December 2025 Meeting

At our dinner meeting on December 10th, Mr. David Von Drehle gave an excellent presentation about his book titled: Rise to Greatness: Abraham Lincoln and America’s Most Perilous Year. Attendance at the December meeting was 59.

Some of the key points that Mr. Von Drehle made during his presentation are as follows:

Prior to becoming president, Lincoln had been senior partner of a law firm. He had no experience to lead a nation. No one in history ever had to preserve a democratic republic during a crisis. On January 1, 1863, Lincoln signs the Emancipation Proclamation. That is what he was most proud of. His name would not be
forgotten. He has a temple in America’s most honored and celebrated space, Washington D.C.

Mr. Von Drehle discussed three key takeaways from his book:

• Author David McCullough said no one lives in the past. Everyone is living in the present. We have to understand people in their present and not as we would second guess the past. By the end of the Civil War, the North was dramatically superior in every way: military, money, production, etc. At the beginning of the war, people thought the Union cause was hopeless. The Confederacy comprised a larger area than the area of Europe that was conquered by Napoleon. The Union captured more land.
• The South was the Saudi Arabia of the day. They had a chokehold on the cotton industry. The South produced over one-half of the cotton in the world. Some thought it was a certainty that European powers would recognize the Confederacy and open up the cotton market.
• No Union army was ready to take on the task of defeating the Confederacy. The Union army only had 16,000 men and most of them were in California. The Union army was mostly volunteers. However, they did have junior officers from the Mexican-American war. At the beginning of the war, Grant said he wasn’t
  capable of leading 1,000 men, much less 20,000. At the end of the war, Grant led the largest army the world had ever seen.

In 1862, people were genuinely worried about General McClellan taking over for Lincoln. His cabinet was worried about a military Coup. Lincoln was a minority president and McClellan was a majority general. After Antietam, Lincoln finally had the clout to fire McClellan.

With the horrors of war, why couldn’t the Union just let the Confederacy go and compromise with them? The country had been trying to compromise since the very beginning: Banning slavery in the north, the Missouri Compromise of 1820, the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, the Kansas/Nebraska Act of 1854, Kansas statehood in 1861. The country couldn’t compromise.

Lincoln believed the future of the U.S. was not going to be a North and a South. Otherwise, the U.S. was going to end up like Europe: tiny countries fighting over rivers. Lincoln understood that despite all of our shortcomings, people in America could make something of themselves. 

Lincoln thought if we can just save the nation and grow as we had been growing, by 1930 the U.S. would be the wealthiest and most powerful country in the world and would have a higher standard of living than ever before. That was his vision.

In January 1862, Lincoln realizes he doesn’t have a plan or a strategy to conduct the war. Lincoln then goes to the library and checks out all of the books on military science. Lincoln figured out the way that the North was going to win the war. The South has a long border, with fewer soldiers than the North. Therefore, the North needed to attack in multiple places at the same time. That is exactly how the North won the war.

Lincoln began thinking about emancipation in the summer of 1862. Lincoln had believed in gradual emancipation with compensation for slave owners Lincoln wanted to engineer a step-by-step plan until he gets to military emancipation. However, the Confederacy was implacable on this issue. They were fighting to win
the war. After Antietam, Lincoln decided to issue the Emancipation Proclamation. Lincoln told his cabinet that he made a promise to God that if the North won at Antietam, he would issue the Emancipation Proclamation, and he would not be moved off of his promise.

Photos from the Dinner