Lincoln: A Life of Purpose and Power (7 page)

It must be said that those speeches by no means marked a complete break with Lincoln’s political past. Their radicalism was qualified by persisting elements of conservative Whiggery. The lawyer who in 1847 had defended a Kentucky slaveowner—Robert Matson—in his attempt to secure the return from Illinois of his runaway slaves, and who had no doubt of the legitimacy of the harsh Fugitive Slave Law of 1850, continued to emphasize the constitutional rights of southern slaveholders. Dismantling slavery presented intractable problems: “If all earthly power were given to me,” he confessed, “I should not know what to do, as to the existing institution.” He reiterated his support for colonization and other gradual, voluntary means of the removal of slavery. He refused to entertain political and social equality for free blacks: “My own feelings will not admit of this; and if mine would, we well know that those of the great mass of white people will not.” Earnestly, he stressed his own devoted Unionism and his lack of prejudice against the people of the South. Entrapped by circumstances not of their own making, they deserved sympathy for their virtual impotence in the face of an entrenched institution.

Lincoln founded his tolerant, encompassing nationalism, however, not on moral concessions to slaveholding but on a conviction that most southerners, in continuing to hold firm to the principles of the Declaration of Independence, shared his own view of slavery as a “monstrous injustice.” He was sure that “[t]he great majority, south as well as north, have human sympathies, of which they can no more divest themselves than they can of their sensibility to physical pain. These sympathies in the bosoms of the southern people, manifest in many ways, their sense of the wrong of slavery, and their consciousness that, after all, there is humanity in the negro.” This allowed him to build to a rhetorical and moral climax, in which he called on all Americans, “south, as well as north,” to resist the spirit of Nebraska and reenergize “the spirit of seventy-six.” In language that paralleled the spiritual warnings, cosmic meanings, and millennialist hopes of the salvationist preacher, Lincoln once more stressed the moral incompatibility of the principles at stake, and urged that Americans “repurify” their soiled “republican robe” by rededicating themselves to Jefferson’s principles and practice. “If we do this, we shall not only have saved the Union; but we shall have so saved it, as to make, and to keep it, forever worthy of the saving. We shall have so saved it, that the succeeding millions of free happy people, the world over, shall rise up, and call us blessed, to the latest generations.”

Lincoln’s outrage and moral earnestness over the Nebraska issue surprised many in his audiences, who were expecting less seriousness and history, and more anecdotes. This newfound authority has prompted historians to dramatize the change from the Lincoln of 1849, the clever but essentially provincial and “self-centered” politician, to the powerful, broad-horizoned statesman of the anti-Nebraska struggle. Michael Burlingame, drawing on Jungian psychology, sees Lincoln’s new seriousness and enhanced stature as the product of a midlife crisis, a time when he spent hours brooding on his modest achievements in law and politics, and on the legacy he would leave.
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Certainly, Lincoln in his early forties had good reason to take stock of his life, as the deaths of his father and, more poignantly, of his son Eddie prompted a heightened sense of his own mortality. These were years, too, when he successfully mastered Euclidean logic, a quintessential act of self-improvement that would leave its mark on all of his subsequent oratory. In the strains of the Peoria speech we hear the voice of a man who had without doubt matured during his five years beyond the political mainstream.

Yet Lincoln’s “transformation” need hardly surprise us. His assault on Douglas and the Democratic administration sprang naturally from well-established elements in his thought. To the Whiggish respecter of law and precedent, one who had urged in his landmark Lyceum speech of 1838 that reverence for the laws should become “the
political religion
of the nation,” the Nebraskaites had perpetrated a statutory violation; to the proponent of economic progress and the intensive cultivation of the American West, the act was a blow against self-improving, independent laborers. Most of all, the measure presented a potent moral challenge to a man who had held a lifelong conviction that slavery was a wrong, tolerable only because it was slowly stumbling to a natural death. Lincoln saw the repeal of the Missouri Compromise threatening to revive an otherwise doomed institution; no morally responsible citizen could passively watch this reversal of the nation’s ethical direction. From Lincoln’s perspective, the real transformation of these years was not in his own moral calculus, but in that of the nation’s leaders.

THE RELIGIOUS ROOTS OF MORAL POWER

Lincoln’s most intimate friend, Joshua Speed, wrote of his fellow Kentuckian, “Unlike all other men there was an entire harmony between his public and private life. He must believe that he was right and that he had truth and justice with him or he was a weak man. But no man could be stronger if he thought that he was right.” Likewise, Joseph Gillespie, another long-standing, shrewd, and trusted friend, considered Lincoln’s powerful sense of justice the essential key to his colleague’s actions. “[T]he sense of right & wrong was extremely acute in his nature,” he recalled. “He was extremely just and fair minded. He was as gentle as a girl and yet as firm for the right as adamant.” Gillespie located Lincoln’s earnest hostility to slavery and to the Nebraska Bill—“about the only public question on which he would become excited”—in an affront to his sense of justice.
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Lincoln’s succinct formulation, “if slavery is not wrong, nothing is wrong,” may have owed something to a New Haven Congregationalist minister, Leonard Bacon, whose essays on slavery, published in 1846, used similar phraseology and had found their way to Springfield.
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That Lincoln appears to have acknowledged this debt to a Yankee clergyman, and that a deep ethical conviction marked the period of his reengagement with serious politics, inevitably raises the issue of the religious sources of that moral concern. It is a question more easily put than answered. Lincoln made no public statement of personal faith in the 1850s, and many of those close to him had no idea about his private views. Judge David Davis, in whose company Lincoln spent many hours on the Eighth Judicial Circuit, considered him “the most reticent—Secretive man I Ever Saw—or Expect to See,” and thought it absurd that any but rare intimates should claim to have known his mind.
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Those who, after Lincoln’s death, did profess to fathom him were scarcely disinterested parties, and their unseemly tussle for his soul leaves us chary about accepting their conflicting judgments at face value.

When Lincoln’s first biographer, Josiah Holland, poured him into the mold of a Christian president, a disbelieving William Herndon found the outcome unrecognizable as the man with whom he had practiced law. He set about interviewing those who might be in a position to know, and in a series of lectures denied there were any Christological elements in Lincoln’s spiritual thought. Still, few religious traditions have subsequently failed to embrace him. Friends have pointed to his Virginia Quaker forebears, Baptists to his parents’ faith, Methodists to a supposed conversion at a camp meeting, Catholics to a surreptitious joining of their church, and Presbyterians to a public attendance at theirs. Masons, Unitarians, and Universalists have each clasped him to their bosoms. Following the visits of two or three mediums to the wartime White House, the Spiritualists claimed him as one of theirs, though Lincoln himself was facetiously dismissive, remarking that the contradictory voices of the spirits at these séances reminded him of his cabinet meetings.
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If such chauvinism befogs rather than illuminates the inner Lincoln, it is equally true that the themes of Lincoln the shrewd pragmatist and political manager have, with a few honorable exceptions, tended to obscure the reflective Lincoln, a politician capable of serious thought about ultimate matters. Yet in the course of his adult life Lincoln faced the traumas of courtship and a broken engagement, embarked on an uncertain marriage, suffered the painful loss of two young sons, and confronted the carnage of a fratricidal war. It would have been strange indeed had a man so given to introspection not added new layers to his understanding of the meaning of life and death. If, as Gillespie judged, he was not given particularly to metaphysical speculation, Lincoln’s old New Salem friend, Isaac Cogdal, was surely right when he asserted that “his mind was full of terrible enquiry—and was skeptical in a good sense.” Speed was certain that over the years Lincoln “was a growing man in religion,” advancing from religious skepticism in the 1830s to serious Christian inquiry in the White House. Though James Matheny, Lincoln’s political associate, suggested that the only change to occur was in his friend’s greater discretion, not his views, which Matheny thought remained skeptical (at least up to 1861), there are reasonable grounds for believing that the mature Lincoln of the 1850s was more receptive to Protestant orthodoxy than he had been twenty years earlier.
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Then the essential elements of Lincoln’s religious outlook surely contributed to the new tone and substance of his speeches following his return to politics in 1854. For the first time he devoted whole speeches to the question of slavery, including its corrosive effect on individual enterprise and aspiration, and found a moral edge for which political opportunism provides only the shallowest of explanations.

Lincoln’s earliest experience of religion came, naturally enough, through his parents. As “hard-shell” Baptists, members of the Little Mount Separate Baptist Church, they subscribed to a predestinarian, hyper-Calvinist system of beliefs: these included “election by grace before the world began”; missionary work was an act of presumption against the Almighty, who needed no assistance to achieve his foreordained plan. When Thomas Lincoln moved to Indiana and remarried, he and his wife eventually joined the Pigeon Creek Baptist Church, Thomas becoming a leading man amongst the “Separates” in the new state. It was a milieu of unlettered preachers and few books. Abraham generally attended church meetings but, unlike his sister, who was admitted to membership, he made no profession of faith. “Abe had no particular religion—didnt think of that question at the time, if he ever did,” his stepmother, Sarah Bush Johnston, recalled. “He never talked about it.”
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The Kentucky and Indiana years left Lincoln with a mixed legacy of belief. Negatively, he can have found little to celebrate in the particular rigidities and exclusiveness of a strict Baptist creed, nominally Calvinist, but one that Calvin himself would barely have recognized. He had no time for the intersectarian rivalries and theological brawling, especially between Baptists and Methodists, that marked the developing West. It was here that were sown the seeds of his aversion to church creeds and his skepticism about “the possibility, or propriety, of settling the religion of Jesus Christ in the models of man-made creeds and dogmas.” He saw little to admire in the religious “enthusiasm” of frontier revivalism, and was more likely to parody and deride the physical and mental gymnastics of uneducated hellfire preachers than to respect them. There was a typical mix of irony and humor in his remark, “when I hear a man preach, I like to see him act as if he were fighting bees!”
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At the same time, Lincoln held on to much of what he had learned in his early experience of religion. Not least, Lincoln’s commonly noted fatalism, which he never shed, reflects the continuing legacy of his high Calvinist upbringing. Equally influential were the handful of books that he read over and over. These included such standards of the English Nonconformist tradition as Bunyan’s
Pilgrim’s Progress
and Watts’s hymns, works whose simplicity and strength of language effected an unmeasurable but undoubted influence on Lincoln’s own prose, at its best spare and taut. Above all, he encountered the King James Bible. Through his mother’s teaching and his own study he acquired a command of the Scriptures which would continue to impress observers and inform his rhetoric throughout his life. His stepmother, seeking to puncture overblown claims about Lincoln’s early piety, noted that “Abe read the bible some, though not as much as said: he sought more congenial books.” But the habit of Scripture-reading was established and thereafter not lost. Allied to his formidable memory (“My mind is like a piece of steel, very hard to scratch anything on it and almost impossible after you get it there to rub it out,” he once explained), his close acquaintance with the Bible gave him a potent weapon for use on audiences steeped in the Scriptures, whether in set-piece speeches or on informal occasions.
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An Illinois minister, seeing Lincoln in the street regaling a gathering of citizens with a sequence of anecdotes, remarked as he passed, “Where the great ones are there will the people be.” Quickly Lincoln replied, “Ho! Parson a little more Scriptural; ‘Where the carcass is there will the eagles be gathered together.’ ”
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To know the Bible well is not necessarily to consider it inspired. Dennis Hanks, a cousin who lived with the family in the Indiana years, questioned whether Lincoln really believed in it, and there is barely any doubt that during the 1830s, as a young man in New Salem and Springfield, Lincoln openly contested its authority. Like others in his circle, he read Tom Paine’s
Age of Reason
and Constantin de Volney’s
Ruins,
and found in their critique of Christianity and the Scriptures, and in their pursuit of a rational theology, much to satisfy his logical, inquiring mind. As an aspiring lawyer, he clearly warmed to their testing of the Bible by the rules of evidence, and to their use of reason and ridicule to expose its contradictions. At the same time he evinced a strong partiality for the caustic, witty poetry of another religious skeptic, Robert Burns, and delighted in his mocking satire on Calvinist self-righteousness, “Holy Willie’s Prayer.”
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