Politics & Power Quote by John Sergeant Wise

Wise writes like a man watching the country slip out of his class's hands. The line is doing double duty: it brands Lincoln as personally unfit ("no such man") and then escalates to a moral panic ("monster") that flatters the speaker's own judgment. The contempt is the point. "That settled Abraham Lincoln with me" has the snap of a verdict, a way of turning political disagreement into a settled fact, beyond argument. It's not just anti-Lincoln; it's anti-deliberation.

The most revealing phrase is "I could not yet conceive it possible". Wise isn't only attacking Lincoln; he's attacking the idea that a majority might legitimately want him. The sentence stages disbelief as evidence. If the outcome feels unthinkable to an educated Virginian insider, the logic goes, it must be illegitimate or pathological. Calling Lincoln a "monster" isn't analysis; it's permission structure. It lets the reader feel that extraordinary measures are reasonable because the threat is extraordinary.

Context does the heavy lifting. Wise was a Confederate veteran and son of Virginia's secessionist governor. His memoir-era voice looks back at 1860 through the haze of Lost Cause politics, where Lincoln becomes a symbol of Northern coercion and social upheaval. The real target is democratic volatility: the fear that mass politics can elevate an "unacceptable" figure and, with him, an unwanted future. Wise's outrage is less about Lincoln's character than about the terrifying possibility that the people might choose against Wise's world.