and Why It Failed." Both cover the same period of time. The Meltzer and Mensch book has a narrower focus, and a broader target audience. I had low expectations for it. Surprisingly, the Meltzer and Mensch book is far better. This book, by Ted Widmer, is not very well written, and is incredibly repetitive. How many different ways can you describe a crowd of people cheering for the president-elect? Not nearly enough. Widmer tries to turn Lincoln's train journey to Washington into a geography lesson, telling at least one story about each town Lincoln visits. This is very interesting for the first 100-200 pages. Then it started to put me to sleep.

> In the first sixty-one years of the government, slaveholders held the presidency for fifty years, the Speaker of the House's chair for forty-one years, and the chairmanship of the House Ways and Means Committee for fifty-two years. Eighteen of thirty-one Supreme Court justices hailed from the South, even though four-fifths of the actual business of the court came from the North. No Northern president had been reelected.

> Floyd may have been the worst. As secretary of war, he had sworn to defend the United States against all enemies. Instead, he surreptitiously shipped arms from Northern arsenals to the South. (The Confederacy would later brag about his disloyalty.)

> For anyone trying to reach Washington from the northern states, Baltimore was a frustrating choke point. The two lines that came in from the north failed to connect with the lines heading south and west, with the result that much time was wasted moving passengers and goods at a snail's pace through the city's clogged streets

> Confederates continued to set up their government. In many ways, they were ahead of the United States, barely governed at all in the final weeks of the Buchanan administration.

> earliest memories stemmed from the Knob Creek farm where his parents had moved when he was two years old. But in all of Kentucky, he had won only 1,364 votes, or less than 1 percent

> Just before the train left, an unattended carpetbag was found in Lincoln's car. When it was opened, a "grenade of the most destructive character" was discovered inside, live, and "so arranged that within fifteen minutes it would have exploded, with a force sufficient to have demolished the car and destroyed the lives of all the persons in it." That remarkable story was reported in the Syracuse Journal but omitted from the daily coverage of the New York City and Chicago papers. Was Lincoln nearly blown up on the third day of his journey?

> Eight years later, on exactly this stretch of track, a young inventor, George Westinghouse, would perfect a new system of air brakes capable of stopping all the cars at the same time thanks to a system of compressed air running through the entire train. The breakthrough would allow trains to grow longer, faster, and safer. Westinghouse would go on to invent a long roster of rail improvements before turning to electricity, alternating current, and the power grids

> It was said that "men kiss each other's wives in Pittsburgh," simply because it was so difficult to see, and that mothers wrote out messages to shopkeepers on the faces of their children.

> Lincoln had just entered the Western Reserve, another statelet within a state. At the time of independence, this section of northern Ohio was still a part of Connecticut—nearly as large as the original, with 3.3 million acres of prime real estate. The parcel had been included in Connecticut's royal charter of 1662 and, as its name suggested, was considered a western extension of the state. But it became difficult to hold as Americans poured west to fill up the new lands after the war. In 1796 Connecticut sold its Ohio land to a group of Connecticut investors. … Moses Cleaveland, whose last name would grace the metropolis of the Western Reserve, thought of it as "New Connecticut," a state unto itself.

> Eventually Rockefeller decided that his talents were better suited to the challenges of refining and shipping the oil rather than extracting it. Two years after Lincoln's visit, the young Clevelander would launch an oil refinery along a small creek that flowed into the Cuyahoga

> at Schenectady. A few young movers and shakers, showing a little too much leadership, took it upon themselves to fire a celebratory cannon as Lincoln's train approached. The only problem was that they managed to fire it directly into his train, taking out a section of the forward car, shattering three windows "into atoms," covering passengers with broken glass, and terrifying everyone. For the second time since the trip started, an errant artillery blast had caused windows to break near the Lincolns.

> an early version was called the "Vertical Screw Railway." But eventually it would be called by a simpler name: the elevator. Its inventor was a former toymaker from Vermont, Elisha Otis, who had filed his patent only a few weeks earlier. Otis had been trying to improve railroad brakes when he began to look into the problem of carrying weight upward, along grooved metal tracks, with power supplied by a steam engine. At first, his device was intended to help factories move heavy equipment from one floor to another

> After he was elected, panicky rumors spread up and down Wall Street that the Republicans were radicals who wanted to punish the wealthy. Many business leaders blamed Lincoln for the fact that Southern states were seceding

> with the passage of the Fugitive Slave Act in 1850, the marshal was obligated to capture suspected runaways. As a result, Independence Hall saw a new function: as a holding pen for African-Americans about to be returned to slavery

> At the last minute, just before midnight, a fake package was delivered to the conductor, to distract him, while the real package—Abraham Lincoln—slipped quietly into the sleeper through the back door and was ushered into his berth. Pinkerton and Lamon followed close behind.

5694. Lincoln on the Verge Thirteen Days to Washington, by Ted Widmer (read 8 Jun 2020) This is a carefully researched book which tells all that you could want to know about Lincoln's 1861 trip from Springfield, Ill., to Washington. He was attended by large crowds as he went by train from Springfield to Chicago, Indianapolis, Cincinnati, Columbus, Pittsburgh, Cleveland, Buffalo, Albany, New York City, and Philadelphia. Warned of a plot to kill or kidnap him in Baltimore, he went secretly to Washington, skipping Baltimore. This book is well put together and I never lost interest in the momentous journey.

This short biography was well-written and told me a lot about Martin Van Buren's political career. I would've liked to learn more about his personal life and also how he managed to create the modern political party as we know it - unfortunately he got rid of his personal letters and did not write down the specifics on how he actually created the political machine that is his legacy. He did write an autobiography, but as was noted in the biography, it was short on these details as well.

The author tried to give an objective narrative of Van Buren's political career - and he largely succeeds. However, the book contains all kinds of references - sometimes totally not related to the subject - that shows authors biases. The book is short but would be much better without author going on the tangent.½

Just finished "Listening In: The Secret White House Recordings of John F. Kennedy" which is a transcript of unreleased recordings from the White House years and before and contains two CD's of audio. Like everything else I have read about JFK, this remarkable collection reveals a warts-and-all great leader with a brilliant mind whose untimely end left a jagged wrong turn for America. It is impossible to conceive of the Vietnam debacle as it rolled out under LBJ & Nixon had Kennedy not gone to Dallas.

I highly recommend this book for a very personal look at a remarkable man.

This was pretty good for anyone interested in the Kennedys and the Kennedy Presidency. Though some of the sound quality was poor, the book more than makes up for it. Some of it is just Kennedy's friends trying to find out what it's like to be John F. Kennedy, asking him questions about his early political life...during some of it Caroline and John Jr. pop in for a delightful interlude... It's pretty interesting stuff. JFK even left the tapes going when he left the room. The people he left in there just kept right on talking, not knowing they were being taped. I especially enjoyed the talks between JFK and RFK.

The introductions are good, too. Lots of footnotes so you can sort out everybody that's being talked about.

All in all, a worthy addition to any Kennedy collection.

This biography of Martin Van Buren, our 8th President, reminded me of Tom Stoppard's play Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead, in which Shakespeare's Hamlet is seen through the eyes of two minor characters. In Stoppard's case, the result is very funny, although it helps to know the main story to start with. Here, Van Buren's story, which would seem to be the main topic, is seen only in glimpses sprinkled through a history of the times. For a President so little known to modern readers, the result is frustration.

I'm not sure this is the author's fault, given his subject. Most of Van Buren's career was dedicated to forging a new political party, accomplished by years of backroom (and therefore hidden, even to historians) political maneuvering, which often found him promoting a middle ground between opponents he was trying to woo. In many instances he was thought to have no strong views himself, and, unlike his predecessors, he left no reams of correspondence or voluminous diaries to give us a peak at his inner turmoil. (He did leave an autobiography written only late in life.)

Van Buren was the first of a lesser-known group to hold the Presidency between Jackson and Lincoln. It was a difficult time for the nation, as the addition of territory brought to a head the oft-sidetracked issue of slavery. Sectional divisions strengthened, and, like others, Van Buren foresaw the Civil War, but it was only in the late 1840s that he could bring himself to publicly criticize slavery and call for its end, after many years of letting the issue slide as he courted Southerners. Although his presidency was expected to be at least somewhat successful, the economic policies of previous years came to a head within weeks of his inauguration, and the Panic of 1837 was only the beginning of the downswing which led to Van Buren's defeat in 1840. Born near the end of the Revolution, he lived to see the beginning of the Civil War, having survived most of his political contemporaries.

Two quotes of note:
p. 69. To this day we still do not know how close young Andrew Jackson came to throwing his lot in with Burr's efforts to create an American empire outside the jurisdiction of the United States. (OK, that's not a thread I recall from the bio of Jackson I just read.)

p. 16. His failures showed how difficult it was to assemble a democratic coalition in the face of withering pressure from economic chaos, regional discord, and the conservative enemies who never gave him a moment's peace. (Doesn't that sound familiar?)

And I was surprised to read that Davy Crockett wrote a (very negative) biography of him leading up to the election of 1836. (RIP Fess Parker, who died this week.)

For all its brevity and lack of detail on a personal level, this entry in Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr.'s The American Presidents Series is a very readable introduction. I would have liked more information on Van Buren's home life and children, and sometimes the author's style is off-putting, as when he refers to Van Buren by all the cute/sarcastic/nasty nicknames employed by his adversaries. But I found myself drawn in and interested till the end.

Short and easy to read, if a little dull, biography of our little-known 8th president. This was the man credited with the formation of a national Democratic party at a time when regional parties were more common. He was also the first sitting president to actively seek re-election. Previously, it was considered unseemly to engage in campaigning. Van Buren was the youngest man elected to the office of president to date, after being active in state and local politics in his native New York - the first New Yorker to become president, and distant cousin to fellow NY presidents Franklin and Theodore Roosevelt. Van Buren's term in office saw the economic panic of 1837 and the continuation of disagreements over slavery which eventually led to the civil war.

The book is part of the American Presidents series of books - short and generally well-written biographies of most of our former leaders. This volume was written by Bill Clinton's head speech writer and contained several uncalled-for jabs at Reagan and both Bushes, as well as unnecessary adulations of Clinton, Kennedy and LBJ. I couldn't understand why any of these men are relevent to a biography of Van Buren, and the blatant partisianship caused me to have serious doubts about the author's dependability. There are relatively few biographies of Van Buren available and this one is easily obtainable which makes it a good choice for the person with only a casual interest in learing about Martin Van Buren.

I received this book for Christmas this year, and find it very handy. Lots of important speeches, many presidential, from Abraham Lincoln to Bill Clinton. I've used it as a reference source, and as a source to peruse.