America's Prophet

by Bruce Feiler

  But Lincoln’s most Mosaic moment may have come more than a year later, in March 1865, during his second inaugural, just a month before he died.

  “At Lincoln’s first inaugural, there’s no mystery about what to do,” Professor Guelzo said. “He’s very rational. He’s very confident. But by the time he gets to the second inaugural, he’s crossed a fiery brook. Passion has been let loose, and events have gone in a direction that secular Whigs have no explanation for. So he switches to full evangelicalism.”

  The speech he gave that day at the Capitol is sometimes referred to as his last will and testament to the American people. At 701 words, it’s a little more than twice as long as the Gettysburg Address but still the second-shortest inaugural address in American history. He refers to prayer three times, quotes or paraphrases the Bible four times, and mentions God fourteen times. And he invokes the mystery of God to heal the decades-long war over the Bible. “Neither party expected for the war the magnitude or the duration which it has already attained…. Both read the same Bible and pray to the same God…. That of neither has been answered fully. The Almighty has His own purposes.”

  “The minute you suggest that history is mysterious, you have left the Enlightenment,” Allen Guelzo said. “But unlike all those people in the North who believe they are thoroughly righteous, Lincoln is more cautious. He says we don’t understand God, and we’re never going to understand, so we might as well give it up. History is the plaything of God.”

  “So if the Civil War was really a war over the meaning of the Bible,” I asked, “which side won?”

  “Neither. The events of the war showed that war is not skywriting from God about the virtue of one side or the other. Rather, the ambiguity of the war was evidence of the ambiguity of the American mission; maybe we’re not the chosen people we thought we were. Remember that Lincoln, even in 1861, describes Americans as the ‘almost-chosen people.’ By the end of the war, he’s lost confidence even in that measure of chosenness. It would almost be like Moses on top of Mount Nebo saying, ‘Hey, guys, I’m not so sure that leaving Egypt was a good idea.’ Imagine how that would have gone over! Abraham Lincoln at the end of his life is America’s Moses, but he’s not sure about the Promised Land. The only thing he’s sure of is the need for ‘malice toward none and charity toward all.’”

  “Given this ambiguity,” I said, “is it safe to say that Lincoln represents the beginning of the end of the Bible in America?” I had been thinking about this idea for a few weeks now and was eager to test it. “Lincoln uses biblical language, but he separates it from religion. He views the Bible as just another source of knowledge but not as the ultimate truth. Can’t we call him a bridge—the last of the religious people, and the first of the secular people?”

  Professor Guelzo didn’t hesitate. “No,” he said.

  “No?” I repeated.

  We both laughed.

  “I think this is because American culture really has two souls. And it’s not a question of whether the culture becomes secularized. The culture never becomes one thing or the other. The culture is always two. The culture is always William Bradford and Jonathan Edwards. The culture is always Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Edison. America was born just in time to have two mentalities. We’re like Jacob and Esau struggling in the womb. Secular people want to believe that we are a nation of the Enlightenment, and because of the Founding Fathers and the Constitution that secularism will supersede religion. Religious people want to believe that through the revival religion will supersede secularism. And both are wrong.

  “What’s going to happen,” he said, “is that there will continue to be a constant dynamic and tension between the two, running side by side. And they’re going to keep on being about that for as long as there’s an American identity worth talking about. Lincoln does not throw a switch; we’re on one track and now we’re on the other. He is symptomatic of both. There are in American history people who are examples of one or the other. But every now and then you get these remarkably creative people who are crossovers. Those are the people who are really fascinating. Abraham Lincoln is one of them.”

  NOT LONG AFTER Lincoln’s second inauguration, the president sent his request to Henry Ward Beecher asking him to deliver a sermon at the ceremony celebrating the Union’s recapture of Fort Sumter in South Carolina. The April 14 event would mark the end to the war four years after its first shot in April 1861. The invitation was so momentous that Beecher’s friends and neighbors in Brooklyn Heights deluged him with requests to attend, forcing his patrons to hire a second ship. In early April, what seemed like half of Brooklyn sailed for Charleston.

  By 1865, Beecher’s name was on everyone’s lips in America, and his hands were in half the petticoats of Brooklyn Heights. Once teased for having a voice that sounded like there was pudding in his mouth, the jowly Beecher with thinning white hair tucked behind his ears—imagine Franklin without the spectacles—had transformed himself into an electrifying speaker. Rejecting the wrathful God of his father, Beecher emphasized the warm embrace of God’s love. “It is love the world wants,” he preached. “Higher than morality, higher than philanthropy, higher than worship, comes the love of God.” He filled his services at the massive Plymouth Church with music, his sermons with jokes, and his pulpit with flowers. And the public responded by filling his pews. Every Sunday throngs would take barges from Manhattan called “Beecher Boats.” He made a fortune speaking around the country. And he gave a series of antislavery speeches in London that even Robert E. Lee said had turned the British against the Confederacy. “Abraham Lincoln emancipated men’s bodies,” one admirer wrote. “Henry Ward Beecher emancipated their minds.”

  But as much as he was adored by abolitionists, he was reviled by Southerners. He was accused of being a “nigger worshipper.” His house in Brooklyn was vandalized. Even one New York paper called for him to be hanged for treason for agitating against slavery. And whispers had already begun over what would become one of the biggest scandals of the century, a public trial in which Beecher was accused of committing adultery with a friend’s wife. (A jury discussed the eye-popping testimony for six days but reached no verdict.) I live a few blocks from Plymouth Church today, and as I walk around my neighborhood, I often imagine Beecher hopscotching from one brownstone to the next, preening his plumage in parlors far more elegant than the one he grew up in in Cincinnati, and inching his fingers up the silk stockings of his most ardent admirers. Being a Beecher in the Beecher Century did have its perks.

  By the time the ships reached South Carolina, Robert E. Lee had surrendered at Appomattox, and the symbolic party at Fort Sumter suddenly became a real party indeed. On Good Friday morning, April 14, every floating vessel for miles made its way to Charleston Harbor, decked from bow to stern in banners and flags. The ruined fort filled with soldiers and color guards, including a brigade of African American soldiers led by Henry Beecher’s brother James, who marched under a banner designed by Harriet with a sun and the word LIBERTY in huge crimson-and-black letters. Having scripted the preamble to the war, the Beechers would define its coda as well.

  After the familiar litany of proclamations, the flag was raised and Beecher rose to speak. “Hail to the flag of our fathers!” he said. “Glory to the banner that has gone through four years black with tempests of war!” The flag was like Moses, Beecher continued, whom God sent into the wilderness after he killed the Egyptian overseer in an effort to prepare him to lead God’s children to freedom. “When God would prepare Moses for emancipation,” Beecher said, “He drove him for forty years to brood in the wilderness. When our flag came down, four years it lay brooding in darkness.” But then the flag understood the sin of slavery and once more “dedicated itself to liberty.” Once more Moses helped define America’s preeminent symbol. Left off the Great Seal following the Revolution, during the Civil War Moses became Old Glory.

  After the speech, the crowd went to an old Charleston mansion for a ball, complete with what some regard
ed as the un-Christian activity of dancing, followed by fireworks over the harbor. A few guests returned to their rooms early. A little after 8 P.M., Abraham Lincoln left the White House for the equally un-Christian activity of going to see Our American Cousin at Ford’s Theatre. Just as William Bradford at the end of his life studied Hebrew to draw closer to his biblical heroes, Lincoln was imagining life after the presidency and dreamed of drawing closer to the book that had shaped his language since childhood. In their box, Lincoln told his wife, Mary, that after their time in the White House they would “go abroad among strangers so I can rest.” He would like to “visit the Holy Land,” he said. His last words, Mary later recounted, were that “there is no city on earth he so much desired to see as Jerusalem.” Moments later, he was shot.

  The following day, with no clue about events in Washington, Beecher and his party went sightseeing. With railroad and telegraph lines severed by the war, Charleston still did not know about Lincoln’s passing. On Sunday morning, as the Brooklyn delegation was preparing to sail for Savannah, they finally heard the news. “It was not grief, it was sickness that I felt,” Beecher recalled. He immediately ordered the ships back to New York.

  Across the country, meanwhile, Easter morning drew millions to church, where worshipers listened to an outpouring of sermons about the martyred president. Given the unavoidable symbolism that America’s savior had been shot on Good Friday by a rebel who felt that Lincoln had betrayed God’s will, many preachers used their Easter pulpit to compare Lincoln to Jesus. Lincoln’s death was “the aftertype of the tragedy which was accomplished on the first Good Friday, more than eighteen centuries ago, upon the eminence of Calvary in Judea,” said one preacher in Connecticut. “Jesus Christ died for the world, Abraham Lincoln died for this country.” In biography after biography about the sixteenth president, including Allen Guelzo’s, the equating of Lincoln with Jesus is presented as the overriding image of Lincoln’s funeral orations.

  But a close inspection of the sermons indicates that another comparison may have been used even more frequently. In 1998 the Candler School of Theology at Emory University scanned the full text of 57 eulogies into a database. The sermons came from all regions and denominations. Sixteen compare Lincoln to Jesus; 34 compare him to Moses. The sermons contain 42 references linking Lincoln with Jesus and 113 linking him with Moses. Separately, 23 Lincoln funeral sermons preached in Boston were gathered in a book; 10 compare Lincoln to Jesus, 11 to Moses. In a similar compendium from New York, 6 of the 21 analogize Lincoln with Jesus, 10 with Moses. In a detailed analysis of 372 Northern eulogies, Charles Stewart shows that “nearly half the sermons compared Lincoln to Moses.”

  Many of the comparisons were similar to the ones made on the death of George Washington: Lincoln was a humble leader, chosen by God, to lead America into the Promised Land. Lincoln’s relations to the American people “bear a striking analogy to those which Moses sustained to the children of Israel,” said a Connecticut preacher. “What was the work which Moses was called to do? It was nothing less than to deliver his race from slavery. The work before our late beloved president was the same. God called him to free the nation.” Eulogizers saw similarities in Lincoln’s and Moses’ impoverished births, though they sometimes had to stretch their midrashic skills to equate Lincoln’s log-cabin upbringing with Moses’ life in the pharaoh’s court. “If Moses was of humble parentage, so was [Lincoln],” said a Philadelphia minister. “If Moses derived from his mother those sentiments and feeling which formed the bases of his exalted character and success, the same may be said of the late president.”

  Orators saw parallels in the rebellions both leaders faced. “When his own people lost heart and confidence, and found fault with him,” one preacher said, Moses “never once thought of giving up…. How like Moses, in these respects, was our late President?” Unlike Washington, Lincoln was not a universally beloved figure at the time of his death, and a number of speeches tweaked the late president by pointing out that, like the Israelites, Americans might have a better chance of reaching the Promised Land with a new leader. Moses was fine for the wilderness, but Israel needed a Joshua to finish the job. “In Abraham Lincoln God gave us just the man to take us safely through the last stages of the rebellion,” said a reverend in Boston. “But the nation had now reached the Jordan, beyond which were sterner duties.” He concluded: “We have passed the Red Sea and the wilderness, and have had unmistakable pledges that we shall occupy that land of Union, Liberty, and Peace which flows with milk and honey.”

  While these speeches were being delivered, Henry Ward Beecher was sailing back to New York. He finally delivered his highly anticipated eulogy in an overflowing Plymouth Church on Sunday, April 23. He began with a long recitation of the final chapter in the Five Books of Moses, Deuteronomy 34:1–5: “So Moses went up from the plains of Moab unto the mountain of Nebo, to the top of Pisgah, that is over against Jericho.” God then gives Moses a face-to-face tour of the full dimensions of the Promised Land—from the fields of Galilee in the north, to the Negev desert in the south, to the Mediterranean in the west. “This is the land of which I swore to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob,” God says. “I have let you see it with your own eyes, but you shall not cross there.” Moses sees the land. He is close enough to see that God has fulfilled his promise. But he will not enter. The parallels with Lincoln were rich.

  “There is no historic figure more noble than that of the Jewish lawgiver,” Beecher continued. “After so many thousand years, the figure of Moses is not diminished, but stands up against the background of early days distinct and individual as if he had lived but yesterday. There is scarcely another event in history more touching than his death.” Until now, Beecher suggested. “Again a great leader of the people has passed through toil, sorrow, battle, and war, and come near to the promised land of peace, into which he might not pass over. Who shall recount our martyr’s suffering for this people!”

  Four score and nine years after Thomas Paine likened America’s independence to the Israelites’ flight from Egypt, and two-thirds of a century after George Washington was eulogized as America’s Great Liberator, Americans once more turned a national tragedy into an opportunity to bind their story to the three-thousand-year-old narrative of nation building forged in the wilderness of Sinai. And once more Americans likened their leader to Moses. The persistence of Mosaic imagery at nearly every major turning point in the country’s formative century shows how clearly the themes of chosenness, liberation from slavery, freedom from authority, and collective moral responsibility had become the tent poles of American public life.

  But in the case of Lincoln, was the analogy apt?

  Before leaving Allen Guelzo’s office, I asked him which comparison he would have chosen—Jesus or Moses—if he had been invited to give a eulogy for Lincoln. He clapped his hands together delightedly and rocked back in his chair. “Hmmm,” he said. Then he thought for a full minute.

  “I think it goes back to what we think Lincoln’s greatest achievement was,” he finally said in a whisper. “If Lincoln’s greatest achievement was emancipation, then we’re going to talk about him as Moses. If we think Lincoln’s greatest achievement was redeeming the country from the onus of slavery, then we’re going to talk about him as Christ.”

  “I would have thought Jesus was a much more influential figure in America,” I said. “But I’m starting to believe the themes of Moses may echo more.”

  “Put it this way,” Professor Guelzo said, “the story of Jesus is extremely important. What is surprising is how persistently important the story of Moses remains. After all, if you take this from the point of Protestant theology, Moses is great but Moses is the old covenant. But that’s not how it plays out. The real story is not why Christ is so attractive, but how did Moses get on the stage. And why is he still here?”

  “So what’s your answer?”

  “I think it’s a message about American identity. It’s like kids identifying themselves with baseball
players. Cultures do the same. Our icons tell us who we are. In this case, the Moses-Jesus track comes down to which is more important: deliverance or redemption?”

  “That brings us back to the question,” I said. “If you had to compare Lincoln with Moses or Jesus, which would you choose?”

  “It depends on how much I knew about Lincoln,” he said. “If I knew a lot about Lincoln personally, I’d probably say he was more interested in redemption. But if I only knew him as the president, the guy in Washington, the man of emancipation, I’d say he was more focused on deliverance. The private Lincoln is more like Jesus, but the public Lincoln is more like Moses.”

  VII

  MOTHER OF EXILES

  I STEP OUT of the Bowling Green subway station in lower Manhattan, stride past the battered sphere sculpture salvaged from the World Trade Center, and pass through security at Coast Guard Headquarters. The guard directs me to a pylon at river’s edge, and suddenly I’m in a different world. The dock is a tangle of buckets, ropes, barnacle-crusted buoys. A seagull flutters in the briny air. To my left is a four-story orange ferryboat, Miss Liberty. Across the inland chop is a giant air vent for the Brooklyn Battery Tunnel, and between us is a never-ending crisscross of water taxis, tugboats, and garbage barges. Far from the glittering lights of Fifth Avenue, this is industrial New York. The harbor as infrastructure. The city as work.