'Boss Lincoln' reminds us that Abraham Lincoln didn't float into the presidency but clawed his way there

Daniel Chester French’s statue of Abraham Lincoln in his memorial in Washington, D.C. I love how his right foot is slightly raised, as if he were about to leap up and kick some laggard American ass, like the tireless political operative that Matthew Pinsker details in his excellent new biography, “Boss Lincoln: The Partisan Life of Abraham Lincoln.”

     You can believe something all your life and then, confronted with new evidence, suddenly realize how ridiculous your thinking was.
     Well, I can anyway. Many people cling to error as if their lives depend on it. Maybe they do. To me, the ability to admit being wrong is not a flaw but a superpower.
     Had you previously asked me to describe the rise of Abraham Lincoln, I'd have said something about young Abe writing letters with coal on the back of a shovel in a log cabin, growing into a lanky, wisecracking Illinois railroad lawyer who shambled into the presidency in 1860 because he was so homespun and wise.
     Dumb.
     Then I cracked open "Boss Lincoln: The Partisan Life of Abraham Lincoln," by Matthew Pinsker, published last week.
     Lincoln was a driven, scheming political animal, "barking out orders, providing advice," scrawling "BURN THIS" at the bottom of letters, abusing the congressional franking privilege to deluge constituents with his speeches, glad-handing every farmer he met.
     Then as now, truth was the first victim of the partisan battle royale.
     "I have been put down here as the candidate of pride, wealth and aristocratic family distinction," Lincoln gripes, of slurs after his marriage to well-off Mary Todd, noting that 12 years earlier he'd been a "friendless, uneducated, penniless boy, working on a flat boat."
     Any biography rests on the fascinating facts it shares, and Pinsker drives home what a mover and shaker Lincoln was, years before the presidency, with this:
     "He was a man of consequence, important enough even to have a town named after him," Pinsker writes. "... the town of Lincoln, Illinois, was born in August, 1853" in honor of the skilled lobbyist who had pushed rail lines through Northern Illinois.
     We're reminded the past isn't a playpen: They weren't handing out presidencies to whatever Bible-quoting yahoo showed up and asked. At one point, Lincoln himself pauses to mock that thinking:
     "Do you suppose that I should ever have got into notice, if I had waited to be hunted up and pushed forward by older men?"
     Not anymore I don't.
     As we are still arguing who can be sheared of human dignity and under what circumstances (color of skin, then; condition of immigration papers, now) the book is terrifyingly relevant — and offers the comfort of reminding us that our extraordinary times might not be quite so extraordinary.
     In 1858, the worry is about immigrants voting illegally. Spying "fifteen Celtic gentlemen with black carpet-sacks" at a railroad junction, Lincoln follows them, spying while the Irish workers hang around a saloon.

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