What do you think?
Rate this book
The Emergence of Lincoln: Douglas, Buchanan & Party Chaos, 1857-59
HistoryUS Civil War
472 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 1950
4 people are currently reading
182 people want to read
About the author
Allan Nevins
489 books26 followersAllan Nevins was an American historian and journalist, renowned for his extensive work on the history of the Civil War and his biographies of such figures as President Grover Cleveland, Hamilton Fish, Henry Ford, and John D. Rockefeller.
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews
March 7, 2016
This old classic stands the test of time, and like a great history, it brings considerable lessons to the present day. Not enough is written by popular historians about the run-up to the Civil War.
Nevins vividly portrays the fanaticism of what seemed to be a naturally passing order -- the slave holding class in the antebellum South -- to plunge their nation and region into the abyss in order to hold on to their oppressive way of life. Interestingly, he believes that it was only a faction (and possibly only a powerful minority) of the old South that favored secession and slavery, and gives some evidence that the secession votes were essentially railroaded.
As one reads about the vitriol and personal violence of the 1850s, and reflects on the shocking spectacle of this year's Presidential campaign, there is only slight reassurance that at one time the national dialogue was worse than now. We have the benefit of history to know where that vitriol and hatred led. What is most depressing is that yes, it can get worse.
Nevins vividly portrays the fanaticism of what seemed to be a naturally passing order -- the slave holding class in the antebellum South -- to plunge their nation and region into the abyss in order to hold on to their oppressive way of life. Interestingly, he believes that it was only a faction (and possibly only a powerful minority) of the old South that favored secession and slavery, and gives some evidence that the secession votes were essentially railroaded.
As one reads about the vitriol and personal violence of the 1850s, and reflects on the shocking spectacle of this year's Presidential campaign, there is only slight reassurance that at one time the national dialogue was worse than now. We have the benefit of history to know where that vitriol and hatred led. What is most depressing is that yes, it can get worse.
March 8, 2023
After zipping through a decade in the first two volumes of his "Ordeal of the Union" series, Allan Nevins slows down as we approach the start of the Civil War with the first volume of the second part of the 8-volume set (and the third volume overall), "The Emergence of Lincoln". As the subtitle of the volume implies, this volume largely focuses on the first two years of the James Buchanan administration, with Illinois Senator Stephen A. Douglas his main antagonist throughout this period. Like the prior volumes, this is an incredibly detailed, generally easy to read, and thoroughly fascinating history of a complex period in America's history. While the sectional crisis was steadily increasing throughout the first two volumes, those focused quite a bit on the growth of America outside of the political arena. While that exists in this third volume, the political struggles in the Democratic party and the rise of the southern extremists and northern Republicans dominate this book.
James Buchanan is usually regarded as one of America's worst presidents, and Nevins would agree with that statement given his portrayal of Buchanan as a bumbling politician who was well past his prime as President and largely fell under the dangerous influences of his cabinet (which Nevins nicknames "The Directory"). Like his predecessor, Franklin Pierce, Buchanan was a northern Democrat with southern sympathies who was indifferent to slavery and opposed to the abolitionist movement and the rise of the Republican party. Also like Pierce, I don't see Buchanan as a necessarily "evil" man with nefarious intentions like some other presidents (e.g. Johnson) but as a man who was not fit to be President and too eager to gain acceptance of those around him. He had largely stayed out of the first two volumes because he was serving as a minister in Europe, leaving him aloof from much of the political debates of the first half of the 1850s. He was 66 when he entered the presidency, never married and had little to not family influence, and generally seemed to have the personality of a cardboard box. This differs wildly from the eccentric and likable Pierce, but where they both found a commonality was their struggles to gain influence over their cabinets. Buchanan's southerners in the Cabinet included Howell Cobb (Treasury), Jacob Thompson (Interior) and John B. Floyd (War), along with his fellow southerner-in-a-Pennsylvanians-body Jeremiah Black (AG). Combine this with a decrepit Lewis Cass heading the State Department and the Buchanan administration was almost bound to fail.
And fail it did, in more ways than one. The Democratic party will eventually break up in 1860, and most of that can be blamed on Buchanan's complete inability to find ways to please both the northerners and southerners in his party. Perhaps given the rising sectionalism this was inevitable (I would wager there was no way he could have really stopped the split) but given the recent history of the Whigs falling apart and Buchanan's experience as a politician, his response was truly horrendous. Right after his inauguration, he prodded the Supreme Court to rule that black people could not be citizens and that Congress had no power to prohibit slavery in the territories, a decision that he, for whatever reason, thought would *end* the sectional crisis rather than inflame it. Nevins' discussion of Dred Scott is one of the more difficult to parse through given that it is less of a discussion of the case itself (which can be read in detail in many places) and more of a discussion of how Buchanan and the members of the Court schemed to get the result that they wanted. Whoever thinks the Court has ever been an apolitical institution, please read!
The second major crisis was the aftermath of the Kansas-Nebraska Act, which was the main political event of Volume II. Here is where Stephen A. Douglas, architect of Kansas-Nebraska and the chief proponent of popular sovereignty, comes into play. Whatever you think of Douglas, he was a man that stuck to his principles, and despite the threat of his beloved Democratic party coming apart, he never wavered from his belief that settlers had the right to choose whether or not a territory could have slavery. Southerners did not want any situation where slavery in a territory could ever be disallowed, and thus continued their illegitimate fight to put a pro-slavery government in Kansas against the obvious wishes of the settlers to be a free state. Buchanan supported the southerners in this crusade and cycled through several territorial governors who refused to go along with his illicit scheming in trying to push through a fake government. This section gets a little complicated and goes on for a very long time with lots of names to remember, but the gist is that Buchanan made things even worse by really only catering to the interests of the Southerners in Kansas. Ultimately, it would be admitted as a free state, but the Democratic party would not last the struggle.
Like the other volumes, pieces of American culture outside of politics (and their subsequent relationship to the political culture of the fifties) are discussed. These including a penetrating chapter on literature and the culture of the transcendentalists, the further westward expansion of the country into Colorado and the mining industries therein, the journalism of the mid-19th century, and the struggles with the Mormons in Utah, among other things. These sections can range from extremely interesting to rather dry.
The volume concludes with a look ahead to the coming crisis in 1860. Lincoln himself pops up for the first extended period in any of the first three volumes, with two chapters discussing the men of Illinois, Douglas and Lincoln, and their similarities and differences. Perhaps this was more important when it first came out, but the debates have been surpassed in modern scholarship. Still, the day-to-day anecdotes are pretty fun to read. Finally, we see how the 35th Congress had reached a head in the sectional conflict. Things that were not purely sectional, like the tariff and internal improvements, were becoming overly sectional in Congress, largely as southerners freaked out that any sort of financial change that could benefit the north more than the south was going to doom slavery. This attitude is beneficial to the southern extremists like William Yancey and Robert Rhett, who start to see their long-awaited moment for secession to become mainstream just within their reach. As we move on to Volume IV, those secessionists will finally get their way ...
James Buchanan is usually regarded as one of America's worst presidents, and Nevins would agree with that statement given his portrayal of Buchanan as a bumbling politician who was well past his prime as President and largely fell under the dangerous influences of his cabinet (which Nevins nicknames "The Directory"). Like his predecessor, Franklin Pierce, Buchanan was a northern Democrat with southern sympathies who was indifferent to slavery and opposed to the abolitionist movement and the rise of the Republican party. Also like Pierce, I don't see Buchanan as a necessarily "evil" man with nefarious intentions like some other presidents (e.g. Johnson) but as a man who was not fit to be President and too eager to gain acceptance of those around him. He had largely stayed out of the first two volumes because he was serving as a minister in Europe, leaving him aloof from much of the political debates of the first half of the 1850s. He was 66 when he entered the presidency, never married and had little to not family influence, and generally seemed to have the personality of a cardboard box. This differs wildly from the eccentric and likable Pierce, but where they both found a commonality was their struggles to gain influence over their cabinets. Buchanan's southerners in the Cabinet included Howell Cobb (Treasury), Jacob Thompson (Interior) and John B. Floyd (War), along with his fellow southerner-in-a-Pennsylvanians-body Jeremiah Black (AG). Combine this with a decrepit Lewis Cass heading the State Department and the Buchanan administration was almost bound to fail.
And fail it did, in more ways than one. The Democratic party will eventually break up in 1860, and most of that can be blamed on Buchanan's complete inability to find ways to please both the northerners and southerners in his party. Perhaps given the rising sectionalism this was inevitable (I would wager there was no way he could have really stopped the split) but given the recent history of the Whigs falling apart and Buchanan's experience as a politician, his response was truly horrendous. Right after his inauguration, he prodded the Supreme Court to rule that black people could not be citizens and that Congress had no power to prohibit slavery in the territories, a decision that he, for whatever reason, thought would *end* the sectional crisis rather than inflame it. Nevins' discussion of Dred Scott is one of the more difficult to parse through given that it is less of a discussion of the case itself (which can be read in detail in many places) and more of a discussion of how Buchanan and the members of the Court schemed to get the result that they wanted. Whoever thinks the Court has ever been an apolitical institution, please read!
The second major crisis was the aftermath of the Kansas-Nebraska Act, which was the main political event of Volume II. Here is where Stephen A. Douglas, architect of Kansas-Nebraska and the chief proponent of popular sovereignty, comes into play. Whatever you think of Douglas, he was a man that stuck to his principles, and despite the threat of his beloved Democratic party coming apart, he never wavered from his belief that settlers had the right to choose whether or not a territory could have slavery. Southerners did not want any situation where slavery in a territory could ever be disallowed, and thus continued their illegitimate fight to put a pro-slavery government in Kansas against the obvious wishes of the settlers to be a free state. Buchanan supported the southerners in this crusade and cycled through several territorial governors who refused to go along with his illicit scheming in trying to push through a fake government. This section gets a little complicated and goes on for a very long time with lots of names to remember, but the gist is that Buchanan made things even worse by really only catering to the interests of the Southerners in Kansas. Ultimately, it would be admitted as a free state, but the Democratic party would not last the struggle.
Like the other volumes, pieces of American culture outside of politics (and their subsequent relationship to the political culture of the fifties) are discussed. These including a penetrating chapter on literature and the culture of the transcendentalists, the further westward expansion of the country into Colorado and the mining industries therein, the journalism of the mid-19th century, and the struggles with the Mormons in Utah, among other things. These sections can range from extremely interesting to rather dry.
The volume concludes with a look ahead to the coming crisis in 1860. Lincoln himself pops up for the first extended period in any of the first three volumes, with two chapters discussing the men of Illinois, Douglas and Lincoln, and their similarities and differences. Perhaps this was more important when it first came out, but the debates have been surpassed in modern scholarship. Still, the day-to-day anecdotes are pretty fun to read. Finally, we see how the 35th Congress had reached a head in the sectional conflict. Things that were not purely sectional, like the tariff and internal improvements, were becoming overly sectional in Congress, largely as southerners freaked out that any sort of financial change that could benefit the north more than the south was going to doom slavery. This attitude is beneficial to the southern extremists like William Yancey and Robert Rhett, who start to see their long-awaited moment for secession to become mainstream just within their reach. As we move on to Volume IV, those secessionists will finally get their way ...
July 19, 2018
Covers the time from just before the election of James Buchanan to the midpoint of his term. Shows how issues such as the Dred Scott decision and the fight over slavery in the territories began to split the Democratic Party to the point where, more than two years before the election of Lincoln, Southern politicians were openly discussing how secession could be accomplished.
August 10, 2025
The 1856 election was supposed to unite the country and save it from the festering issue of Kansas territory, unfortunately the politically spineless James Buchanan turned out to be worse than Franklin Pierce. The Emergence of Lincoln, Volume I: Douglas, Buchanan, and Party Chaos, 1857-59 is the third book of Allan Nevins’ Ordeal of the Union series, an eight-volume history of the lead up to and of the American Civil War, featuring how the last remaining link between North and South in the form of the Democratic party was broken in twain by the decisions of two men.
From the outset Nevins reveals that the country needed a national figure with a vision of national scope to unite the three major regions of the country—North, South, and growing West—but sadly for the United States the man coming into office in March 1857 was James Buchanan who in making up his cabinet became a passive functionary in his own administration. When Buchanan gave prominence to Southern politicians and anti-Douglas Democrats, the stage was set for the dividing of the party and the rise of the Republicans in the North as Douglas Democrats and Lecompton Democrats—named for their support of the pro-slavery constitution for Kansas that was drafted by convention assembled by a rigged election—set the stage for chaotic Presidential contest in 1860. Besides the congressional battle between opponents and supporters for the pro-slavery Kansas constitution, Nevins’ other major focus was the Lincoln-Douglas debates which saw Abraham Lincoln’s emergence on the national scene for the first time as well as detailing what the two politicians spoke about in each debate. Just to through in an additional element to all of this was the Panic of 1857 with its effects in economic terms and political perceptions—whether right or wrong—on all sections of the country. Yet Nevins also wrote about the Dred Scott decision and the Mormon War with their effects on the various elements in the country, the fact that I’m just barely mentioning them shows how much Nevin’s writing made me highlight other things. Honestly, there is so much I learned that I had previously just had a superficial knowledge of.
The Emergence of Lincoln, Volume I reveals how incompetent national leadership exasperated the rising sectional differences while both sides of the divide took different lessons from a economic panic as well as how the growing West were affecting things.
From the outset Nevins reveals that the country needed a national figure with a vision of national scope to unite the three major regions of the country—North, South, and growing West—but sadly for the United States the man coming into office in March 1857 was James Buchanan who in making up his cabinet became a passive functionary in his own administration. When Buchanan gave prominence to Southern politicians and anti-Douglas Democrats, the stage was set for the dividing of the party and the rise of the Republicans in the North as Douglas Democrats and Lecompton Democrats—named for their support of the pro-slavery constitution for Kansas that was drafted by convention assembled by a rigged election—set the stage for chaotic Presidential contest in 1860. Besides the congressional battle between opponents and supporters for the pro-slavery Kansas constitution, Nevins’ other major focus was the Lincoln-Douglas debates which saw Abraham Lincoln’s emergence on the national scene for the first time as well as detailing what the two politicians spoke about in each debate. Just to through in an additional element to all of this was the Panic of 1857 with its effects in economic terms and political perceptions—whether right or wrong—on all sections of the country. Yet Nevins also wrote about the Dred Scott decision and the Mormon War with their effects on the various elements in the country, the fact that I’m just barely mentioning them shows how much Nevin’s writing made me highlight other things. Honestly, there is so much I learned that I had previously just had a superficial knowledge of.
The Emergence of Lincoln, Volume I reveals how incompetent national leadership exasperated the rising sectional differences while both sides of the divide took different lessons from a economic panic as well as how the growing West were affecting things.
September 20, 2022
As is the case with every book that I've read more than once, I learn or re-learn something new. That goes for fiction as well as nonfiction. This volume does a really good job explaining the disruption of the Democratic party preceding the civil war. Many in the south were long convinced that disunion was best for them. Knowing the split in the Democratic party would result in the election of whichever Republican was nominated, the southern Democrats were fine with that because it would accelerate the process of secession which they wanted.
July 18, 2022
This is the third volume in Allan Nevins's "Ordeal of the Union" series, and the first of a subgroup of two books called "The Emergence of Lincoln." Abe himself only appears towards the end of this book, which covers the first two years of the James Buchanan administration.
Kansas again plays a major part in the history here, as the illegitimately-elected territorial government attempts to enact a pro-slavery constitution on a largely anti-slavery populace. Buchanan, under the influence of a powerful cabinet that Nevins refers to as "the Directory" (a la the French Revolution), frequently makes things worse by meddling against his own honest brokers.
Stephen A. Douglas, whose Nebraska-Kansas bill (covered in the previous volume) unleashed a Pandora's box of fighting over the spread of slavery by nullifying the Missouri Compromise, here takes a bold stand against Buchanan, the leader of his own Democratic Party. If the U.S. Congress admits Kansas as a slave state, it will make a mockery of Douglas's core principle of popular sovereignty, as it would clearly go against the wishes of the majority of Kansans. Various figures line up with either Douglas or Buchanan as the Democratic Party effectively splits into northern and southern wings.
Abraham Lincoln now emerges as the figurehead of the Republican Party in Illinois, and becomes Douglas's main opponent as he runs to retain his Senate seat in 1858. At first the two men happen to be giving speeches in many of the same locations in Illinois. Lincoln then proposes that they organize formal debates and Douglas agrees. They arrange to speak in different locations throughout the state, making sure to cover each congressional district. This is where Lincoln, a former one-term Whig Congressman and failed Senate candidate in the previous election, emerges as a national figure. Nevins is good at showing the positive arguments of each candidate, while not ignoring their faults.
I get most excited when reading about the political struggles and developments, but Nevins paints on a wide canvas. There are chapters that discuss American journalism and fiction of this period, economics, and other topics. One chapter focuses on the Supreme Court's Dred Scott decision. There were many eerie parallels with the just-released Dobbs decision overturning Roe v. Wade. The national consequences of the Dred Scott case project a troubling time for our nation in 2022 and beyond.
Kansas again plays a major part in the history here, as the illegitimately-elected territorial government attempts to enact a pro-slavery constitution on a largely anti-slavery populace. Buchanan, under the influence of a powerful cabinet that Nevins refers to as "the Directory" (a la the French Revolution), frequently makes things worse by meddling against his own honest brokers.
Stephen A. Douglas, whose Nebraska-Kansas bill (covered in the previous volume) unleashed a Pandora's box of fighting over the spread of slavery by nullifying the Missouri Compromise, here takes a bold stand against Buchanan, the leader of his own Democratic Party. If the U.S. Congress admits Kansas as a slave state, it will make a mockery of Douglas's core principle of popular sovereignty, as it would clearly go against the wishes of the majority of Kansans. Various figures line up with either Douglas or Buchanan as the Democratic Party effectively splits into northern and southern wings.
Abraham Lincoln now emerges as the figurehead of the Republican Party in Illinois, and becomes Douglas's main opponent as he runs to retain his Senate seat in 1858. At first the two men happen to be giving speeches in many of the same locations in Illinois. Lincoln then proposes that they organize formal debates and Douglas agrees. They arrange to speak in different locations throughout the state, making sure to cover each congressional district. This is where Lincoln, a former one-term Whig Congressman and failed Senate candidate in the previous election, emerges as a national figure. Nevins is good at showing the positive arguments of each candidate, while not ignoring their faults.
I get most excited when reading about the political struggles and developments, but Nevins paints on a wide canvas. There are chapters that discuss American journalism and fiction of this period, economics, and other topics. One chapter focuses on the Supreme Court's Dred Scott decision. There were many eerie parallels with the just-released Dobbs decision overturning Roe v. Wade. The national consequences of the Dred Scott case project a troubling time for our nation in 2022 and beyond.
November 24, 2023
What would be a few sentences in a general history book gets an entire chapter in this very interesting and informative book.
Read
March 28, 2025I used it for a research paper so I can’t really rate it.
January 3, 2026
Like all 8 volumes, incredible research but slow going. Author prefers big, unheard-of words
Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews