In this superb, often surprising account by a leading scholar of the Civil War era, Matthew Pinsker presents Abraham Lincoln as a pragmatic and ambitious political animal as he plows his way through the thickets of Illinois politics and into the bruising national arena—and finally the wartime White House. If anyone still thinks of Lincoln as a rube, this deeply researched, crisply written book will dispel that weary stereotype once and for all. Writes Pinsker, “the wartime president was no simple rail-splitter but at times a cold-blooded hatchet man.” Pinsker, the Pohanka Chair in American Civil War History and director of the House Divided Project at Dickinson College, skillfully reveals the intricate political footwork that led to Lincoln’s rise as a master-strategist, first as a stalwart Whig and then as a Republican, making him one of the canniest political operators in the antebellum United States. Pinsker charts Lincoln’s deft pursuit of “fusion” (the era’s favored term for shaping new alliances from disparate factions), notably during the invention of the Republican party from a congeries of Free Staters, abolitionists, nativists, and anti-slavery Democrats. “To understand Lincoln as a politician,” Pinsker writes, “we must recognize that he was not an office seeker so much as a party builder, and that his peculiar talent for party management was the driving force in his political career.” As Lincoln put it in 1855: “I have no objection to ‘fuse’ with anybody provided I can fuse on ground which I think is right.” By then, Lincoln was the most indefatigable Republican organizer in the key state of Illinois and in wide demand as a partisan orator. He never shirked confrontation with rivals, enjoyed preparing charts and counting votes, and was a pioneer in the targeted personalization of campaign materials. By 1856, he was already a prospective national candidate, coming in second in the balloting for the vice-presidency on the ticket with Republican presidential nominee John C. Fremont. In 1860, he skillfully outmaneuvered the Republican stalwart William Seward to win the presidential nomination for himself. Pinsker says that Lincoln’s antebellum partisan experiences prepared him to become an effective wartime president. He details sharply Lincoln’s frustrations with recalcitrant generals, impatient Radicals in Congress, hostile journalists, border-state loyalists, and ambitious rivals—Treasury Secretary Salmon P. Chase in particular—often pushing and cajoling, but never losing sight of his larger goals and only rarely losing his temper. Always cordial, even genial, he nonetheless could, when called for, project great force and authority. Commented the journalist Charles Dana, “There was no flabby philanthropy about Abraham Lincoln.” Although Lincoln’s personal loathing of slavery was never seriously in question, his arms-length treatment of abolitionists such as Sen. Benjamin Wade (R-OH) and Rep. Thaddeus Stevens (R-PA) has troubled some critics, both in his own day and our own. Pinsker, however, sees Lincoln as always steadily maneuvering toward the antislavery measures he wanted all along. This pragmatic patience was often mistaken for indecision. Lincoln’s 1864 decision to run for reelection not as a Republican, but as the candidate of the National Union Party has often been dismissed as little more than a temporary expedient to harvest War Democrats’ votes. Pinsker, however, deems it a major strategic shift that embodied his determination reframe the postwar political landscape around emancipation and the eventual incorporation of Black Americans into the political system. To accomplish that goal, Lincoln hoped to inspire “patriotic fusion” across the South, a process he knew would be full of challenges after the war, but which he felt was the best course possible or restoring the shattered nation on a stable basis. “We simply must begin with, and mould from, disorganized and discordant elements,” he reflected. His aim was to unify loyal southern whites with former slaves to build biracial majorities, “and presumably culminate with the birth of multiracial democracy across the nation,” Pinsker writes. He notes that Lincoln rarely even used the label “Republican” after 1862, and never in public statements. After the 1864 convention, Lincoln and his allies continued to push their supporters toward a broad patriotic front of willing men from any party, but one based on strong measures that included emancipation, Black enlistment, and eventually a constitutional amendment to abolish slavery. “With decisive behind-the-scenes leadership and persuasive public statements, Lincoln had helped the new party develop into a stable and dynamic coalition,” Pinsker writes. Seen through the fusionist lens, Lincoln’s 1864 dumping of his vice president Hannibal Hamlin, a Maine abolitionist, to make way for Andrew Johnson, a former Tennessee slaveowner—in the view of some, Lincoln’s worst decision as president— was not a misguided blunder, but instead an important step in the effort to cultivate lasting Union support in the South. Lincoln, of course, grossly overestimated the number of Southern Unionists and underestimated the postwar ruthlessness of former Confederates. He didn’t live to see the failure of his strategy in the incompetent hands of the deeply racist Johnson, or the brutal ones of the night-riding Ku Klux Klan. The Lincoln who emerges from Pinsker’s book is for the most part the morally driven Lincoln we thought we knew, but with added dimension. He is tougher, harder, and less compromising on what really matters to him, as well as a political practitioner of the first rank: in short, a “boss,” though one free of the unsavory connotations that the word usually carries.  “Politicians always claim to act on an interest greater than their own ambition,” Pinsker writes. “But in Lincoln’s case, the assertion was true.”   Fergus M. Bordewich’s most recent book is Klan War: Ulysses S. Grant and the Battle to Save Reconstruction. The post Boss Lincoln (2026) appeared first on Civil War Monitor.

Savannah Bananas player RobertAnthony Cruz (Coach RAC) prepared for the first game of the season with a spirit-led prayer over the...

In the lawsuit, Timberlake’s attorney argued “disclosure of this footage would constitute an unwarranted invasion” of the singer’s privacy.

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The Outsiders starred several young actors on their way to fame: Emilio Estevez, Rob Lowe, C Thomas Howell, Matt Dillon, Ralph Macchio, Patrick Swayze and Tom Cruise.

EFF, along with the national ACLU and the ACLU affiliates in Pennsylvania, Delaware, and New Jersey, filed an amicus brief in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit urging the court to require a warrant for border searches of electronic devices, an argument EFF has been making in the courts and Congress for nearly a decade. The case, U.S. v. Roggio, involves a man who had been under ongoing criminal investigation for illegal exports when he returned to the United States from an international trip via JFK airport. Border officers used the opportunity to bypass the Fourth Amendment’s warrant requirement when they seized several of his electronic devices (laptop, tablet, cell phone, and flash drive) and conducted forensic searches of them. As the district court explained, “investigative agents had a case coordination meeting and border search authority was discussed in early January 2017,” before Mr. Roggio traveled internationally in February 2017. The district court denied Mr. Roggio’s motion to suppress the emails and other data obtained from the warrantless searches of his devices. He was subsequently convicted of illegally exporting gun manufacturing parts to Iraq (he was also charged in a superseding indictment with torture and also convicted of that). The number of warrantless device searches at the border and the significant invasion of privacy they represent is only increasing. In Fiscal Year 2025, U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) conducted 55,318 device searches, both manual (“basic”) and forensic (“advanced”). While a manual search involves a border officer tapping or mousing around a device, a forensic search involves connecting another device to the traveler’s device and using software to extract and analyze the data to create a detailed report the device owner’s activities and communications. Border officers have access to forensic tools that help gain access to data on a locked or encrypted device they have physical access to. From public reporting, we know that more recent devices (and ones that have had the latest security updates applied) are more resistant to these type of tools, especially if they are turned off or turned on but not yet unlocked. The U.S. Supreme Court has recognized for a century a border search exception to the Fourth Amendment’s warrant requirement, allowing not only warrantless but also often suspicionless “routine” searches of luggage, vehicles, and other items crossing the border. The primary justification for the border search exception has been to find—in the items being searched—goods smuggled to avoid paying duties (i.e., taxes) and contraband such as drugs, weapons, and other prohibited items, thereby blocking their entry into the country. But a traveler’s privacy interests in their suitcase and its contents are minimal compared to those in all the personal data on the person’s phone or laptop. In our amicus brief, we argue that the U.S. Supreme Court’s balancing test in Riley v. California (2014) should govern the analysis here. In that case, the Court weighed the government’s interests in warrantless and suspicionless access to cell phone data following an arrest against an arrestee’s privacy interests in the depth and breadth of personal information stored on a cell phone. The Court concluded that the search-incident-to-arrest warrant exception does not apply, and that police need to get a warrant to search an arrestee’s phone. Travelers’ privacy interests in their cell phones, laptops and other electronic devices are, of course, the same as those considered in Riley. Modern devices, over a decade later, contain even more data that together reveal the most personal aspects of our lives, including political affiliations, religious beliefs and practices, sexual and romantic affinities, financial status, health conditions, and family and professional associations. In considering the government’s interests in warrantless access to digital data at the border, Riley requires analyzing how closely such searches hew to the original purpose of the warrant exception—preventing the entry of prohibited goods themselves via the items being searched. We argue that the government’s interests are weak in seeking unfettered access to travelers’ electronic devices. First, physical contraband (like drugs) can’t be found in digital data. Second, digital contraband (such as child sexual abuse material) can’t be prevented from entering the country through a warrantless search of a device at the border because it’s likely, given the nature of cloud technology and how internet-connected devices work, that identical copies of the files are already in the country on servers accessible via the internet. Finally, searching devices for evidence of contraband smuggling (for example, the emails here revealing details of the illegal import scheme) and other evidence for general law enforcement (i.e., investigating non-border-related domestic crimes) are too “untethered” from the original purpose of the border search exception, which is to find prohibited items themselves and not evidence to support a criminal prosecution. Therefore, emails or other data found on a digital device searched without a warrant at the border cannot and should not be used as evidence in court. If the Third Circuit is not inclined to require a warrant for electronic device searches at the border, we also argue that such a search—whether manual or forensic—should be justified only by reasonable suspicion that the device contains digital contraband and be limited in scope to looking for digital contraband. This extends the Ninth Circuit’s rule from U.S. v. Cano (2019) in which the court held that only forensic device searches at the border require reasonable suspicion that the device contains digital contraband—that is, some set of already known facts pointing to this possibility—while manual searches may be conducted without suspicion. But the Cano court also held that all searches must be limited in scope to looking for digital contraband (for example, call logs are off limits because they can’t contain digital contraband in the form of photos or files). We hope that the Third Circuit will rise to the occasion and be the first circuit to fully protect travelers’ Fourth Amendment rights at the border.