Lincoln: A Life of Purpose and Power (8 page)

Amongst his circle in New Salem, and then in Springfield as the junior partner of John Stuart, Lincoln had a reputation as “an infidel.” We need not dismiss as unfounded (as have some of his champions) the claim that Lincoln wrote an essay questioning the Bible as divine revelation but that New Salem friends made him burn it to prevent damage to his public career: the story is of a piece with what else we know of his views at this time and was later conceded by several of his circle. James Matheny recalled that his father, a Methodist preacher, though “loving Lincoln with all his soul[,] hated to vote for him” in the mid-1830s because of the taint of unbelief. Matheny himself, friendly with Lincoln in the Springfield office, told how he had heard Lincoln “call Christ a bastard,” how he “would talk about Religion—pick up the Bible—read a passage—and then Comment on it—show its falsity—and its follies on the grounds of Reason—would then show its own self made & self uttered Contradictions and would in the End—finally ridicule it.” Stuart, too, thought Lincoln’s unorthodoxy “bordered on atheism.” He “went further against Christian beliefs—& doctrines & principles than any man I ever heard: he shocked me— . . . Lincoln always denied that Jesus was the . . . son of God as understood and maintained by the Christian world.”
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Lincoln was in fact no more of an atheist than Paine, who, despite his popular reputation, had not launched an assault on all religion. Even in his New Salem period Lincoln believed in a creator. Isaac Cogdal, while conceding the existence of Lincoln’s essay denying the inspiration of Scripture, insisted that his friend “believed in God—and all the great substantial groundworks of Religion.” But this was not a quixotic God who would act on impulse or anger. Cogdal, claiming to have often discussed religion with Lincoln between 1834 and 1859, considered him “a Universalist tap root & all in faith and sentiment,” someone who could not subscribe to the orthodox Calvinist belief in hell and endless punishment. Corroborative evidence comes from Mentor Graham, who gave Lincoln some instruction at New Salem and who recalled reading a manuscript that Lincoln gave him in defense of universal salvation. Denying that “the God of the universe” would ever become “excited, mad, or angry,” Lincoln “took the passage, ‘As in Adam all die, even so in Christ shall all be made alive,’ ” to contradict the theory of eternal damnation. It is unlikely that Lincoln was here endorsing the Christian doctrine of atonement, but rather affirming the case for a creator who operated according to the maxims of justice and rationality in his dealings with humankind.
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Lincoln’s personal and religious circumstances in Springfield worked to refine and reshape his opinions. For the first time he belonged to a community that numbered educated, college-trained ministers, settled pastors capable of engaging intelligently with unorthodox opinion. Hesitant at first about attending any of the city’s fashionable churches, Lincoln, after his marriage to Mary Todd, became an occasional worshipper at the Episcopal church. When their three-year-old son, Eddie, died in 1850, the family switched their allegiance to the First Presbyterian church, whose Old School pastor, James Smith, had conducted the funeral ceremony. Mary entered into full membership, and the Lincolns rented a pew (though Lincoln himself would be by no means the most regular of attenders: he had, as one friendly commentator politely put it, “western and not puritan views” of Sabbath observance). Smith was an intellectual Scot familiar with the works of Paine, Volney, and other freethinkers. In
The Christian’s Defense,
a substantial work of theology, Smith deployed rational argument and the evidence of historical and natural sciences to plead the cause of orthodox Christianity. He gave a copy of his book to Lincoln, whose home on Eighth and Jackson he quite regularly visited, and who, Smith maintained, gave the arguments on both sides “a most patient, impartial and Searching investigation.” It was not Lincoln’s only reading on the issues of faith and reason. He gave a close examination to Robert Chambers’s
Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation
(1844), an analysis of Christianity and evolutionary science; Herndon and Jesse W. Fell, a Bloomington lawyer, lent him the writings of liberal theologians.
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In consequence, according to Smith, Lincoln avowed “his belief in the Divine Authority and the Inspiration of the Scriptures.” Ninian Edwards remembered Lincoln, his brother-in-law, declaring that thanks to his dialogues with his pastor “I am now convinced of the truth of the Christian religion.” Several of Lincoln’s acquaintances maintained that in the late 1850s he had professed his belief in the atonement of Christ for the final salvation of all men. This was the Methodist Jonathan Harnett’s recollection of a discussion in Lincoln’s office in 1858, when Lincoln had said “that Christ must reign supreme, high over all, The Saviour of all.” Isaac Cogdal, a Universalist, recalled a similar, perhaps the same, meeting “in 1859” at which Lincoln declared “that all that was lost by the transgression of Adam was made good by the atonement: all that was lost by the fall was made good by the sacrifice.” A colleague on the judicial circuit, John H. Wickizer, considered Lincoln “very liberal in his views,” but he added, “I think he believed in ‘Jesus Christ, and him crucified.’ ” It is, then, quite possible that Lincoln’s intellectual development within a Presbyterian institutional framework in Springfield made him much more receptive to the idea of the inspiration of Scripture. It is also possible that he had embraced a more Christological theology, now using the terms “Lord” and “Saviour” in more than just a humanist sense.
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It is possible, but the weight of evidence is against it. In a rare moment of private openness, during his father’s last days in 1851, Lincoln asked his stepbrother John Johnston to tell Thomas Lincoln “to remember to call upon, and confide in, our great, and good, and merciful Maker; who will not turn away from him in any extremity. He notes the fall of a sparrow, and numbers the hairs of our heads; and He will not forget the dying man who puts his trust in Him.” Johnston should say that, were his father to die, “he will soon have a joyous [meeting] with many loved ones gone before; and where the [rest of] us, through the help of God, hope ere long [to join] them.”
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The statement confirmed Lincoln’s faith in an omnipotent and kindly creator, but significantly there is no Christology. If there is anything theologically striking about it, it is in its allusion to an afterlife. Although this was not an unequivocal statement of personal belief, it put Lincoln closer to orthodoxy than he had been in his New Salem days, when he had allegedly declared, “It isn’t a pleasant thing to think that when we die that is the last of us.”
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The balance of testimony in fact points to Lincoln’s inclining toward essentially Unitarian, not Trinitarian, beliefs in the 1850s. Jesse Fell, a liberal Christian who had “repeated Conversations” with Lincoln on religious subjects over a period of two decades, argued forcefully that during Lincoln’s Springfield years, “whilst he held many opinions in common with the great mass of Christian believers, he did not believe in what are regarded as the orthodox or evangelical views of Christianity.” Accepting that Lincoln might have changed his outlook during his presidency, Fell was sure that throughout the time of their friendship his views put him “entirely outside the pale of the Christian Church”: “On the inate depravity of Man, the character & office of the great head of the Church, the atonement, the infallibility of the written revelation, the performance of myricles, the nature & design of present & future rewards & punishments . . . and many other Subjects, he held opinions . . . utterly at variance with what are usually taught in the Churches.” In the mid-1850s they discussed at length the Unitarianism of William Ellery Channing and Theodore Parker, both of whose works Lincoln read and admired. Without subscribing to everything they argued, Lincoln warmed to their liberalism and rationality. “His religious views were eminantly practical,” Fell insisted, “and are Sumed up on these two propositions, ‘the Fatherhood of God, and the Brotherhood of Man.’ ”
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Lincoln’s son Robert wrote that he knew nothing “of Dr. Smith’s having ‘converted’ my father from ‘Unitarian’ to ‘Trinitarian’ belief”: he had never heard Lincoln speak of it. John Stuart went further. He told William Herndon that Smith had “tried to Convert Lincoln from Infidelity so late as 1858 and Couldn’t do it.” Listening for Lincoln’s authentic voice in the recollections of his friends and acquaintances of this time, we perhaps hear it most clearly through James W. Keyes, a Springfield tailor. Lincoln, he said, gave as his reason for believing in an omnipotent creator “that in view of the Order and harmony of all nature . . . , it would have been More miraculous to have Come about by chance, than to have been created and arranged by some great thinking power.” As for the theory that “Christ is God, or equal to the Creator[,] he said [it] had better be taken for granted—for by the test of reason all might become infidels on that subject, for evidence of Christs divinity Came to us in somewhat doubtful Shape—but that the Sistom of Christianity was an ingenious one at least—and perhaps was Calculated to do good.” This wary and qualified formulation of belief has an authentic Lincolnian ring to it.
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Whether or not Lincoln moved closer intellectually to a conventional Trinitarian Christian stance during these years, all were agreed that he was not, in Mary Todd Lincoln’s words, “a technical Christian”; he had, she said, “no hope—& no faith in the usual acceptation of those words.” His neighbors knew this too. One of his warmest evangelical supporters in Springfield, the New School minister Albert Hale, was saddened that Lincoln was not “born of God.” Most, though, were adamant that he was “
naturally
religious,” whatever his shortcomings regarding ceremonials and creeds. “He would ridicule the Puritans, or swear in a moment of vexation; but yet his heart was full of natural and cultivated religion,” insisted one of his closest associates, Leonard Swett. Judged “by the higher rule of purity of conduct, of honesty of motive, of unyielding fidelity to the right and acknowledging God as the Supreme Ruler, then he filled all the requirements of true devotion and love of his neighbor as himself.” Even those who doubted his piety found it hard to question the moral integrity and private behavior of a man known not to drink, smoke, or gamble.
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On one feature of Lincoln’s thought there was no disagreement. Lincoln described himself as a lifelong fatalist, and none demurred. “What is to be will be,” he told Congressman Isaac Arnold. “I have found all my life as Hamlet says: ‘There’s a divinity that shapes our ends, Rough-hew them how we will.’ ” Mary Todd heard that formulation many times, for as she confirmed to Herndon, Lincoln’s “maxim and philosophy was—‘What is to be will be and no cares of ours can arrest the decree.’ ” Not that Herndon needed reminding. He recalled many conversations about predestination in which Lincoln had asserted that “all things were fixed, doomed in one way or the other, from which there was no appeal,” and that “no efforts or prayers of ours can change, alter, modify, or reverse the decree.” Lincoln often told his law partner that he had a foreboding of “some terrible end,” but when Joseph Gillespie and others urged him to take precautions against assassination, he took a fatalistic view. “I will be cautious,” he told an anxious acquaintance shortly before his final departure from Springfield, “but God’s will be done. I am in his hands . . . and what he does I must bow to—God rules, and we should submit.”
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The predestinarian ethos of Lincoln’s hyper-Calvinist, Baptist upbringing undoubtedly molded this view of fate: throughout his life he would allude to the determining power of “Divine Providence,” “the Divine Being” and “the providence of God.” This was a God, he told Isaac Cogdal, that “predestined things—and governed the universe by Law—nothing going by accident.” Lincoln’s determinism, though, had more secular roots. According to Herndon, Lincoln believed that all conscious human action was shaped by “motives”—that is, self-interested, rational, and predictable responses to surrounding conditions “that have somewhat existed for a hundred thousand years or more.” There was thus no freedom of the will: as Lincoln put it in an election handbill of 1846, explaining his belief in the “Doctrine of Necessity,” he had found persuasive the idea “that the human mind is impelled to action, or held in rest by some power, over which the mind itself has no control.” Defensively, Lincoln stressed that this was an opinion consistent with religious faith, as “held by several of the Christian denominations,” but as Allen Guelzo has shrewdly observed, there were nonreligious influences working here, too, including British utilitarian ideas, as mediated by American legal reformers. Lincoln’s views on motives, interests, and the lack of freedom of the moral will powerfully resembled Jeremy Bentham’s. Whatever their sources, Lincoln’s views were anathema to many mainstream Christians—Methodists and “Arminianized” Calvinists—who viewed the “doctrine of necessity” as a godless creed that denied moral responsibility. Lincoln, though, continued mainly to present his deterministic faith in a religious language that invoked an all-controlling God.
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