Few historical figures can rival Abraham Lincoln’s constant ability to prompt interesting and first-rate scholarship. The paucity of the record for his early life, his enigmatic personality and lifelong reluctance to reveal himself even to intimates, and the profundity of the public issues that he faced: all encourage speculative analysis and have worked in recent years to attract the attention of some of the very best American historians. Though as a young man Lincoln mournfully judged that he had “done nothing to make any human being remember that he had lived,” he would later recognize, during the second year of an increasingly brutal conflict, that the “fiery trial” of war meant that the Union’s leaders “will be remembered in spite of ourselves … , in honor or dishonor, to the latest generation.” But he would scarcely have credited that he should become a subject of historical attention second only to Jesus Christ.
Lincoln was himself suspicious of the biographical form, a caution shared by many—perhaps most—academic historians writing in recent times, at least as far as the lives of “great men” are concerned. For much of the period since the 1960s, attention to social structures, political cultures and processes, ideological tides, popular movements and voting behavior has widely taken precedence over the study of individual leaders: “bottom-up,” not “top-down,” approaches have been much more in vogue. With the exception of Stephen Oates’s With Malice Toward None (1977), no biography of Lincoln worthy of note appeared during the 1970s and 1980s. Yet over the last decade several justly acclaimed lives of the Union president have played their part in an extraordinary and more general renaissance in American Civil War studies. Both David Herbert Donald, with Lincoln (1995), and Allen C. Guelzo, with Abraham Lincoln: Redeemer President (1999), have produced prizewinning, distinctive, and highly readable biographies, the one emphasizing Lincoln’s “passivity,” the other Lincoln’s serious engagement with the intellectual ideas of his time, including religious ones. In Honor’s Voice: The Transformation of Abraham Lincoln (1998), Douglas L. Wilson has creatively mined the recollections of Lincoln’s contemporaries to provide a compelling portrait of his emotional trials during early manhood. And Mark A. Neely, in The Last Best Hope of Earth: Abraham Lincoln and the Promise of America (1993), has distilled years of authoritative Lincoln scholarship into a short political study. Now William E. Gienapp, Donald’s colleague at Harvard and an unsurpassed historian of the early Republican party, offers his own reading of the sixteenth president.
Abraham Lincoln and Civil War America is a masterpiece of compression and balanced synthesis. In less than 200 pages of crisp text, interspersed with maps and contemporary illustrations, Gienapp surveys the whole of Lincoln’s life, private and public, domestic and professional, from his backwoods beginnings to his assassination and martyrdom. The book moves at pace but not so fast as to prevent considered judgments and skillful exposition of complex issues. Three of its eight chapters take Lincoln to the threshold of the White House, charting his stuttering early progress as an ambitious, enterprising young man in New Salem, determined to turn his back on the rural grind, and then as a citizen of Springfield aspiring to a career of distinction in law and politics. Gienapp tells a story of setbacks and—for so it appeared when Lincoln’s single term in Congress came to a close in 1849—of political dead ends. But the book’s main focus is to address how, as president-elect and president, Lincoln turned his personal and political gifts to the huge challenge of restoring the shattered Union.
Exploring Lincoln’s political and military leadership provides the analytical thread in the book’s narrative of the White House years. Indeed, it is in the president’s determined coordination of the competing claims of political and military strategy that Gienapp locates the cornerstone of Lincoln’s success. Lincoln saw, in a way that his generals rarely did, that military policy could not be pursued in a political democracy without attending to the hopes and fears of the people at large. McClellan’s sluggishness in 1862 notoriously did the administration no political favors. Even Ulysses S. Grant, no slouch, had to be taught the lesson. The president brought him east in 1864 and insisted that he keep northern Virginia his area of operation: that was what the political public expected.
Lincoln had no previous executive experience to bring to the task of political leadership itself, but this limitation was largely offset by a lifetime’s immersion in party management and a rare understanding of what made politicians tick. Recognizing how important it was to keep his Republican-Union party united and as broad-based as possible, he spent much of his time oiling the party machinery and using government jobs to keep its workers loyal (even though, naturally, there were “more horses than oats”). This concern similarly conditioned his shaping of policy. In his schemes for both emancipation and reconstruction he was bent on forging as wide a political consensus as he could, one which would at least draw in the full range of Republicans—radical, moderate and conservative—if not opposition Democrats.
Lincoln’s noncombatant service in the Black Hawk war 30 years earlier, his only martial experience, scarcely equipped him for the task of military leadership in an internecine civil conflict. But as commander-in-chief he was determined to be more than a sideline onlooker, and his earnest attempts to grapple with military theory and with developing an effective chain of command showed that instinctive grasp of essentials which so many of his generals lacked. Gienapp traces the evolution of Lincoln’s strategy, from the prosecution of limited warfare that would leave the South’s institutions intact to a hard war policy that entailed an assault on slavery, the Confederacy’s infrastructure, and—finally, through Sherman’s marches—its psychological well-being.
Gienapp does not hide his admiration for Lincoln’s “accomplished and extraordinary” style of leadership and the speed with which he established himself as master of his administration and kept control of the social revolution launched by the war. The president readily left to Congress what he judged properly to lie within its own sphere, including legislation on economic issues, but he forcefully took control of war policy, including emancipation and reconstruction. He swiftly achieved mastery of his cabinet and, though ready to delegate (notably, financial matters to Chase and foreign affairs to Seward), he was quick to intervene when larger strategic objectives were threatened, as during the Anglo-American crisis over the Trent.
Lincoln’s assumption of new executive powers, whether to secure the border, raise troops, or prosecute a harder war, was “breathtaking”: unauthorized use of the Treasury; suspension of habeas corpus; and government by presidential proclamation. Resolute over ends but flexible over means, he took crucial decisions by himself, relying on his own judgment. Lincoln’s legendary antipathy to quarrels and political vendettas was just one expression of an ability to work with men of diverse outlooks and to endure criticism and ridicule without falling himself into self-defeating small-mindedness. And throughout the struggle he exhibited an extraordinary physical and mental toughness that kept him resilient after even the most desperate setbacks.
In a brilliant essay 25 years ago, Gabor S. Boritt traced the evolution within Lincoln hagiography and historiography of the competing themes of the godlike Lincoln and the earthbound politician. Gienapp’s biography has its subject traveling on a journey to greatness but not to divinity, for Lincoln remains a discernibly human figure, capable of mistakes as well as wise action. Here was a president-elect slow to grasp the depth of the crisis unfolding in the winter of 1860-61; indeed, Lincoln’s misguided belief that most southerners were Unionists at heart continued to shape his policy for months to come. Once in the White House, he made a “fumbling start” to office, allowing himself to be diverted from the crisis over the federal forts by hordes of office seekers.
Though he was mostly a good judge of men, his choice of Simon Cameron for the War Department was not the only rule-proving exception. Most obviously, Lincoln misjudged McClellan, lavishing attention on him and protecting him from his congressional critics, in the mistaken belief that presidential encouragement would instill military vigor. Lincoln made other errors in his dealings with generals. With Joe Hooker, it proved a mistake to by-pass the traditional chain of command, for his commander was resistant to advice, however directly communicated, and the new practice left Henry Halleck in the dark. Again, Lincoln complicated things for Grant through an ill-considered appointment of John McClernand to a separate command at Vicksburg. And in the summer of 1864, the president’s “Niagara manifesto”—a public message to Confederate envoys that emancipation was an essential condition of reunion and peace—badly backfired, putting the administration and the Union party on the defensive.
Still, for Gienapp these are minor blemishes on the larger canvas of Lincoln’s natural political aptitude, evident from the launch of his career in the 1830s. If there is a single theme to this study as a whole, it is Lincoln’s easy confidence in the arena of party politics, and his using those political gifts in pursuit of a larger moral purpose. Gienapp’s Lincoln is no mere party hack, but he saw at the founding period of the world’s first mass democratic society that party was the necessary (though not sufficient) condition for doing good: “the man who is of neither party is not—cannot be, of any consequence.” Mastering party organization gave the moral politician the best scope for action. Both as a Whig and as a Republican, Lincoln was proud of his convictions and the party programs they infused. Self-disciplined, industrious, self-educated and upwardly mobile, Lincoln the Whig—as Gabor Boritt, Daniel Walker Howe, and Allen Guelzo have taught us—was dedicated to improving the means by which people like himself could share in the benefits of an expanding market economy.
Gienapp is surely right to say that after 1854, as Lincoln evolved into a Republican, his “moral passion now ran deeper as he shifted his primary focus from economic issues to slavery”—though the implied disjunction here between economic and moral issues could mislead the unwitting reader. The Whig economic program that Lincoln championed had a clear moral end (expanding opportunity), while the Republican policy of quarantining slavery had both a moral and material dimension (preserving economic opportunities for white farmers and workers, while giving the slave the freedom to eat the bread his hands had earned).
Gienapp’s recognition of Lincoln’s moral dimension sits somewhat uneasily with what he terms Lincoln’s “ingrained conservative nature.” Moral passion and political conservatism are not incompatible, of course, but it is not clear how the man who in 1837 in the Illinois Assembly entered his minority protest against slavery as “founded on both injustice and bad policy,” or who as a congressman sought the end of slavery in the District of Columbia, or who shunned nativism, or who in his debates with Douglas repeated that slavery was wrong and that Negroes were embraced by the Declaration of Independence, or who had moved towards the idea of limited black suffrage by 1864, could be described as “fundamentally” conservative. Lincoln did not publicly adopt radical positions, but there is no good evidence that he sought to resist social or even racial change, providing it was pursued by degrees and without the kind of upheaval that would guarantee the powerful backlash of racist and frightened white communities. His wartime advocacy of colonization for free blacks and of compensated emancipation had much to do with managing opinion. A man who, as Gienapp maintains, “in reality … had been ahead of public opinion on the most controversial domestic issues of the wa emancipation, conscription, and civil liberties” cannot comfortably be classified as conservative.
Lincoln went a long way toward satisfying those who cast him as an instrument of the divine will. A Chicago Methodist believed he had located “the true theory and solution of this ‘terrible war'” in the vivid remark of one of the city’s lawyers: “You may depend upon it, the Lord runs Lincoln.”
In an essay published in 1986, “Who Voted for Lincoln?”, Gienapp provided what is still the best analysis of Lincoln’s electoral support in the presidential contest of 1860; in his magisterial study The Origins of the Republican Party, 1852-1856 (1987), he showed how party leaders faced with grass-roots upheaval had only mixed success in managing popular turbulence. Abraham Lincoln and Civil War America, however, is political history out of a different mold. Focusing on political leadership, it passes over the sources of Lincoln’s popular support in antebellum Illinois and the wartime Union. Gienapp is explicit about the constraints imposed on Lincoln by the realities of mass democracy: how concern over public opinion shaped Lincoln’s military strategy; how he worked to prepare the public mind for changes in policy over slavery, and to defend the administration’s policy on black troops and civil liberties; how in the dark days of 1864 he fought to sustain popular confidence. But it is not Gienapp’s purpose to explore the constituent elements of that support.
Yet Lincoln’s political authority—both in pursuing office and in holding it—derived in large part from his successfully identifying and mobilizing a number of sympathetic and powerful constituencies. Arguably the most powerful of these were those millions of Protestants—and especially evangelicals—who gave Republicanism its tensile moral strength. As president, Lincoln knew that harnessing the energies of loyal clergy and philanthropists would give the Union administration a potent weapon. The election of 1860, with its unprecedented fusing of religion and politics, served as a reminder, if one were needed, that the separation of church and state had not blunted the political appetites of the clergy. Lincoln watched the subsequent rallying of the northern churches to the cause of Union. Bombarded by the resolutions of ecclesiastical bodies, he was well placed to gauge the shifts in religious opinion. Northern clergy, divided before the war over slavery, now united in defense of the Union, as the “higher law” minority of radical antislavery people found common cause with “law and order” conservatives.
If the majority of Protestants accepted the government’s initial definition of the war as a struggle exclusively to re-establish the Constitution and laws, there were those who saw from the start that the logic of events would transform it into an assault on slavery. With contrabands filling the Union camps, making the government further complicit in slavery, it seemed that the North had a moral responsibility for the slaves as never before. Through 1862 even cautious evangelicals warmed to emancipation and the use of black troops as a divinely proffered means of ending the suffering and restoring the Union. American history, as the culmination of world history, would resolve the battle between the Antichrist and the Christian order; between southern slavery on one side, and freedom—Yankee and Puritan—on the other. When it came, the Emancipation Proclamation appeared to purify the war and the nation, opening the way to victory.
Lincoln, as president, easily accepted religion’s role in public affairs. He may not have been conventionally religious, but his sense of a guiding providence at work in the universe deepened during the conflict, and he worked hard to keep lines open with religious leaders. In informal conversations at the White House, he met the full gamut of religious visitors, who arrived sure of a catholic welcome from a president known for his nonsectarian tolerance and religious humility. Some came to deliver homilies, some to seek appointments, others merely to pay respects. They included editors of mass-circulation papers, denominational leaders, distinguished abolitionists and the officers of the chief wartime philanthropic bodies, notably the United States Sanitary Commission and the United States Christian Commission. The president also held more formal meetings with delegations from particular churches or localities (as with the visit of leading Chicago clergy in September 1862), and from particular causes (including Covenanters seeking a Christian amendment to the federal constitution).
Some critics failed to understand the political value of these meetings, seeing only an oppressed president deferring weakly to pressure groups. “I wish that Halleck would put a Guard on the White House to keep out the Committees of preachers … that absorb Lincoln’s time and thought,” grumbled William T. Sherman. In fact, Lincoln turned these meetings to his political advantage, often responding to his visitors’ addresses with his own carefully crafted words.
Indeed, words—spoken and written—were Lincoln’s most powerful weapon. No modern reader can fail to be impressed by the power that derives from the lucidity and economy of his language. Gienapp’s well-judged selection of Lincoln’s speeches and writings, Fiery Trial, only underscores Harriet Beecher Stowe’s contemporary judgment that the president’s words had “the relish and smack of the soil,” allowing him to reach all classes, from the most sophisticated to “the lowest intellect.” In speeches designed specifically for religious and humanitarian audiences, as with his addresses to fund-raising Sanitary Fairs; in proclaiming days for fasting and thanksgiving; in set-piece speeches which, if not usually cast in religious language, appealed to the better side of human nature and called on a deep moral understanding of America’s meaning (as in his salvationist rhetoric of rebirth at Gettysburg)—in all these ways Lincoln worked to persuade the public that the administration was led by a man who recognized his dependence on Divine favor.
Observers frequently saw in Lincoln a capacity for deep religious feeling. One of them shrewdly commented that both president and people “seem … to imagine that he is a sort of half way clergyman.” In fact, as Lincoln’s remarkable Second Inaugural Address revealed, the president’s understanding of the Almighty’s role in Union affairs was far more subtle than that of most professional theologians. It revealed a president capable of a meaningful engagement with the nation’s Christian leaders. Thus Lincoln went a long way toward satisfying those who cast him as an instrument of the divine will. A Chicago Methodist believed he had located “the true theory and solution of this ‘terrible war'” in the vivid remark of one of the city’s lawyers: “You may depend upon it, the Lord runs Lincoln.”
The administration’s efforts worked. Cadres of mainstream Protestants in effect acted as ideological shock troops, putting their full-blooded Unionism at the service of patriotic politics and encouraging even some previously apolitical clergy to become an arm of the Republican party. They saw loyalty to the administration not as grubby politics but as obedience to the claims of St. Paul on behalf of established government. Church meetings fused the sacred and the secular, the patriotic and the partisan. Congregations sang “America” and the “Star-Spangled Banner” and cheered the sanctified stars and stripes that fluttered over their buildings. Large-circulation Protestant newspapers remained staunchly loyal. A network of potent clerics took to the rostrum. Matthew Simpson, the Methodist bishop, criss-crossed the country as an “evangelist of patriotism” capable of melting an audience to tears or rousing it to the heights of passionate enthusiasm for the war-torn flag.
Hostile pockets of conservative churches in the lower North launched virulent assaults on the administration’s “puritan meddling.” But mostly evangelicals (including those dissident radical voices within the Unionist ranks) worked to prepare the nation for sacrifice in a gigantic war. Press and pulpit steeled women to the knowledge that victory would cost the lives of their menfolk, and offered consolation for death in the nation’s millennial cause. They boosted popular morale during the low tides in Union fortunes. They echoed the government’s calls for troops, and became recruiting agents themselves. Female evangelicals raised funds, produced uniforms, and prepared other supplies. Ministers defended the administration’s suspension of habeas corpus, and welcomed strong-arm action against draft resisters and dissenters who overstepped the limits of legitimate opposition. Chaplains and agents of the Christian Commission moved beyond benevolence to inspire the serving men of the Federal armies with the high purposes of the Union.
The combined religious engines of the Union—and the motor of evangelical Protestantism in particular—possibly did more than any other single force to generate support for the war and the president who conducted it. In fusing a defense of lawful government against sinful rebellion with a vision of a new moral order, they gave heightened meaning to loyalty. The administration knew their value. Whereas Jefferson Davis and the southern leadership had to break with their section’s conventional political culture when they chose to deploy religion for overtly political ends, Lincoln had no such intellectual embarrassment. He simply rejoiced in what he described to a group of Baptists in the spring of 1864 as “the effective and almost unanimous support which the Christian communities are so zealously giving to the country.”
It was, then, from the interplay of presidential leadership and the ambitious nationalism of ordinary Unionists, both on the home front and in the Federal armies, that Lincoln derived his power. We will have a better appreciation of the nature of Lincoln’s authority, the more we understand what was going on in the Union’s localities in wartime.
The home front is a long-neglected area whose history is only now beginning to be seriously explored. Local energies played their part in securing Lincoln’s return to office in 1864, thus keeping alive the vision of the nation articulated by both the president and a myriad of local activists. It was based on a deep sense of America’s historical significance and providential role, and on a continuing commitment to a set of ideas based less on blood and race than on ideals of equality and freedom.
One of Lincoln’s great political achievements was so to define these national ideals and elevate the Union cause as to harness the energizing forces of Yankee Protestant radicalism, without at the same time frightening off more conservative Unionists. In emphasizing, as historians so often have, Lincoln’s shrewd holding together of a broad Union coalition and his pragmatism in keeping conservatives on board, there is a danger of undervaluing the significance of the more radical elements in the amalgam. Lincoln knew that radicals had little option but to stick with the Republicans. But he also recognized the destructive power of defeatism and war-weariness, and the need to harness enough of the radicals’ vision to keep Union loyalists energized and inspired. He needed the radicals, just as they needed him. Over time he showed enough of those who were ready to listen that he was, in Congressman William Kelley’s words, “the wisest radical of them all.”
Richard Carwardine is Rhodes Professor of American History at Oxford University and Fellow of St. Catherine’s College. His political biography, Lincoln, was published in May by Longman.
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