2 of 4
But age, the loss of two young sons, the horrors of a war that seemed never to end and, above all, "death by mass production" (as Ernie Pyle would say of a later conflict), brought changes. To be sure, to the end of his life Lincoln never affiliated with a Christian church, never professed orthodox Trinitarian convictions, never testified to a New Birth experience, and never suggested belief in life beyond the grave, at least not directly. Still, Carwardine argues, the crises of the 1850s and 1860s prompted a dramatic deepening in Lincoln's religious outlook. The mature Lincoln found solace in Scripture, which he read privately and quoted often. He worshipped regularly at Washington, D.C.'s New York Avenue Presbyterian Church. He saw the nation's destiny in providential terms and himself as an instrument in the Almighty's hands.
Such materials invite different interpretations. In his recent prizewinning biography of Lincoln, Allen C. Guelzo stresses the productive tension between the "Calvinistic 'melancholy'" and the "bourgeois aggressiveness" that marked the president's thinking about God and humans.3 Carwardine, in contrast, depicts Lincoln more as a tragic figure, a man bowed by a crushing sense of responsibility to a divine will that remained inscrutable. For him the task was somehow to identify that will and align the Union with its purposes.
More important than Lincoln's own religion was the way that he drew on powerful evangelical Protestant sensibilities in mid-19th century America, especially in the North, to promote the twin causes of the Union and emancipation. This narrative lies at the heart of Carwardine's assessment of Lincoln's political authority. Though Charles Finney's faith was not Lincoln's, the president harnessed the optimistic, postmillennial, reform-minded spirit displayed by Finney and millions like him to achieve his political ends. Carwardine mercifully spares readers mind-numbing statistics of electoral returns. But he makes clear that evangelical Protestants, with the aid of holiness offshoots like the Free Methodists and liberal co-belligerents like the Quakers, constituted Lincoln's core support base. (Carwardine might well have turned the question around and asked how the sects used Lincoln to achieve their own purposes, but that would be another book.)
Carwardine's account of Lincoln's changing view of the relation between the Union and emancipation adds a sharp moral edge to a story other historians have told in other ways. In brief, Lincoln's estimation of the moral enormity of slavery evolved from what might be called quiet disapproval to vigorous opposition. Though Lincoln never countenanced slavery, when he was a young man the problem ranked low on his agenda. But by the time of the Kansas-Nebraska Act in 1854, and especially the U.S. Senate race with Stephen A. Douglas in 1858, it had moved high.
In Lincoln's mind the North and the South—and for that matter the Republican and the Democratic parties—inhabited different moral universes. The North tolerated slavery where the U.S. Constitution sanctioned it, but would not permit slavery to spread into the federal territories. Meanwhile, the North determined to choke the "peculiar institution" by all means legally possible. The South, finding slavery a reasonable economic and social arrangement, believed that slaveholders enjoyed the constitutional right to take their slaves into the federal territories. By September 1862, when Lincoln sketched the principles that issued in the Emancipation Proclamation in January 1863, slavery had moved front and center in his thinking. Where once he had seen emancipation as a desirable byproduct of a restored Union, now he saw a restored Union as the means by which liberty for all, black and white, would be won.
share this page
RSS Feed
