Nearly a decade ago, in the inaugural issue of Books & Culture, Mark Noll surveyed the seemingly endless proliferation of Abraham Lincoln studies. One factoid will suffice. In 1950, at least 500 persons were earning their living from collecting Lincoln materials, publishing Lincoln books and articles, or tending Lincoln shrines. Since then, the statistics have continued to pile up like snowdrifts. As a case in point, between December 1996 and April 2003 the Abraham Lincoln Research Web site registered nearly four million hits.1
Under the circumstances it seems unlikely that anyone would be able to say much that is fresh, let alone important, about the sixteenth president. But this new biography by the Rhodes Professor of American History at Oxford University constitutes a brilliant addition to the Lincoln literature. Readers familiar with Carwardine’s Evangelicals and Politics in Antebellum America (1993) will find the breadth of research and judiciousness of argument in the present study a fitting sequel to his earlier achievement.
Carwardine bills this work as a political biography, focusing especially on the political sources of Lincoln’s authority. He tells us that the president’s success stemmed from three factors: personal ambition, sensitivity to public opinion, and mastery of Whig and, later, Republican Party machinery. The book tracks the interplay of these three elements in a narrative framework, stretched over Lincoln’s life (1809-1865), with close attention to specific settings.
In one sense Carwardine amply fulfills his promise to provide a political biography. He offers exhaustive attention to the ins and outs of antebellum elections, backroom negotiations, and intra-party squabbling. Readers hoping to learn exactly what the Whig, Republican, and Democratic parties held on the major issues of the day, who voted for whom, and why, will not be disappointed. But in another sense the book is far more than a political biography. Though Carwardine never flat-out says so, the work is really, above all else, a study of the role of religion in Lincoln’s career—first as a wellspring of his worldview, and second as a tool for securing his political purposes.
What was Lincoln’s religion? The question is not easy to answer, for everyone claimed him. Evangelical Protestants led the parade, but at one time or another everyone else seemed to join the procession, including Catholics, Jews, Masons, Mormons, Quakers, Unitarians, Universalists, and even Spiritualists. The same was true of Lincoln’s associates, who variously made him into an infidel or a saint or just about anything in between. Maybe, as Barbara Welter suggests, “the man himself did not know what he thought.”2
Carwardine bravely wades in with his own judgments. Part of the problem, he tells us, is the paucity of evidence. Despite the amplitude of presidential papers, Lincoln actually said very little about his personal life, and next to nothing about his faith—or lack of it. “Lincoln never told mortal man his purposes—Never,” said one of his closest friends. But another part of the problem is that Lincoln’s views changed considerably over the course of his life.
The story can be summarized briefly. Reared by fervently Calvinist or “Hard Shell” Baptist parents, young Abraham mastered major parts of the King James Version before leaving home. As an adult he never drank, smoked, gambled, or swore (spicy stories were another matter). He hated cruelty to animals and never used a gun (except once, as a young man, when he dispatched a turkey and later felt much remorse for it). Even so, in his salad years as an Illinois legislator and aspiring lawyer, he strayed from his parents’ rigorist faith. Holding an Enlightenment-like view of a distant, benevolent Creator, Lincoln rarely attended church, gave no sign of orthodox Christian belief, and disdained the emotionalism of camp meeting religion. “[W]hen I hear a man preach,” he quipped, “I like to see him act as if he were fighting bees!”
But age, the loss of two young sons, the horrors of a war that seemed never to end and, above all, “death by mass production” (as Ernie Pyle would say of a later conflict), brought changes. To be sure, to the end of his life Lincoln never affiliated with a Christian church, never professed orthodox Trinitarian convictions, never testified to a New Birth experience, and never suggested belief in life beyond the grave, at least not directly. Still, Carwardine argues, the crises of the 1850s and 1860s prompted a dramatic deepening in Lincoln’s religious outlook. The mature Lincoln found solace in Scripture, which he read privately and quoted often. He worshipped regularly at Washington, D.C.’s New York Avenue Presbyterian Church. He saw the nation’s destiny in providential terms and himself as an instrument in the Almighty’s hands.
Such materials invite different interpretations. In his recent prizewinning biography of Lincoln, Allen C. Guelzo stresses the productive tension between the “Calvinistic ‘melancholy'” and the “bourgeois aggressiveness” that marked the president’s thinking about God and humans.3 Carwardine, in contrast, depicts Lincoln more as a tragic figure, a man bowed by a crushing sense of responsibility to a divine will that remained inscrutable. For him the task was somehow to identify that will and align the Union with its purposes.
More important than Lincoln’s own religion was the way that he drew on powerful evangelical Protestant sensibilities in mid-19th century America, especially in the North, to promote the twin causes of the Union and emancipation. This narrative lies at the heart of Carwardine’s assessment of Lincoln’s political authority. Though Charles Finney’s faith was not Lincoln’s, the president harnessed the optimistic, postmillennial, reform-minded spirit displayed by Finney and millions like him to achieve his political ends. Carwardine mercifully spares readers mind-numbing statistics of electoral returns. But he makes clear that evangelical Protestants, with the aid of holiness offshoots like the Free Methodists and liberal co-belligerents like the Quakers, constituted Lincoln’s core support base. (Carwardine might well have turned the question around and asked how the sects used Lincoln to achieve their own purposes, but that would be another book.)
Carwardine’s account of Lincoln’s changing view of the relation between the Union and emancipation adds a sharp moral edge to a story other historians have told in other ways. In brief, Lincoln’s estimation of the moral enormity of slavery evolved from what might be called quiet disapproval to vigorous opposition. Though Lincoln never countenanced slavery, when he was a young man the problem ranked low on his agenda. But by the time of the Kansas-Nebraska Act in 1854, and especially the U.S. Senate race with Stephen A. Douglas in 1858, it had moved high.
In Lincoln’s mind the North and the South—and for that matter the Republican and the Democratic parties—inhabited different moral universes. The North tolerated slavery where the U.S. Constitution sanctioned it, but would not permit slavery to spread into the federal territories. Meanwhile, the North determined to choke the “peculiar institution” by all means legally possible. The South, finding slavery a reasonable economic and social arrangement, believed that slaveholders enjoyed the constitutional right to take their slaves into the federal territories. By September 1862, when Lincoln sketched the principles that issued in the Emancipation Proclamation in January 1863, slavery had moved front and center in his thinking. Where once he had seen emancipation as a desirable byproduct of a restored Union, now he saw a restored Union as the means by which liberty for all, black and white, would be won.
Behind it all, in Carwardine’s depiction, stood the engine of religious passion. For the president, the Bible made clear that all men were created in God’s image; that every man was entitled to a just reward for his labor; that the Christian rule of charity called for giving to, not taking from, the needy; that God punished wicked nations, not just individuals. Carwardine suggests that for Lincoln himself, the Enlightenment principles of liberty and equality, enunciated in the Declaration of Independence, rivaled—and possibly trumped—the biblical principles of humanitarian compassion. But in the end, the exact sources and relative weighting of motivations mattered little. What mattered was that Americans stood at the most momentous moral crossroads of modern times. They might—in Lincoln’s ringing words—”nobly save, or meanly lose, the last best, hope of earth.”
The book brims with virtues. The prose sings. Though it is not necessarily the first volume one would take to the beach, one could well read it just for pleasure. Carwardine’s eye for the telling detail creates a richly suggestive image of the president. He allows that this is not a personal biography—and indeed, he is quite right, for we learn little about Lincoln’s family life or daily preferences or melancholic “nights of the soul.” But we learn much else that may be more important for measuring the temper of the times. Strikingly tall for the era (6′ 4″), gawky, unkempt, Lincoln parlayed his leathery visage and homely looks into a political asset. He prided himself on speaking clearly, simply, and economically. And then there was his legendary sense of humor. He liked to tell of the western farmer who protested, “I am not greedy about land; I only want what jines mine.”
It is hard to imagine a subject more challenging than Lincoln. If many Americans have gone out of their way to elevate him to mythic proportions, many historians, as well as some normal folk, especially in the South, have gone out of their way to cut him down to size. Carwardine confronts the problem not by steering down the middle but by setting Lincoln squarely in the context of his times. He acknowledges the president’s political misjudgments, especially his perennial inability to gage the ferocity of the South’s determination to pull out—and stay out. Yet Carwardine gives Lincoln fair praise for remaining focused on the two vast essentials of the day: the indissolubility of the Union, and the evil of human slavery.
Carwardine’s own moral commitments emerge with clarity in his evaluation of Lincoln’s legacy, both immediate and long-range. Americans, he observes, soon found continuities linking Moses and Lincoln, for both leaders freed a people—indeed, Lincoln, unlike Moses, freed a people not of his own kindred. Others found even loftier parallels: Hadn’t Lincoln entered the Confederate capital of Richmond on Palm Sunday, suffered an assassin’s bullet on Good Friday, and died after his salvific work on earth was finished? The result was to sanctify the swelling chorus of American nationalism. But if Lincoln bequeathed an enhanced sense of millennial purpose to his successors, Carwardine cautions, he also bequeathed a brake on the arrogance of power by “deep thought, breadth of vision, careful concern for consequences and a remarkable lack of pride.”
One of my teachers used to say with a wry smile that a good history book is a sermon with footnotes. This history book offers enough footnotes to satisfy the most rigorous scholar. It also offers enough wisdom to instruct the most thoughtful student of that titanic ordeal we have come to call, with little sense of its bloodshed and agony, the Civil War.
Grant Wacker is professor of church history at Duke University. His book Heaven Below: Early Pentecostals and American Culture has just been issued in paperback by Harvard University Press. With Daniel Bays, he is the editor of The Foreign Missionary Enterprise at Home: Explorations in North American Cultural History (Univ. of Alabama Press).
1. Mark Noll, “The Struggle for Lincoln’s Soul,” Books & Culture, September/October 1995, p. 3; Abraham Lincoln Research Site: members.aol.com/RVSNorton/Lincoln2.html; 3,722,742 hits since December 29, 1996. Data extracted April 11, 2003. Admittedly, hit-counts are notoriously subject to manipulation, but the high level of interest in Lincoln is confirmed by many other sources.
2. Barbara Welter, “A Man of Nineteenth-Century Ideas,” Reviews in American History, Vol. 2 (2001), p. 376.
3. Allen C. Guelzo, Abraham Lincoln: Redeemer President (Eerdmans, 1999), p. 463.
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