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Naturally, such chauvinism cuts little ice with modern historians. Mostly, though, their treatments of Lincoln's religion have offered little more than a plausible sketching of the phases of his evolving faith: the Baptist milieu of his upbringing, his dalliance with deistic freethinkers as a young man in New Salem, his more conventional churchgoing as a married man in Springfield, and his maturing theological thoughtfulness as he confronted the grisly realities of war. His biographers have largely failed to fathom his religious thought or to integrate the reflective Lincoln with Lincoln the politician and president. Rather, the dominant themes have been those of Lincoln's pragmatic shrewdness and crisis management.
Allen Guelzo's marvelous new biography of Lincoln, winner of this year's Abraham Lincoln prize, breaks free from these constraints. Guelzo demands that we view Lincoln as a man of ideas operating in a society that took ideas seriously. He identifies two powerful currents in Lincoln's thought, each of which marked a sharp break with the Jeffersonian world in- to which Lincoln was born. One of these was Lincoln's enthusiasm for the fluid, market-oriented society into which he moved when he left his father's home to seek his fortune. Contemptuous of the world of Jeffersonian aristocrats who clung to slavery as the means of maintaining a stable landed order, Lincoln prized social mobility and "the right to rise."
Guelzo's most valuable contribution, however, lies in his exploration of a second current in Lincoln's thought: his evolving faith and especially its significance for his formulation of policy as president. From Herndon's informants we know how strong was the pull of religious skepticism on Lincoln the young adult. During the 1830s, in both New Salem and Springfield, Lincoln contested the authority of Scripture and acquired a reputation as an "infidel." He warmed to the critique of Christianity and the search for a rational theology in Tom Paine's Age of Reason and Constantin Volney's Ruins. Equally, he relished the caustic, witty poetry of the skeptic, Robert Burns. Several witnesses testify to his having written and then burnt an essay questioning the divinity of the Bible. His political admirers worried about his taint of unbelief, fearing the alienation of orthodox churchgoers. In 1846 that was precisely the advantage that the Methodist stalwart, Peter Cartwright, aimed to secure as he fought Lincoln for a congressional seat.
In his appetite for Enlightenment rationalism and his coolness towards the revitalised evangelicalism of the early Republic, Lincoln appears firmly Jeffersonian. But, unlike Jefferson, Lincoln never erased from his thinking the stamp of the stern Calvinism of his up bringing. His parents were "hard-shell" predestinarian Baptists and bequeathed him a legacy which he never entirely shed, however much he reacted against the sectarian rigidities and exclusiveness of that milieu. Guelzo sees this as the chief source of Lincoln's well-documented fatalism. Even Herndon acknowledged that Lincoln, though lacking faith in a personal God, saw the iron hand of providence at work in the world. All events had a cause.
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