"Boss Lincoln" reminds us that Abraham Lincoln didn't float into the presidency, but clawed his way there

You can believe something all your life and then, confronted with new evidence, suddenly realize how ridiculous that thinking was.

Well, I can anyway. Many people cling to error as if their lives depend on it. Maybe they do. To me, the ability to admit being wrong is not a flaw but a superpower.

Had you previously asked me to describe the rise of Abraham Lincoln, I'd have said something about young Abe writing letters with coal on the back of a shovel in a log cabin, growing into a lanky, wisecracking Illinois railroad lawyer who shambled into the presidency in 1860 because he was so homespun and wise.

Dumb.

Then I cracked open “Boss Lincoln: The Partisan Life of Abraham Lincoln, by Matthew Pinsker, published last week.

Lincoln was a driven, scheming political animal, "barking out orders, providing advice," scrawling "BURN THIS" at the bottom of letters, abusing the congressional franking privilege to deluge constituents with his speeches, glad-handing every farmer he met.

Then as now, truth was the first victim of the partisan battle royale.

"I have been put down here as the candidate of pride, wealth and aristocratic family distinction," Lincoln gripes, of slurs after his marriage to well-off Mary Todd, noting that 12 years earlier he'd been a "friendless, uneducated, penniless boy, working on a flat boat."

Any biography rests on the fascinating facts it shares, and Pinsker drives home what a mover and shaker Lincoln was, years before the presidency, with this:

"He was a man of consequence, important enough even to have a town named after him," Pinsker writes. "... the town of Lincoln, Illinois, was born in August, 1853" in honor of the skilled lobbyist who had pushed rail lines through Northern Illinois.

We're reminded the past isn't a playpen: They weren't handing out presidencies to whatever Bible-quoting yahoo showed up and asked. At one point, Lincoln himself pauses to mock that thinking:

"Do you suppose that I should ever have got into notice, if I had waited to be hunted up and pushed forward by older men?"

Not anymore I don't.

As we are still arguing who can be sheared of human dignity and under what circumstances (color of skin, then; condition of immigration papers, now) the book is terrifyingly relevant — and offers the comfort of reminding us that our extraordinary times might not be quite so extraordinary.

In 1858, the worry is about immigrants voting illegally. Spying "fifteen Celtic gentlemen with black carpet-sacks" at a railroad junction, Lincoln follows them, spying while the Irish workers hang around a saloon.

Lincoln also tags after U.S. Sen. Stephen Douglas, tracking him like a campaign staffer doing opposition research, offering on-the-spot rebuttals — leading to the famous Lincoln-Douglas debates.

Slave-owning Douglas might remind readers of a more contemporary politician.

"Douglas began the debates with a series of lies," Pinsker writes. "He repeated charges from the 1856 campaign, long since repudiated ... then claiming to read directly from the platforms of the 'Black Republican Party' adopted at the state fair in Springfield in October, 1854... He tried taunting Lincoln if he still believed in such radical ideas, before pivoting to a series of ugly questions about race."

Watching Americans argue today over the obvious — Is climate change real? Do vaccines work? Should immigrants be treated humanely? — it might offer some small comfort to remember the nation once agonized over whether a person should be consigned to a life of cruel bondage because his grandmother was Black.

Douglas tried to leap ahead, past the unsettled slavery question, and abuse his opponents with then-unimaginable images of a mixed society, leading to Lincoln's famous retort, blasting the "counterfeit logic" that "because I do not want a black woman for a slave I must necessarily want her for a wife" and noting, with surprising candor, that if Douglas was worried about race mixing, it was to be found in the rape culture of Southern slavery, not in the hazy future prospect of intermarriage with free Blacks.

No book is perfect, and Pinsker, when focusing on certain grassroots political machinations, sometimes gets down on his knees to explore a situation, blade by blade.

The fate of a single subcabinet post — commissionership of the General Land Office — is battled over for nearly 20 pages. The Gettysburg Address merits only three.

That said,"Boss Lincoln" is history at its most fresh, real and relevant — maybe too relevant, considering that a gifted, eloquent unifier like Lincoln, a skilled lawyer, dedicated to his party and country, nevertheless presided over a fratricidal Civil War that killed 600,000 Americans. What will a man who cares neither for party nor country, a sinkhole of ego, self-dealing and heedless of the law, lead us to?