Lincoln: A Life of Purpose and Power

by Richard J. Carwardine

  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.46 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.47 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.48

  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.49 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.”50

  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!”51

  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.52 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.’ ”53

  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 W
illie’s Prayer.”54

  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.”55

  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.56

  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.57

  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.58

  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.”59 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.”60

  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.’ ”61

  Lincoln’s son Robert wrote that he knew nothing “of Dr. Smith’s having ‘converted’ my father from ‘Unitarian’ to ‘Trinitarian’ belief”: he had nev
er 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.62

  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.63