A dramatic version of Stanton’s telegraphed announcement to John A. Dix, the U.S. military commander of the Department of the East.
Lincoln’s funeral car makes its slow journey through the choked streets of Philadelphia.
A contemporary journalist immediately understood the significance of what was at work: “It has made it impossible to speak the truth of Abraham Lincoln hereafter.” The iconic figure who took a place in American memory would become a constant impediment to historians trying to catch the essence of the man beyond. Moreover, there have been multiple American memories. The historian David Blight has shone a brilliant light on the competing folk narratives of the Civil War in the half-century after Appomattox. Lincoln, naturally, was incorporated (alongside Frederick Douglass, William Lloyd Garrison, and others) into the heroic African-American script of emancipation. But implicitly the president who had intended “malice toward none” could be slowly incorporated, too, into a script of national “reconciliation” which marginalized and downgraded the black race: gradually in the South “the Black Republican” Lincoln became, for some at least, the charitable Lincoln whose death had deprived the Confederacy of a southern-born ally.15
The Lincoln delineated in the present study is a man who, politically gifted though he was, earns the label “exceptional” chiefly because of the office he held and the singular circumstances in which he held it. Lincoln is best understood not as the extraordinary figure of the iconographers, but as a man of his times, politically wise but capable of misjudgments, too, and powerful largely because he was representative and, as such, deeply familiar with his people and his context. This gave him a real feel for the direction of events. Thus, he came to see that a party committed to quarantining slavery was capable of securing the highest office in the land; he realized that he had the qualities—and good fortune—to fit that party’s prescription of its ideal candidate; he rightly sensed that his own outrage at southern secession was widely enough shared to make defense of the Union politically practicable; and he understood that his power as a war president depended above all on his harnessing the potent force of popular nationalism.
Problematic as his deification may be for the historian, Lincoln’s instant elevation to the pantheon had its own public significance and demonstrated that—thanks to his martyrdom—he continued to exercise remarkable political power even in death. Desperate to understand their cruel bereavement, most Union loyalists were convinced that the assassination had a meaning, however opaque, and that “the permissive hand of God” had allowed a temporary evil “for His own wise and holy ends.” The Almighty had deemed his agent’s work on earth completed: having guided the nation safely through its era of crisis, Lincoln would have been too lenient and merciful for the next stage, the era of reconstruction.16
Lincoln’s martyrdom derived particular potency from its Christian, vicarious character. A chorus of voices claimed the murdered president for the church. It was, they agreed, a shame that he had made no public profession of faith, but it would have come, in time. Some clutched at the implausible report of a tearful Lincoln telling how, when he visited the heroes’ graves at Gettysburg, “I gave myself to God, and now I can say that I do love Jesus.” Speaking at the Springfield interment, Matthew Simpson reassured his mass audience that at least Lincoln “believed in Christ the Saviour of sinners; and I think he was sincere in trying to bring his life into harmony with the principles of revealed religion.”17
Lincoln’s religious credentials and role as liberator of an enslaved people cast him as a latter-day Moses (though one who had freed even more slaves than the Old Testament leader, “and those not of his kindred or his race”); he had taken “this Israel of ours” over “the blood-red sea of rebellion” and, like Moses, had been allowed to see, but not to enter, the Promised Land. More compelling still were the Christ-like characteristics of the murdered president. Vicarious sacrifice for his people on Good Friday succeeded a Palm Sunday on which Lincoln had in humble triumph entered the Confederate capital of Richmond: “As Christ entered Jerusalem, the city that above all others hated, rejected, and would soon slay Him . . . so did this, His servant, enter the city that above all others hated and rejected him, and would soon be the real if not the intentional cause of his death.” A theater may have been “a poor place to die in,” but the president had gone out of a sense of duty, “not to see a comedy, but to gratify the people.” God had taken Lincoln, “the Saviour of his country,” from the American people, just as he had taken Moses and Jesus when their tasks were done. In the future, urged Gilbert Haven, his death should be commemorated not on the calendar date, but on every Good Friday, as “a movable fast” to be kept “beside the cross and the grave of our blessed Lord, in whose service and for whose gospel he became a victim and a martyr.”18
The profoundest historical consequences of Lincoln’s assassination, then, had less to do with his removal from the fraught politics of reconstruction (we may reasonably wonder, if there had been no murder, whether the exhausted Lincoln would naturally have lived out his second term) than with the sanctification of American nationalism.19 As they mourned, Americans were encouraged to discover in Lincoln’s death a millennial promise that fused the secular and the sacred. Through “Black Easter” the Almighty was unfolding a plan that would secure the Kingdom of God and a purified nation. A Brooklyn Presbyterian rejoiced, “A martyr’s blood has sealed the covenant we are making with posterity,” guaranteeing “the rights of men, the truth of the Gospel, the principles of humanity, the integrity of the Union, the power of Christian people to govern themselves, the indefeasible equality of all creatures of God . . . , no matter what may be the color of their skin.” Likewise, George Dana Boardman, a Philadelphia Baptist, read in Lincoln’s death a glorious promise of the nation’s future greatness. Had Lincoln lived into old age, “no nation would have been born of him.” But an inscrutable Providence had allowed “the glorious seed” to die “that it might . . . bring forth much fruit. . . . I see springing from the tear-wet bier of Abraham Lincoln the green and tender blades which foretell the birth of an emancipated, united, triumphant, transfigured, immortal Republic.”20
Many Americans thus drew from Lincoln’s assassination what Henry Ward Beecher described as “a new impulse of patriotism.” Matthew Simpson felt powerfully the nation’s duty “to carry forward the policy . . . so nobly begun . . . to give every human being his true position before God and man; to crush every form of rebellion, and to stand by the flag which God has given us.” The slain president’s cause—“to decide whether the people, as a people, in their entire majesty, were destined to be the government, or whether they were to be subject to tyrants or aristocrats, or to class-rule of any kind”—was close to resolution. “If successful, republics will spread in spite of monarchs, all over this earth.” Echoing Lincoln’s sense of the nation as “the last best hope of earth,” the interpreters of his death deemed God to be saying “to all the nations of the earth, ‘Republican liberty, based upon true Christianity, is firm as the foundation of the globe.’ ”21
Thus Lincoln, through his life and death, bequeathed an enhanced and ambitious nationalism to his successors. How subsequent political generations harnessed that force lies well beyond the scope of this study. Lincoln cannot be held responsible for the way in which they chose to deploy the power they inherited. But his was a model which offered some check on the arrogance of power. While he was certainly not reluctant to wield political authority, his practical policy grew from a strong sense of moral purpose, and his course as president was shaped not by impulsive, self-aggrandizing action or self-righteousness, but by deep thought, breadth of vision, careful concern for consequences, and a remarkable lack of pride.
AFTERWORD
He is one of those giant figures, of whom there are very few in history, who lose their nationality in death.
—DAVID LLOYD GEORGE ON ABRAHAM LINCOLN
When this book was honored with the Lincoln
Prize in 2004, it served as a reminder that Americans are not alone in their fascination with a president who stakes a compelling claim to being the greatest of the nation’s leaders. Indeed, one of the best and most durable of all the scholarly lives of Abraham Lincoln, as well as the earliest, was written by the British peer Godfrey Rathbone Benson, Lord Charnwood. In that study, published in 1916, the Oxford-educated Charnwood brought a sympathetic transatlantic eye to bear on Lincoln’s moral purpose, while avoiding the hagiography that had marked so many earlier biographies of the Great Emancipator. Charnwood encouraged his contemporaries to admire Lincoln’s single-minded defense of the American Union and, more important still, the president’s role in showing that democracy was a political philosophy that could work. Although the author’s English bearings prompted the occasional local allusion (he described Bull Run as “a stream about as broad as the Thames at Oxford but fordable”), his essential vision was not provincial, but panoramic, even universal: the Liberal peer attributed to Lincoln a main role in what he called the “wider cause of human good.”1
During the era of the Great War and its aftermath there developed in Britain, particularly amongst liberals, what George Bernard Shaw called a “cult of Lincoln.” A copy of Augustus Saint-Gaudens’s statue of a deeply contemplative Civil War president was erected in 1920 in London’s Parliament Square. At about the same time, a replica of George Barnard’s Cincinnati statue was placed in Manchester: known as the “stomachache statue,” since Lincoln’s hands unfortunately suggest a man troubled with colic, it commemorates the president’s tribute to suffering Lancashire mill operatives during the wartime cotton famine. Even before the war ended, the poet John Drinkwater had published a celebratory play, Abraham Lincoln. (Another writer, R. F. Delderfield, born in 1912, would have been christened “Abraham Lincoln Delderfield” had his Tory mother not overruled the wishes of his Liberal father.) David Lloyd George, by then an ex–prime minister, made a triumphal tour of North America in 1923. Feted as a wartime statesman of “almost superhuman” character (as the New York Times put it), he spent what he called the most memorable day of his life visiting the Kentucky birthplace of his lifelong hero; a little later, like other British pilgrims, he journeyed to Lincoln’s tomb at Springfield, Illinois. If the underlying reason for this devotion to Lincoln was the shared self-understanding of Britons and Americans as joint defenders of progressive government, dedicated to making the world “safe for democracy,” it was Charnwood in particular who had encouraged them to seize on Lincoln as an example of what wise, determined, and noble leadership might achieve.2
Charnwood’s biography remained deservedly influential for many years, until well after the Second World War, when the opening to the public of the Lincoln Papers at the Library of Congress spurred a new generation of historians to rethink the Lincoln story. Mostly these were the works of American scholars—notably, Benjamin P. Thomas, Reinhard H. Luthin, Don E. Fehrenbacher, and Richard N. Current—though distinguished British students of the United States, including J. R. Pole, wrote brief assessments of Lincoln. Then came, in the 1960s and 1970s, the turn in historical writing which encouraged on both sides of the Atlantic a powerful interest in social and cultural history, ideological tides, and popular movements: “bottom-up,” not “top-down,” approaches became the vogue, pushing traditional political history to the margins. The academic historian’s disdain for biography meant that the scholarly study of “great men” was rarely attempted. With the exception of Stephen Oates’s With Malice Toward None (1977), no biography of Lincoln worthy of note appeared in either Britain or America during the 1970s and 1980s. Equally, works such as Gabor Boritt’s on Lincoln’s economic beliefs, LaWanda Cox’s on Lincoln and black freedom, and Charles Strozier’s psychological pre-presidential portrait were noteworthy for being oases of imaginative Lincoln-focused scholarship during a time of relative drought.
In recent years, however, in both Britain and the United States, there has been something of a return to political history and biographical study—in many cases resulting in work that, thanks to the broadening of historical writing more generally since the 1960s, is even richer and more solidly contextualized than that which preceded it. Symptomatically, several justly acclaimed lives of Lincoln have appeared during the past decade, part of a remarkable renaissance in American Civil War studies. This book, begun during the mid-1990s, may be seen in that context. For British historians of the United States are far less “foreign observers” than they were in Charnwood’s day; rather, they see themselves as part of an Atlantic community of historians engaged in a common scholarly debate largely blind to their particular nationality. Indeed, my own intellectual debts include those to many American scholars—particularly Michael Burlingame, David H. Donald, Don E. Fehrenbacher, Eric Foner, William H. Freehling, William E. Gienapp, Allen C. Guelzo, Michael F. Holt, James M. McPherson, Mark E. Neely, Mark Noll, Phillip S. Paludan, Joel H. Silbey, and Douglas L. Wilson—who have lately enhanced our understanding of Lincoln and the Union during the Civil War era with studies as distinguished as they are substantial.
Still, as well as serving to connect, the Atlantic may also provide the cultural distance that permits a degree of detachment. This study of Lincoln aspires, naturally, to just such an emotional neutrality, though some may judge that the milieu in which I grew up, that of Welsh political Liberalism and the Nonconformist religious conscience, has inflected my approach. Certainly I take very seriously Lincoln’s moral relationship to power, and in this I differ from Charnwood only in emphasis, not in general interpretation. What strikes the neutral reader is the tenacity of Lincoln’s ethical convictions: his faith in meritocracy; his belief that no one’s opportunities for self-improvement should be limited by class, religious beliefs, or ethnicity; his repugnance for slavery as a system that denied people their chance of moral and economic self-fashioning; his unwavering commitment to a Union freighted with moral value, as a democratic model; and his refusal to be complicit in the destruction of the Union. Lincoln’s moral understanding of the demands of power was not founded on a conventional Christian faith. But the evolution of his religious thought, his quest to understand divine purposes during the war, his Calvinistic frame of reference, and the ease with which he rooted his arguments in Scripture, make it essential to take his religion seriously.
I am acutely conscious of the extraordinary honor of the Lincoln Prize, just as I am of the generosity of its founders, Richard Gilder and Lewis Lehrman. It is a pleasure formally to record here my heartfelt thanks to them, as well as to the Board of Trustees and its chairman, Gabor Boritt; to the Prize Jury; and to the Lincoln and Soldiers Institute at Gettysburg College.
I have used the opportunity of this enhanced edition of the book to make a few, minor changes to the text, and to add a glossary, maps, and illustrations. In this enterprise I have been blessed with the energetic support of James G. Basker, the president of the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History; David Godwin and Sarah Savitt, of David Godwin Associates; my editor, Carol Janeway, and Lauren LeBlanc, at Knopf; Sara Dunn and Jody Cary of the Gilder Lehrman Collection at the New-York Historical Society; John Marruffo at the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum; Jill Reichenbach at the New-York Historical Society; Holly Snyder at the John Hay Library, Brown University; and Louise Taper. Jenny Weber also gave me help, as gracious as it was timely. These are not my only debts, gratefully acknowledged. I take pleasure here in thanking, equally warmly, Andrea Bevan, for providing a rare blend of historical grasp and skillful indexing; John Page, for his bravura performance as Intelligent General Reader; and Daniel W. Howe, for his kind response to this book and for his broader encouragement to me, his successor at Oxford.
St. Catherine’s College
Oxford
December 2004
ENDNOTE
*I have aimed to reproduce all quoted material as it is found in the cited source, though I have occasionally made minor alterations to punctuation. U
nless I have indicated otherwise, italics in quoted material represent emphasis in the original text. I have avoided the use of sic to indicate errors.
NOTES
Abbreviations
ALP Abraham Lincoln Papers, Library of Congress
CW Roy P. Basler et al., eds., The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln, 9 vols. (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1953–55)
DJH Michael Burlingame and John R. Turner Ettlinger, eds., Inside Lincoln’s White House: The Complete Civil War Diary of John Hay (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1997)
Donald David Herbert Donald, Lincoln (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1995)
Herndon’s Lincoln William H. Herndon and Jesse W. Weik, Herndon’s Life of Lincoln: The History and Personal Recollections of Abraham Lincoln as Originally Written by William H. Herndon and Jesse W. Weik with an Introduction and Notes by Paul M. Angle (Cleveland and New York: World Publishing Company, 1942)
HI Douglas L. Wilson and Rodney O. Davis, eds., Herndon’s Informants: Letters, Interviews, and Statements About Abraham Lincoln (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1998)
Lincoln’s Journalist Michael Burlingame, ed., Lincoln’s Journalist: John Hay’s Anonymous Writings for the Press, 1860–1864 (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1999)
Lincoln Observed Michael Burlingame, ed., Lincoln Observed: Civil War Dispatches of Noah Brooks (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998)
N&H John G. Nicolay and John Hay, Abraham Lincoln: A History, 10 vols. (New York: The Century Company, 1890)
Lincoln: A Life of Purpose and Power Page 44
