Founders' Son: A Life of Abraham Lincoln (45 page)

The fathers that Lincoln took to heart and that showed him how to be a great man were the founding fathers, surrogates plucked from reading and history. As a boy he was thrilled by George Washington and his struggles for liberty. As a young man he was thrilled by Thomas Paine’s skepticism and his laughter. As a middle-aged man, however much he disliked Thomas Jefferson’s late-life cowardice, Lincoln found the perfect expression of America’s essence in the Declaration of Independence—logical, beautiful, and universally endorsed (“
We
hold these truths . . . ”). But Lincoln loved everything about the
founding fathers: the Constitution and its Preamble, the Northwest Ordinance, the Revolutionary veterans and their widows. What he did not love he made lovable, or ignored. He brought the founding fathers back to life; he labored to have their principles recognized, by political rivals and crowds of listening voters. He enlisted them in the fights of his time, from prairie elections to multi-thousand-men battles. He enlisted them in his own rise to power, which would (he hoped) be power to do good.

But these same fathers had harbored a wen or a cancer—slavery. They had not known what to do with it. They had blocked its expansion, by declaring the old Northwest off-limits to existing slaves, and they had cut off its supply, by making it possible to end the importation of new slaves. Perhaps slavery would then wither away. But the wen or cancer lived and thrived; it became a national disease. The slave trade never resumed officially, but slavery had expanded into new American states and territories, first to Louisiana, then to Missouri, then to Texas, then to New Mexico, then to Kansas and Nebraska (that last leap had been blocked, barely; but then, what about Cuba? and Central America?). And now Americans, from simple soldier boys to fifty-year-old one-armed men, were dying by fives and by thousands to cut out the wen or cancer—the founding fathers’ untended deadly legacy.

Where could Lincoln turn for help? To himself, of course, and to his friends, allies, cronies, and instruments. The first is the resource of every man, the others are the resource of every politician.

But there was another father for this extremity: God the Father.

Thomas Lincoln and his wives were Baptists. Abraham had gone with them to their church services to hear the preaching, and had amused his playmates afterward by imitating it. Once Lincoln had left the nest, Paine told him not to bother with all that; it was contradictory and ridiculous: Jesus was a bastard and the Bible was full of holes. Lincoln saw the contradictions and joined in the laugh. But Paine had his own God, who was loving and beneficent, speaking through nature and our reasoning faculty. That was not quite Lincoln’s experience. God, or
someone or thing equally potent, had swept away his seeds, his mother, his sister, and his sweetheart. God put poison in cow’s milk that turned tongues brown; He gave women delirium and diarrhea then rained on their graves.

There was much to be said for God, even so. He inspired great writing, a matter of first importance for a man like Lincoln.
Paine, always doubling down, mocked the Bible’s style along with its content, calling Paul’s epistles “quibble, subterfuge and pun”; the Book of Jeremiah an “incoherent bombastical rant”; and the Book of Judges “paltry stories.” The only biblical writing Paine liked was in the Book of Job, and he thought that had been lifted from a non-Jewish source. A man with Lincoln’s ear would easily have heard how ludicrous Paine’s literary judgments were. Paine was a great writer when it came to polemics, whether earnest or knock-about, but the King James Bible—the Bible of Lincoln’s world—touched chords beyond Paine’s ken.

One of Lincoln’s
favorite phrases came from one of the books Paine specifically scorned, Judges 5:20: “The stars in their courses fought against Sisera.” (Sisera was the Canaanite general who had been defeated in battle and then killed by Jael, the wife of Heber, as he slept.) Lincoln, ever impressed by the unwinding of causes and forces, would naturally be moved by the spectacle of inevitability bearing Sisera down. But he also had to be entranced by the startling image and the sumptuous language. There is a tide in the affairs of men, says Shakespeare’s Cassius; the tide of the Book of Judges was in the heavens. The tolling
r
’s—
stars, their, courses, Sisera
—resembled the
r
’s that rolled out the Gettysburg Address—
four, score, years, our, fathers, forth
.

The translators of the King James Version had breathed the same air as Shakespeare, and their Bible was as great a source of incident and character as Shakespeare’s plays. Some of its images and expressions were so vivid that they had become free-floating proverbs detached from their original context. The metaphor of the house divided was used by Jesus (Matthew 12:25, Mark 3:25, Luke 11:17) to rebut those who accused Him of performing miracles with diabolical assistance: devils,
argued Jesus, cannot cast out devils, for how can a house divided against itself stand? The powers of Hell work in concert. But Lincoln, and most people who employed the image, used it to evoke the perils of disunity in a good cause.

One description of Lincoln’s Bible reading, recorded decades after the fact, but first seen with eyes of innocence, came from Julia Taft Bayne, the daughter of a Washington patent officer, who as a teenager had played with Willie and Tad Lincoln in the White House. She recalled that Lincoln’s Bible lay on a table in the sitting room, “and quite often, after the midday meal, he would sit there reading, sometimes in his stocking feet with one long leg crossed over the other, the unshod foot slowly waving back and forth. . . . He read it in the relaxed, almost lazy attitude of a man enjoying
a good book.” She had been an observant girl, but even as an old woman Mrs. Bayne did not fully understand what she had observed. Many people read carelessly or casually, like people grabbing a bite to eat; what they read stays with them as long as what they have eaten. But a storyteller, a displaced poet, a man stooped under his burdens, will absorb a book, even one that he is enjoying, in a different spirit.

The accident of Lincoln’s name thrust him into the Bible. Most presidents had had common religious or royal first names. By 1860 four Jameses, three Johns, and one George, Thomas, Andrew, Martin, and William had held the office. Long handling had worn away any special meaning these names had once possessed, like faces on old coins. Franklin and Millard were last names as first names. Zachary carried a more pungent biblical flavor; in various spellings it was the name of an evil king, a minor prophet, and the father of John the Baptist. But Abraham is the first of the patriarchs, the father of Israel. During the war, “Father Abraham” became a popular nickname for Lincoln—partly jocular, partly a play on his beard (patriarchs should always be bearded); more and more, as time passed, a recognition of his role as leader, explainer, and father of his embattled country—a role he had grown into. Revering the founding fathers, he was joining them in a second generation.

God was more than an occasion for great writing. He was also the prime mover, the first cause. This was a very old role for Him, elaborated by philosophers and theologians whom Lincoln had never read and by authors whom everyone had read (“In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth” [Genesis 1:1]; “All things were made by him; and without him was not any thing made that was made” [John 1:3]). Lincoln, who saw himself bound by his melancholy, and buffeted by eruptions of weather, disease, and (now) slaughter, who saw the world and everyone in it bound in chains of cause and effect, would naturally consider where these chains led, and Who held the remotest ends and for what purpose.

In September 1862 Lincoln wrote out some thoughts on the divine will, perhaps after John Pope’s defeat at the Second Battle of Bull Run. The war had entered a stalemate, the first of several; Lincoln had discussed the Emancipation Proclamation with his cabinet, but would not issue it until the Union had won a victory.

He tried to understand what this awful immobility, both military and political, meant. He laid out the alternatives like a geometrical proof. “The will of God prevails.” That was axiomatic. “Each party” in this, or any war, “claims to act in accordance with the will of God.” That was human nature. But one party “
must
be wrong,” since “God can not be
for
and
against
the same thing at the same time.” That was elementary logic. And both parties “
may
be” wrong, if God’s purpose were different from the purpose of either. That was Lincoln’s problem.

What could God’s purpose in September 1862 be? He could have prevented the war before it began “by his mere quiet power [acting] on the minds of the now contestants,” or He could end it “any day,” by letting either side win. “Yet the contest proceeds.” Conclusion: “God wills this contest, and wills that it shall
not end yet.”

His secretaries John Hay and John G. Nicolay, who preserved the fragment, said it was not meant “to be
seen of men.” But shortly after Lincoln wrote it, he opened his thoughts to a woman.

Eliza Kirkbride was born to a Philadelphia Quaker family in 1801. When she was forty she married Joseph Gurney, a charismatic English
Quaker evangelist and prison reformer; he died after they had been together for six years. Thus it was that as a sixty-one-year-old widow Eliza Gurney came to the White House in October 1862, with three friends, to pay “a religious visit” to the president. Photographs of her show a plain face under straight, pulled-back hair, with intent eyes.

Religious visitors appeared frequently among the hordes of petitioners, complainers, and politicians who descended on Lincoln. Sometimes religious visitors hectored him, asking why he would not free the slaves tomorrow? On September 13, 1862—in the very week, perhaps, when he wrote out his thoughts on the divine will—Lincoln had met with two ministers, a Congregationalist and a Methodist, who presented an appeal for emancipation from Chicago Christians. In the discussion that followed, the president allowed himself a touch of humor, perhaps also of temper: if “God would reveal his will to others, on a point so connected with my duty, it might be supposed he would reveal it directly to me.” Nothing daunted, the ministers replied that God might enlighten Lincoln by “the suggestions and arguments of
other minds.”
Just listen to us, Mr. President, we’ll tell you what God wants you to do.

On September 22, nine days after meeting the helpful ministers, Lincoln had announced the Preliminary Emancipation Proclamation. So Eliza Gurney, in October, would not be pressing him about that. Her purpose was in fact altogether different: she wanted to lead Lincoln to sustenance and relief.

She addressed an impromptu exhortation to him (Quakers believed in speaking when the spirit moved them, and they had always believed that women could speak as truly as men). “There is a river,” she said, “the streams whereof make glad the whole heritage of God. And seeing how difficult it is to accomplish that which we wish, and how vain is the help of man, I have earnestly desired that the President might repair day by day . . . to this river of God, which is full of water, even to the well-spring of Eternal Life, that thus his spirit may be strengthened and refreshed, and be fitted for the right performance of his various and arduous duties.”

She then became at once more intimate and more exalted: “And now, my dear friend, if so I may be permitted to call thee, may the Lord bless thee and keep thee. . . . He shall cover [the righteous] with His feathers, and under His wings shall they trust. His truth shall be their shield and buckler. A thousand may fall at their side, and ten thousand at their right hand”—practically a description of Antietam, which had been fought five days earlier: over 2,100 Union men killed, over 1,500 Confederates killed—“but it shall not come nigh them, because they have made the Lord
their refuge.” She ended by kneeling and praying for Lincoln and for America.

Gurney’s effusion was a mélange of uplift and biblical imagery (the river of life is from Revelation, God’s protecting wings and shield from the 91st Psalm). It had propulsive force, but nothing noteworthy in its shape or its original expressions. Yet Lincoln was moved by it. Why?

Gurney’s Quakerism may have touched him. Lincoln had some slight connections to the religion—he believed, on the basis of what he called a “
vague tradition” in the family, that his great-grandfather, John Lincoln, had been a Quaker. Quakers were also the only Christian denomination that Thomas Paine ever had
a good word for, because they had the plainest services and carried the lightest load of dogma. As a Quaker, Gurney was addressing Lincoln from corners of his past.

Was there something maternal about her? She was only eight years older than he was. Yet she was a widow, which symbolically aged her. Lincoln had a soft spot for widows, from Lucretia Clay to Rebecca Thomas all the way back to his stepmother, Sarah Bush Lincoln, who had been a widow when Thomas Lincoln courted her. But more striking than denominations or gender roles was Gurney’s evident sympathy for Lincoln. She wanted to help him, to console him.

He made a reply, which began with a phrase that still smolders. “We are indeed going through a great trial—a fiery trial.”

He continued by sharing his thoughts on divine will, but to Gurney he expressed them personally, not with the philosophic detachment of his note to himself. There he had written of “each party” and “the now
contestants” as if observing them from on high. To Gurney he spoke of himself, in the heart of his trial. He was, he said, “a humble instrument in the hands of our Heavenly Father.” Not God, some airy, overarching being, but our Father, with hands yet. Lincoln went on: “I have sought His aid—but if after endeavoring to do my best in the light which He affords me, I find my efforts fail, I must believe that for some purpose unknown to me, He wills it otherwise.” What a tangle of protest and accusation, pain and anger this was, not yet smoothed into acceptance:
I sought to do my best, but I failed; I believe He willed it so.