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by Richard J. Carwardine Longman, 2003 352 pp; $16.95, paper |
Nearly a decade ago, in the inaugural issue of Books & Culture, Mark Noll surveyed the seemingly endless proliferation of Abraham Lincoln studies. One factoid will suffice. In 1950, at least 500 persons were earning their living from collecting Lincoln materials, publishing Lincoln books and articles, or tending Lincoln shrines. Since then, the statistics have continued to pile up like snowdrifts. As a case in point, between December 1996 and April 2003 the Abraham Lincoln Research Web site registered nearly four million hits.1
Under the circumstances it seems unlikely that anyone would be able to say much that is fresh, let alone important, about the sixteenth president. But this new biography by the Rhodes Professor of American History at Oxford University constitutes a brilliant addition to the Lincoln literature. Readers familiar with Carwardine's Evangelicals and Politics in Antebellum America (1993) will find the breadth of research and judiciousness of argument in the present study a fitting sequel to his earlier achievement.
Carwardine bills this work as a political biography, focusing especially on the political sources of Lincoln's authority. He tells us that the president's success stemmed from three factors: personal ambition, sensitivity to public opinion, and mastery of Whig and, later, Republican Party machinery. The book tracks the interplay of these three elements in a narrative framework, stretched over Lincoln's life (1809-1865), with close attention to specific settings.
In one sense Carwardine amply fulfills his promise to provide a political biography. He offers exhaustive attention to the ins and outs of antebellum elections, backroom negotiations, and intra-party squabbling. Readers hoping to learn exactly what the Whig, Republican, and Democratic parties held on the major issues of the day, who voted for whom, and why, will not be disappointed. But in another sense the book is far more than a political biography. Though Carwardine never flat-out says so, the work is really, above all else, a study of the role of religion in Lincoln's career—first as a wellspring of his worldview, and second as a tool for securing his political purposes.
What was Lincoln's religion? The question is not easy to answer, for everyone claimed him. Evangelical Protestants led the parade, but at one time or another everyone else seemed to join the procession, including Catholics, Jews, Masons, Mormons, Quakers, Unitarians, Universalists, and even Spiritualists. The same was true of Lincoln's associates, who variously made him into an infidel or a saint or just about anything in between. Maybe, as Barbara Welter suggests, "the man himself did not know what he thought."2
Carwardine bravely wades in with his own judgments. Part of the problem, he tells us, is the paucity of evidence. Despite the amplitude of presidential papers, Lincoln actually said very little about his personal life, and next to nothing about his faith—or lack of it. "Lincoln never told mortal man his purposes—Never," said one of his closest friends. But another part of the problem is that Lincoln's views changed considerably over the course of his life.
The story can be summarized briefly. Reared by fervently Calvinist or "Hard Shell" Baptist parents, young Abraham mastered major parts of the King James Version before leaving home. As an adult he never drank, smoked, gambled, or swore (spicy stories were another matter). He hated cruelty to animals and never used a gun (except once, as a young man, when he dispatched a turkey and later felt much remorse for it). Even so, in his salad years as an Illinois legislator and aspiring lawyer, he strayed from his parents' rigorist faith. Holding an Enlightenment-like view of a distant, benevolent Creator, Lincoln rarely attended church, gave no sign of orthodox Christian belief, and disdained the emotionalism of camp meeting religion. "[W]hen I hear a man preach," he quipped, "I like to see him act as if he were fighting bees!"
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