Founders' Son: A Life of Abraham Lincoln

by Richard Brookhiser

  If there had been no Civil War from which to look back on it, Lincoln’s 1837 Protest would be legislative trivia, mere lint. But perhaps most principles are lint until they are challenged.

  Four

  THOMAS PAINE, LAUGHTER, AND REASON

  LINCOLN’S TWENTIES PASSED AS THOSE OF MOST PEOPLE DO, in loving and working (he was less lucky than average in the first, luckier in the second). Meanwhile he continued to educate himself. In this decade he encountered Thomas Paine—an eccentric founding father who gave him provisional answers to some big questions, and who encouraged him in certain styles of thinking and writing. Paine taught him—for a while at least—to laugh at Christianity, and he showed him, to his lifelong benefit, how to use laughter in winning arguments.

  Paine sits a little uneasily among the founding fathers. He never had serious political or military responsibilities—he was secretary of a congressional committee for two years during the Revolution, a glorified clerk. He led a peripatetic life: born in England in 1737, he migrated first to America in 1772 on the eve of our revolution, then to France in 1792 in the midst of its, going wherever the winds of change were stirring. In 1802 he returned to the United States, and he died in Greenwich Village the year Lincoln was born.

  It was Paine’s writing that gave him his eminence as an American patriot. His pamphlet Common Sense, calling for American independence, appeared in January 1776, half a year before Congress declared it. Common Sense made a sensation, selling 150,000 copies (in a country of 3 million, that was the equivalent of selling 15 million today). The American Crisis was the name Paine gave a series of essays commenting on the progress of the war. The first appeared in the grim December of 1776, a week before the Battle of Trenton; its first paragraph (“These are the times that try men’s souls . . . ”) is the most stirring lede in the history of journalism, the republican equivalent of King Harry’s speech before the Battle of Agincourt in Henry V—Shakespeare in prose.

  Paine almost unmade his reputation by his writing, too. The Age of Reason, a book-length attack on Christianity published in the mid-1790s, raised up a swarm of enemies, including a number of his fellow founders. Benjamin Rush, signer of the Declaration, refused to meet him after he returned to America, and Samuel Adams, another signer, wrote him a chiding letter about his religious views: “When I heard that you had turned your mind to a defense of infidelity [i.e., irreligion] I felt myself much astonished, and more grieved.” Only Thomas Jefferson stayed loyal to him, welcoming Paine to the White House.

  But Paine’s works, both patriotic and anti-Christian, stayed in print. Parson Weems included The Age of Reason in the stock of books he sold, though he recommended buying it with a Christian antidote. Lincoln first read Paine in New Salem.

  Son of a Quaker father and an Anglican mother, Paine was exposed to both faiths when he was a boy. But in The Age of Reason he said that his disenchantment with Christianity began when he was seven or eight years old. Some family member had given a home reading of a sermon on substitutionary atonement—the doctrine that Christ died for our sins. In the Christian notion, the sins of Adam and Eve (which infected all their descendants) were so egregious that they and all men thereafter must die. But Jesus offered His death on the cross to God, His Father, as payment for their offenses. When the sermon ended, young Paine went outside, “and as I was going down the garden steps (for I perfectly recollect the spot) I revolted at the recollection of what I had heard, and thought to myself that it was making God Almighty act like a passionate man that killed his son when he could not revenge himself any other way; and as I was sure a man would be hanged that did such a thing, I could not see for what purpose they preached such sermons.”

  Paine declared his own mature credo at the beginning of The Age of Reason: he believed “in one God, and no more,” but considered all existing religions “human inventions set up to terrify and enslave mankind.” Paine made some cracks at Islam, and more at Judaism, but he aimed most of his fire at Christianity. He employed three sorts of arguments, each centered on the Bible.

  He made much of the contradictions scattered throughout the bible (he always lowercased it). The Books of Ezra and Nehemiah list, tribe by tribe, the Jews who returned to Jerusalem after the Babylonian captivity; but the lists disagree with each other, and their enumerations do not add up. “These writers,” Paine wrote, “may do well enough for bible-makers, but not for anything where truth and exactness is necessary.” The four gospel accounts of Jesus’ ancestry, crucifixion, and resurrection differ on points large and small. If the authors had given such inconsistent evidence in court, said Paine, “they would have been in danger of having their ears cropped for perjury, and would have justly deserved it.” Paine was not the first man to notice these inconsistencies: Christian and anti-Christian polemicists had been explaining or deriding them for centuries. But Paine’s catalog of contradictions was well-tailored to impress or anger a nation of Bible-readers; it was literalism standing on its head.

  Another characteristic line of attack for Paine was to arraign the Bible for indecency. He was ever on the lookout for naughty bits, and inviting his readers to snigger at them. He described Ruth wooing her future husband, Boaz, as a “country girl creeping slyly to bed” with him. “Pretty stuff indeed to be called the word of God!” He called the Song of Solomon “amorous and foolish,” Ecclesiastes the reflections “of a worn out debauchee.” He explained Mary Magdalene’s presence at Jesus’ empty tomb by her being “upon the stroll”—that is, trolling for tricks. The story of Jesus’ birth struck him as “blasphemously obscene. . . . Were any girl, that is now with child, to say, and even to swear to it, that she was gotten with child by a ghost, and that an angel told her so, would she be believed?” Not by Paine.

  Paine’s erotic history was as unhappy as Lincoln’s. He married twice, at ages twenty-two and thirty-four. His first wife died in childbirth after they had been together less than a year, and he separated from his second after three years, possibly for reason of impotence. There are no accounts of him having lovers. He liked arguing politics with the guys in coffeehouses and taverns. Nothing wrong with that; it was a common male pastime in all of Paine’s homelands. But sexuality, especially female sexuality, seems to have alarmed him, in the Bible as in life.

  Violence in the Bible—Paine’s third target—disgusted him. Israel’s wars with its many enemies in the Old Testament struck him as “horrid . . . a military history of rapine and murder.” Claiming that God had ordered and approved this bloodshed was “blasphemy.” But what most rankled Paine was what had disturbed him at age seven or eight: the notion that Jesus, God’s Son, would offer Himself as a sacrifice in payment for man’s sins, and that God, His Father, would accept it. It seemed both irrational—Wasn’t God powerful enough to pardon sins without such a transaction?—and sadistic—How could crucifying an innocent man benefit others? “The Christian story of God the Father putting his son to death . . . cannot be told by a parent to a child; and to tell him that it was done to make mankind happier and better is making the story still worse, as if mankind could be improved by the example of murder.”

  Paine’s alternative to Christianity was a religion of reason (hence the title of his book). God’s word was to be found not in any scripture, but in creation itself; the way to read it was by using our reason—“the choicest gift of God to man.” Applying our minds to the world around us would show us how the universe worked, and how we should behave. Paine’s God says, “I have made an earth for man to dwell upon. . . . LEARN FROM MY MUNIFICENCE TO ALL, TO BE KIND TO EACH OTHER.” Paine, though he would not capitalize the “b” of “Bible,” capitalized this sentence.

  The Age of Reason defied everything Lincoln had been taught about religion as a child. Thomas Lincoln belonged to the Baptist church, which was growing rapidly in turn-of-the-nineteenth-century America; he had joined a congregation in Indiana and had even served as a church trustee. Abraham Lincoln attended services as a boy, and afterwa
rd, he would repeat the sermons he had heard to other children as a performance, generally a humorous one. But his stepmother noticed some aloofness on his part: “Abe had no particular religion. . . . He never talked about it.”

  After Lincoln moved to Illinois, he read Paine and other anti-Christian authors whose works circulated even in rural America: Voltaire and another Frenchman, Constantin de Volney, whose book The Ruins was a meditation on the transience of all empires and religions. But Paine was the American skeptic, who spoke with an American voice.

  Books can both express thoughts we already have and stimulate us to have new ones. Whether because of his reading, or because he was no longer living with churchgoing parents, Lincoln in Illinois started talking about religion.

  James Matheny heard him doing it in Springfield. Nine years younger than Lincoln, Matheny clerked in various government offices there. Springfield had a small downtown, making it easy for anyone to call on anyone else. Matheny remembered that when he and his fellow clerks had “nothing to do,” Lincoln, who was by then John Stuart’s junior law partner, would drop by, “pick up the Bible, read a passage, and then comment on it—show its falsity and its follies on the grounds of reason.” Matheny gave as an instance Lincoln calling Christ “a bastard.” Contradictions of the Bible, the test of reason, Jesus’ illegitimacy—it sounds like a Thomas Paine triple play.

  Lincoln’s biblical exegeses were in part an act, a performance. He was older than Matheny and the other clerks; although he had never been to college, when he picked up the Bible he was taking the role of an upperclassman scandalizing the freshmen. Christ’s bastardy would also have had a special meaning for Lincoln, which he did not share with the gaping clerks: if Jesus was an ordinary illegitimate child, then the Holy Family was a lot like the Hanks family. It made the Bible less awesome, and the Hankses less deplorable.

  Lincoln did more than just talk about religion. When he was still living in New Salem, he wrote a Paine-ite pamphlet explaining that the Bible was not God’s word, and Jesus was not His Son. He read it aloud to friends during the slack hours of his postmaster’s job, and spoke of getting it printed—until Samuel Hill, an older man who owned one of the village’s stores, took the manuscript and burned it.

  Lincoln was already seeking political office. Paine’s views had injured even his considerable reputation as a patriot; writing up similar views would have snuffed Lincoln’s reputation before it was made. So Hill did the young man a good turn. The story of the burned pamphlet became a topic for local gossip even so; Hill’s son heard old folks mention it “hundreds of times.” In 1846 when Lincoln was running for Congress, Peter Cartwright, his Democratic opponent and a Methodist minister, started a whispering campaign about his irreligion. Lincoln had to issue a statement denying that he had ever been “an open scoffer” at Christianity. Shocking (and titillating) a roomful of clerks could qualify as private scoffing. Publishing a pamphlet would certainly have been open scoffing, but Lincoln, thanks to Hill, had been spared that blunder.

  Paine was the first founder Lincoln encountered writing in his own voice. Washington appeared in Weems’s Life in the third person; Weems included some of his authentic sayings and writings, but many of the words Weems assigned Washington were made up. Paine wrote for himself.

  Paine also wrote surpassingly well. Weems told good stories—we still remember the cherry tree, two centuries later—but he told them in runaway sentences, never using five words when he could use twenty. Washington’s own prose was grave and a little stiff, like the man himself. Paine had the punch of an editorial writer, with the clarity and speed of a good reporter.

  This made Paine important to Lincoln the future writer and speaker. Lincoln already knew how to tell stories; Paine showed him how to make and win arguments.

  Paine’s knack for ridicule made him particularly useful to Lincoln, who already had the knack himself. Paine could nail down his points with similes that fixed them in the memory. He called the Book of Jeremiah “a medley of unconnected anecdotes”—then added, “as if the various and contradictory accounts that are to be found in a bundle of newspapers . . . were put together without date, order, or explanation.” Paine could turn ideas he did not like into slapstick, by means of speed and concreteness. Christians, he wrote, accepted “the amphibious idea of a man-god; the corporeal idea of the death of a god; the mythological idea of a family of gods; and the christian system of arithmetic, that three is one, and one is three.”

  At his funniest Paine used the reductio ad absurdum, taking an idea and pushing it until the consequences become ludicrous. Paine’s bugaboo, the story of Christ dying for our sins, became this when placed in an astronomical context: “Are we to suppose that every world, in the boundless creation, had an Eve, an apple, a serpent, and a redeemer? In this case, the person who is irreverently called the Son of God . . . would have nothing else to do than to travel from world to world, in an endless succession of death, with scarcely a momentary interval of life.”

  It took Lincoln a while to master these techniques—humor and seriousness can be an unstable mix—but as a mature debater and speechmaker he would use them all. In the 1850s, he would argue that his rivals had become too casual about slavery: they “cease speaking of it as in any way wrong, [they] regard slavery as one of the common matters of property, and speak of negroes as we do of our horses and cattle.” The first two phrases defined the problem; the simile of the third planted it on the family farm. When rivals accused him of being in favor of race mixing, he protested that just because he did not want a black woman for a slave did not mean he desired her for a wife. “I need not have her for either. I can just leave her alone.” Here he demolished an argument with concreteness, cutting through lurid fears with a plain personal reaction. As president, he defended onerous wartime measures with the reductio ad absurdum: Americans were no more likely to maintain them in peacetime than a sick man would “persist in feeding upon . . . emetics” once he became well. All these techniques are related to the stretching and teasing of good storytelling—to the Man of Audacity milking his own embarrassment. But Paine and the older Lincoln used them to poke holes in the arguments of their enemies.

  They are common techniques that Lincoln could have picked up in many places. Jonathan Swift was a master of this kind of mockery, and Gulliver’s Travels was a classic that was in print all during Lincoln’s life. We could easily call Lincoln’s exercises in this style of humor Swiftian—except for one thing. There is no indication that Lincoln ever read Swift, or even mentioned him, Gulliver or Lilliput. Paine was the mocking humorist he did read.

  Lincoln would retain traces of Paine’s style for much of his life, but there was a barrier between him and the author of The Age of Reason that prevented him from becoming a full-fledged Paine-ite. That was Paine’s optimism.

  Paine believed that studying the world would demonstrate God’s “MUNIFICENCE” (all caps) because he believed that the world was a good place. “Do we not see a fair creation prepared to receive us the instant we were born—a world furnished to our hands that cost us nothing? Is it we that light up the sun; that pour down the rain; and fill the earth with abundance? Whether we sleep or wake, the vast machinery of the universe still goes on.” Paine is like Augustine Washington in Weems’s Life teaching young George about God’s bounty.

  Paine is half right. The world is a good place—except when it’s not. What of the many coughs and rattles in the machinery of the universe—floods, famines, droughts, plagues, eruptions, earthquakes? What of the one-on-one disasters and retail catastrophes that fill every life—the death of Paine’s first wife? The deaths of Nancy Lincoln, Sarah Grigsby, and Ann Rutledge? Paine, from conviction or temperament, heroism or stupidity, looked the other way. Lincoln could not.

  As with the world, so with fathers. Paine’s outrage over the substitutionary atonement sprang from his horror at the notion that a good father could sacrifice a son in payment for sin. Any father who did it, he was c
ertain, “would be hanged.” On the question of what fathers would or would not do, Lincoln reserved judgment.

  To find reflections of nature’s darkness, and his own, Lincoln turned instead to poetry. He missed many of the great poets of his time: Wordsworth, Coleridge, Keats, Shelley, Tennyson, Whitman never stirred his interest. His favorite poem, disconcertingly, was “Mortality,” a lugubrious meditation on the vanity of human wishes by William Knox, a Scotsman who had died in 1825. Lincoln read it in New Salem, committed it to memory, and would recite it in later years. “I would give all I am worth, and go in debt,” he once declared, “to be able to write so fine a piece as I think that is.” More to his credit was his love of Robert Burns, whom he admired for his satire; “Holy Willie’s Prayer,” a send-up of a canting hypocrite, was a particular favorite of his.

  A third discovery in New Salem was Lord Byron. It is hard now to understand what Byron was to the early nineteenth century. He was both a poet and a personality, an actor and a hero. He was beautiful, glamorous, rich, witty, and damned—an irresistible combination. Byron’s politics were not unlike Paine’s—he was a liberty-loving aristocrat who died in 1824 fighting to free Greece from the Ottoman Empire. But, unlike Paine, or any other Enlightenment figure, he had access to all the dark emotions—depression, despair, nihilism, madness. The ease of his access makes us now suspect that he was a bit of a poseur. Lincoln, like most of his contemporaries, loved him; when he was on the road, he would look up favorite passages in other people’s volumes of Byron (other people always had them).

  Towering over all was Shakespeare. Lincoln never read all the plays. This was characteristic of his learning; he was less well read than many a professor or even journalist, but what he read he read deeply. His favorites were the plays in minor keys—the tragedies and the histories (though Shakespeare designed the histories to end well—springtime for Tudors—there is a lot of grimness along the way). Lincoln’s favorite of favorites was Macbeth, the play that is set in motion by witches.