Lincoln’s Election And The Party Idea

Politics didn’t always reward performance over prudence. We dive into how Abraham Lincoln—once a young Whig and later the face of a new Republican coalition—used a strong party system to win, govern, and preserve a fragile constitutional order without mistaking power for purpose. From the 1860 convention drama to a cabinet of rivals, we unpack how parties once acted as talent scouts and guardrails, elevating character, experience, and coalition-building over pure spectacle.

We walk through Lincoln’s approach to governing: deferring to Congress on domestic policy, reserving the veto for constitutional concerns, and holding a national election in 1864 even when defeat seemed likely. His decision to run on a National Union ticket with Democrat Andrew Johnson wasn’t a gimmick—it was a bid to widen consent and steady the republic in wartime. Along the way, we connect those choices to today’s “I’ll get primaried” culture, where weakened parties and winner-take-all primaries can punish compromise and reward the loudest performance.

The conversation offers clear takeaways for a healthier two-party system: empower parties to filter for fitness to govern, rebuild incentives for cross-party negotiation, and restore the norm that you campaign as a partisan but serve as an American. If you’re curious how institutional design shapes character—and how character, within the right institutions, can carry a country through crisis—this one’s for you.

If this resonates, follow the show, share it with a friend who cares about civic renewal, and leave a review with the reform you’d try first. Your ideas help guide future episodes.

Check Out the Civic Literacy Curriculum!

School of Civic and Economic Thought and Leadership

Center for American Civics

Transcript

Copy

Setting The Big Lincoln Questions

SPEAKER_00 0:49

All right, welcome back to Civics in the year. We our last political party episode, we talked about the rise of the Republican Party in the 1850s. So if you haven't listened to that, what Dr. Beinberg highly suggests. But today we have Dr. Paris with us. And Dr. Paris, today we're going to talk about Abraham Lincoln because I feel like you can't talk about the new Republican Party in the 1850s without naturally going into Abraham Lincoln's. So our question today is: how did Abraham Lincoln's election change party politics? And what lessons from Lincoln's view of parties are still relevant today?

SPEAKER_01 1:31

Thank you, Liz. These are great topic questions. Of course, Lincoln is a great American figure, arguably one of the greatest presidents still, Washington and Lincoln to this day are still thought to be our two greatest presidents. He's a great American simply. So anyone interested in America, interested in civic education about America, it's great to be talking about Lincoln. And we do think of him to some extent as related to party, that he was a Republican, although he has this status that he's larger than parties. But I do want to play on this that he was both. He was a party man. He was a party figure, and he was a great American. Today, 160 years after his death, we think these two things can't go together. If you're partisan, if you're you know deeply identified by party, this is not a good thing, we tend to think. Partisanship is a bad word

Lincoln: Party Man And Statesman

SPEAKER_01 2:31

for us. And we we've talked in earlier episodes, Liz, about George Washington's warnings about parties from the 1790s when they were starting, furiously, in his two terms as president. And and the wisdom of Washington's warnings about parties, he didn't say don't ever have them. He just warned. He said they seem to be a reality, I'm paraphrasing, a reality of our politics, but warning they can go too far because they're driven as much by passion as they are by principles and reasons. So I want to actually frame Link Lincoln as the same kind of person who thought parties were necessary and they could be a good thing. They could also go too far. And he represents a concept of parties that we generally have lost, where parties were strong. It was a good thing to be a party person, but it was still the case that you were an American first, and that kind of party system allowed, for at least for a very long time, allowed for compromises and what we call bipartisanship. So these are some of the lessons I want to try out. First of all, Lincoln had always been a party man in politics. He was a Whig. We don't think of this term anymore. WHID was a Whig first, and the Whig Party had arisen in opposition really to Andrew Jackson as a as a populist Democrat and very strong president. And so the Whig Party arose with some policy differences about Jackson, you know, in favor of uh tariffs and national improvements, but also thinking that his kind of Democratic Party and small D Democratic populist strong presidency was not good for the constitutional order. So Lincoln starts in politics as a Whig, and he actually serves for two terms in I'm sorry, for two years for one term in the U.S. House of Representatives as a Whig. But under the strong party system of the 19th century, that I'm I'm trying to revive here for consideration, the strong party system meant he was not in charge of his political career. And in Illinois, the Whigs had

From Whig Roots To Republican Rise

SPEAKER_01 4:51

a rotation principle. He got his chance, he got his opportunity to serve for two years, one term in the House, and then he was out. They rotated. And he accepted that. Then he ran for the Senate later again, but when he comes back and runs for the Senate, he's now running as a Republican in the 1950s in the 1850s. So he's a party man. That's my first point. First he's a Whig, and then because of the crisis of the Civil War and the sectional crisis, Lincoln is involved in establishing this new party, the Republican Party, the GOP, the Grand Old Party, because there was a need to have an anti-slavery party that was not an abolitionist party, but was opposed to the spread of slavery and forthright about slavery being a bad thing. We've got to deal with this, we've let it go on too long, and we certainly can't let it spread any farther. So he switches from being a Whig party man to a Republican party man. But again, what does that mean? We now think of parties as important, but partisanship as mostly bad. We're very polarized right now. The fancy term the political scientists use is effective polarization, negative polarization. But there was a mode in the 19th century and early in the 20th century in which basically Washington's view of parties held parties are going to happen in free political orders, people are going to disagree, and in a way there's an efficiency to organizing elections and policy debates in these two big coalitions. And ever since 1860, it's the Democratic Party and the Republican Party as the two big parties. But they can go too far, and so it's important to keep in mind that you campaign as parties in elections, and then you govern partly as party and more as American. And so parties in the 19th century and in the 20th century for much of the century actually provided this constructive constitutional role of allowing for there to be compromises in the House, the U.S. House, in the U.S. Senate with the U.S. President, because the people who had been selected by the parties to run for an office were selected for a certain character and a certain experience. So we today in the 21st century and for the pat my entire adult lifetime, I'm 59 years old, the parties have been getting weaker and weaker since the 1960s because an invention arose earlier in the 20th century called the primary round election. And you would know of this from typically statewide offices for governor, sometimes for state legislative seats, but certainly for U.S. Senate seats, U.S. House seats, that the party doesn't choose who the final candidate is in November of a given year for the governor of the state, for the U.S. Senate seats from a state, from the U.S. House seats from a state. It's a primary round election. Now you have to say, well, I'm a Republican,

Strong Parties vs Primaries

SPEAKER_01 8:16

or I'm a Democrat, and I'm running for the nomination. But actually we know, in fact, in very famous cases, there are people who run for these nominations who aren't really a Democrat or Republican. Donald Trump was not really Republican when he ran for the presidential nomination of the Republican Party in 2016. He'd been a Democrat sometimes, been a Republican sometimes. Bernie Sanders has never been the senator from Vermont, and you know, sort of famous Democratic Socialist, uh, has never been a Democrat, or not for a very long time, has been a Democrat, right? But he wanted to be the Democratic Party nominee for president in 2016. Okay. So these are weak parties that don't really control who runs for, even in very important offices. And this is a lesson, I think we can learn, the advantages of the stronger party system that shaped Abraham Lincoln. And I think it's a he was a man of extraordinary character, of learning and of moral character, and of constitutional character. But I do think the fact that he was a strong party man, that was also a positive influence on the way he governed as president responsibly, and also why he was able to make certain compromises even in the most awful crisis of the Civil War.

SPEAKER_00 9:41

So what are the advantages then of stronger parties, this traditional model of the political party that brought Lincoln to prominence and shaped his political career and his views of American politics?

SPEAKER_01 9:59

Lincoln, in a way, puts the Republican Party on the map. And because he wins in 1860 and wins again in 1864, which was a rare thing in the 19th century to win reelection in the later 18th century, later 19th century, excuse me. Because he wins 1860 and 1864 as the Republican candidate for president, the Republican Party has now clearly replaced the Whig Party. It's one of the two dominant parties in the country, and it's been that way for 160 years since then, right? But the the advantage of the stronger party, as I was suggesting, is that it it allowed Lincoln to govern effectively and responsibly even in a crisis. So first thing is his cabinet. Lincoln wins the Republican nomination in 1860 under the old model in which the party and the party's national convention is in charge. There haven't been primary campaigns in states around the country and primary elections in states around the country. It's all happening at the National Convention in Chicago in 1860. And he's not the most famous man by far who's put himself forward, and he doesn't win until the third ballot. A much more famous man, who turns out to be his Secretary of State, Seward, is leading in the first two ballots. But then people realize, you know what, we could use a Midwesterner, Lincoln, and Seward's not quite showing that he's got the party unified. And Lincoln surges on the third ballot and wins. And then what does Lincoln do? He turns around once he is the nominee and then wins the election, he names all of his rivals for the presidency in 1862 as cabinet, including Seward as Secretary of State and Salmon Chase and others. So this is it was a party coming together in a crisis. And and they agreed, they they were trying to strong arm Lincoln at first from the cabinet, especially Seward, but they eventually realized this is an extraordinary person, and they stuck together for the party and for the Constitution to help Lincoln in this terrible secession crisis. So the strength of the party was that it had put forward and developed over time very capable, very able, civic-minded public servants. And that became Lincoln's cabinet. So there's an advantage of parties I would like to us to think about, right? Think of parties in a more positive party. Parties can be adults in the room, so to speak. Say, you know what, this person, Liz, Paul, Sean, somebody, you know, they've got this kind of character and this kind of background. They'd be good for the U.S. House, but they're not really right, right? They're not ready for the U.S. Senate. So they should work their way up. Or, boy, they'd be great for the Senate right now. That's the kind of character they have. They're not so good as an executive, so they're really not the best candidate for governor or the best candidate for the president of the United States, right? So this is what parties do, and generally it's that you work your way up. You have the experience enough to run for

Lincoln’s 1860 Convention And Cabinet

SPEAKER_01 13:16

a higher office or a different office. And then a second advantage, and I'm going to tell a story from recent experience. Senator John Kyle, great Arizonian, great American, told a story publicly about this with his friend Tom Dashell, Democratic senator. They both served in the 1990s and 2000s, et cetera. But telling a story about how strong parties made compromise possible and how the primary round election had made governing compromises difficult. And so the word a primary round election, right, that makes the parties weaker, that's a noun, but it has also become a verb. So let's say, Liz, you're a Democrat and I'm a Republican. And we've got this contentious issue, let's say immigration, okay. And we're seen talking with each other about make coming up with some compromise. Well, there are people in our parties, Democrats, who would be not happy with you because you're talking to me, a Republican. And the same thing with me on the Republican side. And the term primary now gets used as a verb. Oh, I don't want to be seen talking to this Democrat or this Republican about this contentious issue because I might be primaried. Right? There might be a faction of people in my party really ticked off about the thought that I might make a compromise. And so what the older traditional system of the parties did is it gave some top cover, it gave some protection that I might not be primaried if I did the responsible thing to govern, which means in our complicated political system to compromise. And I'm partly selected by the party because I'm the person who might realize, yes, I'm a I'm a partisan, I'm a tough Republican, or I'm a tough Democrat in elections, but I also know the ultimate job is to govern under our complicated constitutional order. And with the separation of powers and with federalism, what does that mean? It means you've got to compromise. You can't always just win every vote because I've got 51% of the votes, I've got the majority. It's more complicated than that, especially the big, big, complicated issues of our political life. So this is the political culture and political spirit that brought Abraham Lincoln to prominence and that shaped the way he governed. So, as president, we think of him as a very, very strong president. He was because of the Civil War. But in domestic politics, he let Congress lead the way. He never vetoed a bill because of a policy disagreement. He gave the traditional 19th-century view about the presidency and the presidential veto. This is unconstitutional. This bill is unconstitutional. I can't, in good conscience, constitutionally sign it. He never vetoed because of policy disagreements. So he was not some kind of a Caesar or Napoleon as president. He only took extraordinary measures because of the crisis of the war, directly related to the necessity of trying to win the war, which meant saving the union and saving the constitutional order. Otherwise, he was much more governed by the party and letting Congress take the lead in domestic affairs.

SPEAKER_00 17:03

Am I getting that correct?

SPEAKER_01 17:05

Yes. And I admit it's a it's a paradox. But uh I do think we I do think one reason we are in, in the 21st century, in as as angry a political moment as we are in, is that we have many people who are holding office who are candidates who seek a primary round election victory, and they never leave behind being candidates. They end up, in effect, being performers all the time. They don't understand, as this older idea of the party and how the party serves the constitutional order understood it, is that yes, you campaign hard, and then you're in an office and you govern according to the office. You're still a partisan. John Kyle and and Senator Dashell,

Parties As Talent Scouts And Guardrails

SPEAKER_01 17:57

the Democrat, when I interviewed them for a public event in in 2018 about this, right? You're still a partisan. You're still a Democrat, you're still a Republican. But you know your larger mission is to serve in this particular office. I'm in the House, I'm in the Senate, I'm in the Presidency, and also that the our constitutional order requires compromise. So I think this shaped Lincoln, as I mentioned. I'll mention one other fact the fact that he held elections in 1864, rather amazing. Yes. And he thought all during the year of 1864, if he was nominated by the Republican Party, and he was, that he would lose. And he makes the cabinet actually sign a memo earlier in the 1864 year that if as likely the Democratic candidate wins, and that means the war is lost. The war is over, there's going to be some kind of negotiated compromise, and the Confederacy, in effect, will have won. That our cabinet will respect the elections, respect the election result, and work to help the new administration come. And he has them all sign this, right? And then another amazing thing about 1864, he chooses a Democrat, and the Republican Party ratifies this. He chooses a war Democrat, Andrew Johnson, as his running mate, his vice president in 1864, so that it becomes a national union ticket, a national unity ticket. Now, we all know that because of the horrible crime of the assassination and problems with Andrew Johnson's character, this does not work out so well for America. But it's mostly because of the assassination. Then Andrew Johnson is left in the position nobody thought he would be in, being president from the beginning of, you know, early in 1865. So, but Lincoln's larger point, not thinking he might be assassinated, was to unify the country, picking a Democrat. This was the older party system that a Democrat to a Republican is not evil. They're just wrong, right? And a Democrat thinks, oh, it's a Republican. They're not evil or an American, they're wrong, right? But if they get elected to office, we have to govern and we have to compromise. So I think this really shaped being a party person and being first a Whig and then a Republican, really did shape Abraham Lincoln and in a responsible way. And so again, I've got all kinds of paradoxes for the listeners. That yes, the party system, this old party system, which I'm trying to have us think a little bit better of, didn't prevent the Civil War. But maybe we shouldn't think of it as the main cause of the Civil War either. And that certain elements of the party system were very constructive in helping Lincoln to govern and helping Lincoln to actually eventually win uh the war. And to set up this extraordinary uh achievement in eighteen sixty-four, that he holds the election, he's gonna accept the results of the election, he does win the election, but he's got as his vice presidential candidate a Democrat. So the the the two-party system can be part of uh reconstruction and rebuilding, renewing uh the constitutional order. So uh that that's

Primaried: How Compromise Got Harder

SPEAKER_01 21:21

my complicated set of ideas for us to consider when we think about Lincoln, why he changed the party system, really putting the Republicans on the map, and larger lessons we can learn about the possibility of parties playing a constructive, uh more constructive role than we think of today in our constitutional order.

SPEAKER_00 21:42

And I appreciate that you brought up, you know, our former Senator John Kyle, who is a huge advocate for civics in our state. But it also makes me think of our, you know, former Senator John McCain, a lot of that bipartisanship, you know, that reaching across the aisle. So that's like that just kind of makes me really proud to be in Arizona and of you know the people that represent us. Dr. Reese, thank you so much. I've loved digging into this, and I know that we're going to talk more about Lincoln later. And this is just really that political party, but I really appreciate you showing us that things are not simple, right? There are paradoxes and there are these kinds of backs and forths. And that's what makes American, you know, political history, American history so fun to study. So thank you so much.

SPEAKER_01 22:30

Thank you, Liz.