A Patriot's History of the United States: From Columbus's Great Discovery to the War on Terror (60 page)

Perhaps no aspect of Abraham Lincoln’s character is less understood than his religion. Like many young men, he was a skeptic early in life. He viewed the “good old maxims of the Bible” as little different from the
Farmer’s Almanac
, admitting in the 1830s, “I’ve never been to church yet, nor probably shall not [sic] be soon.”
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An oft-misunderstood phrase Lincoln uttered—purportedly that he was a Deist—was, in fact, “Because I belonged to no church, [I] was suspected of being a deist,” an absurdity he put on the same plane as having “talked about fighting a duel.”
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Quite the contrary, to dispute an 1846 handbill that he was “an open scoffer at Christianity,” Lincoln produced his own handbill in which he admitted, “I am not a member of any Christian Church…but I have never denied the truth of the Scriptures.”
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Some Lincoln biographers dismiss this as campaign propaganda, but Lincoln’s religious journey accelerated the closer he got to greatness (or, perhaps, impelled him to it).

A profound change in Lincoln’s faith occurred from 1858 to 1863. Mary had brought home a Bible, which Lincoln read, and after the death of Eddie at age four, he attended a Presbyterian church intermittently, paying rent for a pew for his wife. He never joined the church, but by 1851 was already preaching, in letters, to his own father: “Remember to call upon, and confide in, our great, and good, and merciful Maker…. He will not forget the dying man, who puts his trust in Him.”
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After 1860 Lincoln himself told associates of a “change,” a “true religious experience,” a “change of heart.” Toward what? Lincoln prayed every day and read his Bible regularly. He followed Micah 6:8 to a tee, “…to do justly, and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with thy God.” When a lifelong friend, Joshua Speed, commented that he remained skeptical of matters of faith, Lincoln said, “You are wrong, Speed; take all of this book [the Bible] upon reason you can, and the balance on faith, and you will live and die a happier and better man.”
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What kept Lincoln from formal church association was what he viewed as overly long and complicated confessions of faith, or what might be called denominationalism. “When any church will inscribe over its altar the Saviour’s condensed statement of law and gospel, ‘Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart and with all thy soul and with all they mind, and love thy neighbor as thyself,’ that church I will join with all my heart.”
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In fact, he thought it beneficial that numerous denominations and sects existed, telling a friend, “The more sects…the better. They are all getting somebody [into heaven] that others would not.”
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To Lincoln, an important separation of politics and religion existed during the campaign: “I will not discuss the character and religion of Jesus Christ on the stump! That is no place for it.”
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It was Gettysburg, however, where Lincoln was born again. His own pastor, Phineas Gurley, noted the change after Gettysburg: With “tears in his eyes,” Gurley wrote, Lincoln “now believed his heart was changed and that he loved the Saviour, and, if he was not deceived in himself, it was his intention soon to make a profession of religion.”
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Did he actually make such a profession? An Illinois clergyman asked Lincoln before his death, “Do you love Jesus?” to which Lincoln gave a straight answer:

 

When I left Springfield I asked the people to pray for me. I was not a Christian. When I buried my son, the severest trial of my life, I was not a Christian. But when I went to Gettysburg and saw the graves of thousands of our soldiers, I then and there consecrated myself to Christ. Yes, I love Jesus.
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During the war Lincoln saw God’s hand in numerous events, although in 1862 he wrote, “The will of God prevails. In great contests, each party claims to act in accordance with the will of God. Both
may
be, and one
must
be wrong. God can not be
for,
or
against,
the same thing at the same time.”
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Significantly, at Gettysburg, he again referred to God’s own purposes, noting that the nation was “dedicated to the proposition” that “all men are created equal.” Would God validate that proposition? It remained, in Lincoln’s spirit, to be determined.
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He puzzled why God allowed the war to continue, which reflected his fatalistic side that discounted human will in perpetuating evil. Lincoln called numerous days of national prayer—an unusual step for a supposed unbeliever. The evidence that Lincoln was a spiritual, even devout, man, and toward the end of his life a committed Christian, is abundant.

That spiritual journey paralleled another road traveled by Lincoln. His path to political prominence, although perhaps cut in his early Whig partisan battles, was hewed and sanded by his famous contest with Stephen Douglas in 1858 for the Illinois Senate seat. Together the two men made almost two hundred speeches between July and November. The most famous, however, came at seven joint debates from August to October in each of the remaining seven congressional districts where the two had not yet spoken.

In sharp contrast to the content-free televised debates of the twentieth century, where candidates hope to merely avoid a fatal gaffe, political debates of the nineteenth century were festive affairs involving bands, food, and plenty of whiskey. Farmers, merchants, laborers, and families came from miles away to listen to the candidates. It was, after all, a form of entertainment: the men would challenge each other, perhaps even insult each other, but usually in a good-natured way that left them shaking hands at the end of the day. Or, as David Morris Potter put it, “The values which united them as Americans were more important than those which divided them as candidates.”
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By agreeing to disagree, Lincoln and Douglas reflected a nineteenth-century view of tolerance that had no connection to the twentieth-century understanding of indifference to values—quite the contrary, the men had strong convictions that, they agreed, could only be solved by the voters.

To prepare for his debates with Douglas, Lincoln honed his already sharp logic to a fine point. Challenging notions that slavery was “good” for the blacks, Lincoln proposed sarcastically that the beneficial institution should therefore be extended to whites as well. Then, at the state convention at Springfield, Lincoln gave what is generally agreed as one of the greatest political speeches in American history:

 

We are now far into the fifth year since a policy was initiated with the avowed object and confident promise of putting an end to slavery agitation…. That agitation has not ceased but has constantly augmented. In my opinion, it will not cease until a crisis has been reached and passed. “A house divided against itself cannot stand.” I believe this government cannot endure permanently half slave and half free. I do not expect the Union to be dissolved—I do not expect the house to fall—but I do expect that it will cease to be divided.
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He continued to argue that the opponents of slavery would stop its spread, or that the proponents would make it lawful in all states.

Sufficiently determined to make slavery the issue, Lincoln engaged Douglas in the pivotal debates, where he boxed in the Little Giant over the issue of popular sovereignty on the one hand and the
Dred Scott
decision on the other. Douglas claimed to support both. How was that possible, Lincoln asked, if the Supreme Court said that neither the people nor Congress could exclude slavery, yet Douglas hailed popular sovereignty as letting the people choose? Again, contrary to mythology, Lincoln had not raised an issue Douglas had never considered. As early as 1857, Douglas, noting the paradox, produced an answer: “These regulations…must necessarily depend entirely upon the will and wishes of the people of the territory, as they can only be prescribed by the local legislatures.”
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What was novel was that Lincoln pounded the question in the debates, forcing Douglas to elaborate further than he already had: “Slavery cannot exist a day in the midst of an unfriendly people with unfriendly laws.”
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Without realizing it—and even before this view was immortalized as the Freeport Doctrine—Douglas had stepped into a viper’s pit, for he had raised the central fact that slavery was not a cultural or economic institution, but that it was a power relationship. In its most crystal form, slavery was political oppression. Yet the question was asked, and answered, at the debate at Freeport, where Lincoln maneuvered Douglas into a categorical statement: “It matters not what way the Supreme Court may…decide as to the abstract question of whether slavery may or may not go into a Territory…. The people have the lawful means to introduce it or exclude it as they please.”
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To fire eaters in the South, Douglas had just given the people of the territories a legitimate rationale for breaking the national law. He had cut the legs out from under the
Dred Scott
decision, and all but preached rebellion to nonslave owners in the South. Lincoln’s aim, however, was not to shatter Douglas’s Southern support, as it had no bearing whatsoever on the Senate race at hand. Rather, he had shifted the argument to a different philosophical plane, that of the morality of slavery. Douglas had gone on record as saying that it did not matter if slavery was right or wrong, or even if the Constitution (as interpreted by the Supreme Court) was right or wrong.

In short, the contest pitted republicanism against democracy in the purest sense of the definition, for Douglas advocated a majoritarian dictatorship in which those with the most votes won, regardless of right or wrong. Lincoln, on the other hand, defended a democratic republic, in which majority rule was proscribed within the rule of law.
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Douglas’s defenders have argued that he advocated only local sovereignty, and he thought local majorities “would be less prone to arbitrary action, executed without regard for local interests.”
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America’s federal system did emphasize local control, but never at the expense of “these truths,” which the American Revolutionaries held as “self-evident.”

“The real issue,” Lincoln said at the last debate, “is the sentiment on the part of one class that looks upon the institution of slavery
as a wrong….
The Republican Party,” he said, “look[s] upon it as being a moral, social and political wrong…and one of the methods of treating it as a wrong is to
make provision that it shall grow no larger….
That is the real issue.”
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A “moral, a social, and a political wrong,” he called slavery at Quincy in the October debate.
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Lincoln went further, declaring that the black man was “entitled to all the natural rights enumerated in the Declaration of Independence, the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness…. In the right to eat the bread, without leave of anybody else, which his own hand earns,
he is my equal and the equal of Judge Douglas, and the equal of every living man.
”
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What made Lincoln stand out and gain credibility with the voters was that he embraced the moral and logical designation of slavery as an inherent evil, while distancing himself from the oddball notions of utopian perfectionists like the Grimké sisters or wild-eyed anti-Constitutionalists like William Lloyd Garrison. He achieved this by refocusing the nation on slavery’s assault on the concept of law in the Republic.

Lincoln had already touched on this critical point of respect for the law in his famous 1838 Lyceum Address, in which he attacked both abolitionist rioters and proslavery supporters. After predicting that America could never be conquered by a foreign power, Lincoln warned that the danger was from mob law. His remedy for such a threat was simple: “Let every American, every lover of liberty…swear by the blood of the Revolution never to violate the least particular laws of the country, and never to tolerate their violation by others.”
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Then came the immortal phrase,

 

Let reverence for the laws be breathed by every American mother to the lisping babe that prattles on her lap; let it be taught in schools, in seminaries, and in colleges; let it be written in primers, spelling-books, and in almanacs; let it be preached from the pulpit, proclaimed in the legislative halls, and enforced in courts of justice. And, in short, let it become the political religion of the nation.
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It was inevitable that he would soon see the South as a threat to the foundations of the Republic through its blatant disregard for the law he held so precious.

Left-wing historians have attempted to portray Lincoln as a racist because he did not immediately embrace full voting and civil rights for blacks. He had once said, in response to a typical “Black Republican” comment from Stephen Douglas, that just because he did not want a black woman for a slave did not mean he wanted one for a wife. Such comments require consideration of not only their time, but their setting—a political campaign. Applying twenty-first-century values to earlier times, a historical flaw known as presentism, makes understanding the context of the day even more difficult.

On racial issues, Lincoln led; he didn’t follow. With the exception of a few of the mid-nineteenth-century radicals who, it must be remembered, used antislavery as a means to destroy all social and family relationships of oppression—Lincoln marched far ahead of most of his fellow men when it came to race relations. By the end of the war, despite hostile opposition from his own advisers, he had insisted on paying black soldiers as much as white soldiers. Black editor Frederick Douglass, who had supported a “pure” abolitionist candidate in the early part of the 1860 election, eventually campaigned for Lincoln, and did so again in 1864. They met twice, and Douglass, although never fully satisfied, realized that Lincoln was a friend of his cause. Attending Lincoln’s second inaugural, Douglass was banned from the evening gala. When Lincoln heard about it, he issued orders to admit the editor and greeted him warmly: “Here comes my friend Douglass,” he said proudly.