The first book events for Differ We Must came at the History Book Festival in Delaware. At the main one, a sellout crowd of 600 filled a church at the beach town of Lewes, where I was interviewed by Christina Shutt, executive director of the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library in Springfield, Illinois. It’s a little daunting to be questioned by the leader of a presidential library who literally has all the archives at her back!
It worked out that we had a wonderful talk. If you came away with one of the 600 books sold that evening, thank you. If not, general book sales begin Tuesday, Oct. 3, and you may order now at your bookstore or preorder at this link. An early order is a huge help to this book.
In the days before publication I have done close to thirty interviews—radio, TV, podcast, print. A few are already out, like the NPR talk with Scott Simon. More will be published in days to come.
It fits the theme of the book that my interviewers have widely divergent views. It’s been at least as interesting for me to listen to them as the other way around, because they are interpreting a book that tells Lincoln’s life story through his meetings with people who disagreed with him.
Charles C. W. Cooke, a writer at the conservative National Review, kindly invited me onto his eponymous podcast, and began the conversation with what he called “a provocation.” He proposed that Differ We Must advances a “radical” idea. That’s because it reports that Abraham Lincoln dealt with and even befriended people who embraced awful ideas.
The title comes from a letter in which Lincoln critqued his best friend, who was from a slaveholding family, for admitting that slavery was wrong in the abstract but not being serious about ending it. (Slaveowners “talk” about the evils of slavery but “never vote that way.”) Having said that, Lincoln added philosophically, “If for this we must differ, differ we must.” He would not agree with Speed but they would remain friends.
Cooke will speak for himself (and you can hear him when the podcast is out!) but I understood him to mean that this idea is “radical” because Lincoln did not shun, ostracize, silence, or try to keep himself pure and apart from a man with noxious ideas, as some people feel they must do today. When Lincoln could not persuade someone, he still tried to get some use out of them. He eventually did rely on Speed for the good of the country: his friend remained a prominent loyal citizen when civil war came.
The free exchange of ideas also came up in a podcast with more progressive politics: Democracy-ish, hosted by Danielle Moodie and Wajahat Ali.
The hosts zeroed in on Lincoln’s tolerance for the criticism of Frederick Douglass, who escaped from slavery to become an abolitionist writer and activist. In the Civil War Douglass felt Lincoln moved far too slowly against slavery, trying far too hard to accommodate slaveholders who were loyal to the Union. Lincoln read some of his critiques, but met and worked with Douglass anyway.
Danielle Moodie observed that “dissent is necessary in a democracy.” Douglass served as a kind of loyal opposition, both supporting and lambasting the president. And in this approach both he and Lincoln profited far more than do some people today, who are “sycophants” to a leader, and base their politics on “loyalty to a person rather than to country.”
If the phrase “cancel culture” hung unspoken in Cooke’s interview, the word “Trump” hung unspoken in the other. There is a lot to discuss here!
Moodie made another observation about Douglass. He felt Republicans were too moderate but also understood their potential, and supported the party on the inside, even as he criticized its timidity from the outside.
Moodie said this is “often what I have found through Black thought leaders, academics, and scholars.” She said they have recognized through history that “you can’t burn down this system, just as is; you have to operate inside of this system,” even if it was “meant for your dehumanization… Because I am a person that would love to burn the system down, right? But I also worked on Capitol Hill,” because “there has to be both an inside and an outside game if you are to actually move things forward.”
Differ We Must is a story of the nineteenth century, and I have worked to make sure that when you read this book, you will encounter a story of that time in that context without hindsight or commentary about our time. That’s the way history should be.
But one reason to read history is to discover how it speaks to us today. I’m beginning to learn what my fellow citizens make of this history, and that’s exciting. I’ll be eager to hear what you think of it.