Book Review: Boss Lincoln: The Partisan Life of Abraham Lincoln

Boss Lincoln: The Partisan Life of Abraham Lincoln. By Matthew Pinsker. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2026. Hardcover, 576 pp. $31.99

Reviewed by Max Longley

Matthew Pinsker teaches at Dickinson College, focusing on the Civil War era. He is Project Director at the House Divided Project at Dickinson.

Pinsker examines Abraham Lincoln’s career as a political partisan. Of course, just about every aspect of Lincoln’s career has been examined by now, including his relationship with his dog. But Lincoln as a political boss – this is a comparatively new approach to a much-discussed historical figure. The idea of a President as a political partisan shouldn’t be surprising – how do Presidents become President, after all? But when the partisan in question is Lincoln, there may be some fan resistance to the idea. Pinsker reviews the existing Lincoln literature, as well as delving into the archival records of Lincoln himself and of his political contemporaries, to show that, yes, Lincoln practiced politics, devoted considerable attention to it, and was good at it.

Pinsker exposes the backroom machinations of Lincolnian politics, but to Pinsker, Lincoln’s partisanship always served higher ends. Here is how Pinsker sees it: From the beginning of his political career until its tragic end, Abraham Lincoln saw parties as essential vehicles to advance the political principles he held. The Whig Party – of which Lincoln was an influential Illinois leader until the party’s breakup in 1854 – was needed to promote economic development (with state and federal assistance when that was considered necessary). The antebellum Republican Party was needed to keep slavery out of the federal territories, and Lincoln’s role in the new party grew from Illinois leader to national figure and successful Presidential contender. After the Civil War began, the Republican Party, with Lincoln now at the head, was responsible for war policy. So was the Union Party, created as the war progressed as a combination of Republicans and those prowar Democrats who accepted Lincoln’s war aims – especially emancipation.

In all these partisan roles, Lincoln was a dedicated party organizer – intelligent, hard-working and skilled in the ins and outs of coalition-building, of flattering and appeasing people he needed as allies, and of keeping his supporters in order. All with an eye to the elections, with voters and their habits analyzed with the best techniques available at the time.

During the war, Lincoln avoided the Churchillian option of a wartime government made up of all parties and factions. That’s probably just as well, because such a broad-based government would have included prowar Democrats who didn’t support emancipation, which would have necessitated betraying the enslaved. In any case, a Churchillian option went against all the partisan instincts which Lincoln held from the very beginning.

To be sure, some readers might recoil when they read Pinsker’s account of Lincoln, on the same day that he ordered out the military in the wake of Fort Sumter’s fall, holding an intense discussion of patronage issues. (306) Then there’s Pinsker’s assessment of the famous dedication of the Gettysburg cemetery: “The partisan elements at Gettysburg were apparent from the beginning” (p. 399). And Lincoln’s Gettysburg address is described as “partisan poetry” appealing to “key northern factions.” (402)

Those who are able to surmount their shock at such descriptions will nonetheless understand that Pinsker remains a Lincoln supporter. To Pinsker, Lincoln thought that some parties – Lincoln’s own – were much better for the vital interests of the country than the opposing parties, so Lincoln worked to ensure his own parties’ success.