Jonathan Earle's "He Has the People"

Jonathan Earle teaches history and politics at Louisiana State University, where he has been Dean of the Ogden Honors College since 2014.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, He Has the People: Abraham Lincoln and the Election of 1860, and reported the following:

The Page 99 Test works uncannily well in He Has the People: Abraham Lincoln and the Election of 1860. The book is intended to be a gripping narrative history for a general audience about a particularly consequential election – one that often gets short shrift in the numerous works about Lincoln, the sectional crisis, and the coming of the Civil War. The main reason, I argue, is the tendency to ignore historical contingency and present some outcomes as inevitable. Of course, that fully self-realized boy born in that Kentucky log cabin would make it to the White House during the nation’s severest crisis. Against considerable odds, he would prevail in a civil war and prevent government “of the people, by the people, for the people” from perishing from the earth.

But what if we took the contingency of the past more seriously? I hope the book makes a strong case for narrative history that restores human agency, chance and the very real sense that things could all have gone very, very differently.

A reader alighting on page 99 would be thrown into the excitement and chaos of the Chicago Republican convention that wound up nominating Lincoln, whose political resume to that point amounted to one single term in Congress in the 1840s and a spirited but losing Senatorial campaign in Illinois a decade later. The overwhelming frontrunner in the battle for the nomination was the venerable New York senator William Seward, whose campaign rolled into the city with trunkloads of money, powerful advocates, and promises to dole out to potential office-seekers. “The consensus remained that Seward’s best chance at the nomination was a clean win on the first ballot,” reads the first sentence on the page. On the other hand, “Lincoln and his managers were hoping that their candidate would clear 100 votes on that same ballot, which, with other ‘favorite son’ votes, would guarantee at least two rounds of balloting, denying Seward a quick victory.” Further down the page we see a Lincoln man, the German-born editor Gustave Koerner, pull a fast one on the Seward juggernaut by giving local spectators tickets for the convention floor before anyone else. “While the friends of the other candidates held processions and marched around, we had made arrangements that the Wigwam (the cavernous hall built for the convention] should be at the earliest opening every morning filled with Illinoisians” cheering for Lincoln.”

Learn more about He Has the People at the Oxford University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue