4
The Civil War, like most wars, was a bad time for religious skeptics. It was also a crucible in which Americans were forced to question their moral values as never before. On April 10, 1861—two days before the attack on Fort Sumter ushered in the war—the indefatigable Ernestine Rose delivered a lecture titled “A Defense of Atheism” at Boston’s Mercantile Hall. Arguing against the idea that religious belief is a precondition for moral behavior, Rose reminded her audience that America’s “present crisis” had been created by a system of slavery long upheld by many religious leaders in the North as well as the South.
As soon as the first shots were fired, the issue of northern churchmen’s waffling response to slavery disappeared from public discourse and was replaced by the overpowering conviction that God was on the side of the Union army. As far as the South was concerned, He was of course on the side of the Confederacy. There was no more talk from ministers of “silken ties” between northern and southern Christians. The real cause of America’s fratricidal conflict, many religious leaders asserted, was the failure of the founders to enshrine God in the Constitution. The war was nothing more—or less—than the fulfillment of the Reverend John Mason’s 1793 prediction that the godless document would one day impel the Divinity to “crush us to atoms in the wreck.” The only way to stop the destruction was to amend the Constitution’s preamble and finally acknowledge not only God but Jesus Christ as the source of all just governmental power. In 1863, the “nondenominational,” albeit entirely Protestant, National Reform Association was founded for the specific purpose of lobbying Congress to put God into the Constitution. Today’s Christian conservatives frequently use the slogan “Let’s put God back into the Constitution,” thereby implying that “secular humanists” have managed to overturn what was originally intended to be a marriage of church and state. Nineteenth-century clerics knew better and were honest about their desire to reverse what they regarded as the founders’ erroneous decision to separate church and state. At an 1864 convention in Pittsburgh, the National Reform delegates were in a dither about how to word the proposed amendment before presenting it to President Lincoln and the Congress, so as not to offend any orthodox Protestant denomination. They were not worried about offending Jews, Catholics, or dissident Protestant sects like Hicksite Quakers, who were appalled by the idea of tampering with the Constitution in order to blur the distinction between church and state. After rejecting acknowledgment of “Almighty God” and “His revealed will” as too imprecise, the ministers finally agreed on a rewording of the preamble that would replace “We, the People of the United States, in order to form a more perfect union . . .” with “Recognizing Almighty God as the source of all authority and power in civil government, and acknowledging the Lord Jesus Christ as the Governor among the nations, His revealed will as the supreme law of the land, in order to constitute a Christian government . . .”
The religious stalwarts who founded the National Reform Association met with Lincoln in February 1864 and presented him with their forthright petition for a Christian government:
You . . . as no other of our Chief Magistrates ever did, have solemnly reminded us of the redeeming grace of our blessed Savior, and of the authority of the Holy Scriptures over us as a people. By such acts as these you have awakened a hope in the Christian people of this land that you represent them in feeling the want of a distinct and plain recognition of the divine authority in the Constitution of the United States.1
The ministers had some reason to hope that Lincoln would respond to them favorably. In 1862, he had issued an order, unprecedented in American history, that military commanders observe Sunday as a day of rest in deference to the religious sensibilities of Christian soldiers. But Lincoln was also one of the canniest politicians ever to occupy the White House, and he had no intention of using his authority on behalf of a measure as potentially divisive as the Christian amendment in the midst of a war that had already pitted brother against brother and neighbor against neighbor. Observing that “the work of amending the Constitution should never be done hastily,” he promised to “take such action upon it as my responsibility to my Maker and our country demands.”2Lincoln’s action was to take no action at all. Congress also ducked the proposal to Christianize the Constitution and continued to table similar resolutions year after year.
The ministers may have derived some consolation from the fact that Congress, though unwilling to become embroiled in debate over a substantive constitutional amendment, was easily persuaded to take the symbolic action of acknowledging the deity on American coins. The union of God and Mammon came about as the result of a suggestion by a Pennsylvania minister to Secretary of the Treasury Salmon P. Chase, who was known to be the most religiously orthodox member of Lincoln’s cabinet and who took credit for Lincoln’s invocation of God at the end of the Emancipation Proclamation. Originally, the president had planned to end the historic decree freeing the slaves with the sentence “And upon this, sincerely believed to be an act of justice, warranted by the Constitution, upon military necessity, I invoke the considerate judgment of mankind.”3Supposedly acting on Chase’s recommendation, Lincoln added “and the gracious favor of Almighty God” to the “considerate judgment of mankind.”4 Scholars have also suggested, on the basis of less evidence, that Chase was responsible for the addition of “under God” to the famous closing sentence of the Gettysburg Address: “It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us—that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they here gave the last full measure of devotion; that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain; that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom; and that government of the people, by the people, for the people shall not perish from the earth.” The words “under God” do not appear in Lincoln’s first or second handwritten draft of his address, so he may have added the phrase as he spoke. Lincoln did write “under God” in three subsequent copies he made of the speech.
But Chase was definitely responsible for the push to add a religious motto to American coins. After receiving the Pennsylvania clergyman’s proposal for a more devout currency, the secretary of the treasury promptly ordered the director of the mint to change the format of coins to reflect “the trust of our people in God.” To Chase’s dismay, he soon discovered that only Congress could authorize any alteration of the currency. After considerable deliberation about the exact wording of the motto—should it be “Our country; our God” or “God, our Trust”?—Congress settled on “In God we trust” for a new two-cent coin issued in 1864. By the end of 1865, the original permission had been extended to engrave the motto on coins of nearly all denominations.5 (This wording naturally provided endless opportunities for the pun “In gold we trust.” A later variation, during the period of controversy over the gold standard, was “in God we trust—for the short weight.” Theodore Roosevelt, one of the most devout Christians ever to be elected president, attempted in 1907 to dispense with the motto precisely because of those sacrilegious puns. He succeeded only in arousing a storm of criticism from ministers who had previously been among his strongest supporters. Roosevelt, who had dubbed Paine a “filthy little atheist,” was himself called an infidel for his attempt to remove God from American money.)
However, no displays of symbolic piety during the Civil War could completely rewrite the miserable record of organized religion’s response to what most northern Christians were finally prepared to call the sin of slavery. Only the small minority of freethinkers, many of them longtime abolitionists, could lay aside the question of how a just God could allow their nation to engage in a war instigated by the desire of men to own other men. The nonbeliever was free to view slavery as the work—the evil work—of man alone. For many believers, the war was a crisis of faith, if not in God, then in the earthly institutions that purported to speak for God. Religious institutions responded to the crisis by expanding their proselytizing. In the first year of the war, the American Bible Society published 370,000 more Bibles than it had in 1860. From 1861 until the end of the war, more than 5.2 million Bibles were printed.6 The intensity of the Christian imagery associated with the Union cause—never equaled before or since the war—represented an extremely successful effort to supercede the compromised and compromising religion that had consented to the existence of slavery for so long. “The Battle Hymn of the Republic,” one of the most powerful calls to arms ever set to music, was not only religious but Christian to the core. The last verse of Julia Ward Howe’s anthem, as well known during the war as the famous first verse is today, explicitly articulates the song’s Christian doctrinal basis and emotional appeal: “In the beauty of the lilies Christ was born across the sea, / With a glory in His bosom that transfigures you and me; / As he died to make men holy, let us die to make men free, / While God is marching on.” But what was a devout Christian from the North, fighting under instructions from his God, to make of an equally devout southern cousin whose God—ostensibly the same God—had handed down a contradictory set of instructions? While the Civil War ushered in a revival of religious devotion for many, it also raised fundamental questions about whether religion was really a force for good in the world.
During the war years, no one agonized over these moral and ethical issues more profoundly, or articulated them more clearly for the American public, than Abraham Lincoln. A discussion of Lincoln is central to the history of American freethought, because he grappled with and exemplified so many of the complicated, often dissonant forces that have shaped American attitudes toward religion. So large does Lincoln loom in the American pantheon that every religious and antireligious group wants to claim him as a member; over the years, he has been described in print as an agnostic, unbeliever, freethinker, spiritualist, every sort of Protestant, and as a Roman Catholic. The weird claim of Catholicism for a man raised in an evangelical Baptist frontier environment appears to have originated in the fact that Lincoln did indeed have an aunt who was a Catholic—and she had a son named Abraham. In 1927, Cardinal George Mundelein of Chicago seems to have confused Lincoln’s aunt with his stepmother—who was not a Catholic—and the aunt’s son with the future president. Mundelein informed a credulous Chicago press that when a traveling priest arrived to say Mass for Lincoln’s stepmother, “Mr. Lincoln would prepare the altar himself.”7 The Chicago prelate, it should be noted, was one of the foremost early-twentieth-century advocates of Americanizing a Catholic Church still strongly associated with immigrants. What better way to accomplish that than to link Catholicism with the martyred president who was considered a secular saint? The universality and durability of Lincoln’s fascination to both the orthodox and the unorthodox can be gleaned even from a glancing survey of the hundreds of books devoted solely to his religious belief or nonbelief: Abraham Lincoln, the Ideal Christian (1913); Lincoln the Freethinker (1924); Abraham Lincoln and Hillel’s Golden Rule (1929); Abraham Lincoln: Fatalist, Skeptic, Atheist, or Christian? (1942); The Religion of Abraham Lincoln (1963), and Abraham Lincoln: Theologian of American Anguish(1973). One of the most recent studies of Lincoln’s belief is an elegant exegesis of his Second Inaugural Address, Lincoln’s Greatest Speech (2002), by Ronald C. White, dean and professor of religious history at San Francisco State University.
Although the intensity of scholarly and popular interest in Lincoln’s faith has never wavered in the 140 years since his assassination, many claims about his religious devotion amount to nothing more than the apocrypha that inevitably shrouds the real beliefs of men of mythic stature. One such story, quoted uncritically by a number of nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century biographers, appeared soon after the war in the Western Christian Advocate, a leading Protestant journal. The paper reported that Lincoln, after receiving the news that Lee had surrendered to Grant at Appomattox, called his cabinet into session, and, upon the president’s suggestion, “all dropped on their knees, and offered in silence and in tears their humble and heartfelt acknowledgment to the Almighty for the triumph he had granted to the national cause.” The article claimed that the conveniently anonymous source was “a friend intimate with the late President Lincoln.”8 In 1890, John E. Remsburg, a well-known freethinker, set out to track down the origin of the story. Only one of Lincoln’s cabinet members, Hugh M. McCulloch (Lincoln’s last secretary of the treasury) was still living, but he answered Remsburg’s inquiry in unequivocal terms in a letter dated February 1891. “The description of what occurred at the Executive Mansion,” McCulloch wrote, “when the intelligence was received of the surrender of the Confederate forces, which you quote from the Western Christian Advocate, is not only absolutely groundless, but absurd. After I became Secretary of the Treasury I was present at every Cabinet meeting and I never saw Mr. Lincoln or any of his ministers upon his knees or in tears.”9
The persistence of this story, and many others like it, reveals a good deal more about conventional American religious attitudes than it does about Lincoln. It was not enough for the Great Emancipator to be seen as a deeply moral man or even a believer in God; he had to be presented as a Christian, a believer in divine revelation, and a commander in chief who, granted victory, thanked his God for having been on the side of the strongest battalion. “It was not until after Mr. Lincoln’s death,” wrote his friend and law partner Ward Hill Lamon in 1872, “that his alleged orthodoxy became the principal topic of his eulogists; but since then the effort on the part of some political writers and speakers to impress the public mind erroneously seems to have been general and systematic.”10 Lincoln, who had picked Lamon to escort him to Washington in 1861, amid rumors that he would be assassinated before being sworn in as president, then appointed him marshal for the District of Columbia. In that capacity, Lamon was responsible for the president’s personal safety—a difficult task, since Lincoln frequently disregarded his friend’s warnings. At times when political passions ran especially high—the White House not being the armed fortress it is today—Lamon slept on a cot, his weapon at the ready, to protect his president from any armed intruders. On the evening of Lincoln’s assassination at Ford’s Theatre, though, Lamon was in Richmond on a special presidential assignment; before leaving, he had warned Lincoln not to go out at night and especially to avoid the theater. Lamon’s last task as a government official was to escort the body of his martyred friend back to Springfield for burial.
Ordinarily, books published in the first decade after the death of an important political leader—especially one who has been assassinated—are of interest primarily for their insight into the temper of the time. That generalization applies even more strongly to the literary and personal quarrels surrounding books by friends and colleagues: I knew him better than you knew him. No one would argue, for instance, that Kenneth O’Donnell, Theodore Sorensen, or even so distinguished a historian as Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., presented a full and evenhanded portrait of John F. Kennedy, their boss and friend, in the books they wrote about him in the sixties and early seventies. But no one would deny that the judgments of contemporaries who knew Kennedy well, and knew him long before he began running for the presidency, are an important contribution to the permanent historical record of his character. In the case of Lincoln—whose stature as the leader who preserved the Union meant that his assassination produced an even greater outpouring of memoir and biography than Kennedy’s would—the tendency to place a higher value on the reminiscences of old friends than on those of more recent acquaintances and political hangers-on was reversed. Greater credence was given in the late nineteenth century to the reminiscences of people who met Lincoln after he became a major political figure, or knew him only slightly, than to those of people who knew him well and worked with him long before the Lincoln-Douglas debates catapulted the man from Illinois into the national spotlight. As a general rule, the post-presidential acquaintances emphasized Lincoln’s religiosity, while those who had known the president from his young manhood emphasized his religious skepticism. The views of old friends who regarded Lincoln as a freethinker were greeted with outright disbelief and intense animosity.
The contrasting responses to two biographies titled Life of Abraham Lincoln—the first by Josiah Gilbert Holland in 1866, the other by Lamon in 1872—demonstrate what Americans did and did not want to hear about their recently slain president. Holland was a well-known poet, magazine writer, and editor for many years of the respected Scribner’s Magazine. His Life, published only a year after the president’s death, was basically a quickie book (albeit a tome of more than five hundred pages) designed to capitalize on public interest in a dramatic news event—as common a phenomenon in the nineteenth as in the twenty-first century. Holland did not know Lincoln personally, and he spoke only of Lincoln’s virtues, ignored all defects of character, and, above all, emphasized his devout Christianity. He concluded that “the power of a true-hearted Christian man, in perfect sympathy with a true-hearted Christian people, was Mr. Lincoln’s power. . . . While he took care of deeds fashioned by a purely ideal standard, God took care of results. Moderate, frank, truthful, gentle, forgiving, loving, just, Mr. Lincoln will always be remembered as eminently a Christian president; and the almost immeasurably great results which he had the privilege of achieving were due to the fact that he was a Christian president.”11 One of Holland’s chief pieces of evidence for Lincoln’s Christian piety was a conversation between Lincoln and one Newton Bateman, who served as Illinois superintendent of public instruction in the late 1850s and had an office in the same building as the future president; the details of the conversation of course came entirely from Bateman. During the 1860 presidential campaign, Lincoln expressed his distress over the fact that twenty out of Springfield’s twenty-three Protestant ministers opposed his election. “Mr. Bateman, I am not a Christian—God knows I would be one,” Lincoln reportedly told Bateman. The future president went on to say that he could not understand how ministers who believed in the New Testament, “in the light of which human bondage cannot live a moment, . . . are going to vote against me. I do not understand it at all.” Later, Lincoln supposedly added, “I know there is a God, and that he hates injustice and slavery. I see the storm coming, and I know that his hand is in it. If he has a place for me—and I think he has—I believe I am ready. I am nothing, but truth is everything. I know I am right, for Christ teaches it, and Christ is God.” The account of this conversation, which makes Lincoln sound both pompous and schizoid, is bizarre on several counts. Why would Lincoln say in one breath that he was not a Christian and in the next that Christ was God? In his public speeches, Lincoln almost never referred to Jesus and never described him as God. Moreover, why would Lincoln confide views to Bateman, a mere professional acquaintance (albeit a respected one), and not share them with his closest friends? In his bestselling book, Holland had an answer:
The effect of this conversation upon the mind of Mr. Bateman, a Christian gentleman whom Mr. Lincoln profoundly respected, was to convince him that Mr. Lincoln had, in his quiet way, found a path to the Christian standpoint—that he had found God, and rested on the eternal truth of God. As the two men were about to separate, Mr. Bateman remarked: ‘I had not supposed that you were accustomed to think so much upon this class of subjects. Certainly your friends generally are ignorant of the sentiments you have expressed to me.’ He replied quickly: ‘I know they are. I am obliged to appear different to them; but I think more upon these subjects than upon all others, and I have done so for years; and I am willing that you should know it.’”12
As evidence of the slain president’s Christian orthodoxy, these passages make no sense. If Lincoln was indeed a devout believer, why would the majority of clergymen in his hometown have opposed his candidacy? And why would he have felt “obliged” to conceal his true respect for religion from his friends—not to mention all of those unfriendly ministers, who might well have changed their opinion of him had he professed his devout Christianity to them? Why should he reveal his religious orthodoxy privately to only one man, when it would surely have helped his candidacy to proclaim his belief in Jesus from the rooftops? Something else was at work in the favorable popular and critical reception of Holland’s book, and that something was a desire to identify the martyred leader with every conventional definition of virtue—Christian orthodoxy being one of them.
Lamon’s 1872 Life, like Holland’s a work of more than five hundred pages, dealt only with Lincoln’s experiences before he became president. A second volume was supposed to cover the presidential years, but it was never written because the first volume was a financial and critical failure. Although he loved Lincoln as a friend and admired him as a leader, Lamon avoided the hagiographical tone that had characterized nearly everything written about Lincoln since his death. He wrote of Lincoln’s love for the doomed Ann Rutledge, his bouts of depression, his ambition, his knack for political compromise, and—most damningly, in the view of the critics—his long history of religious skepticism. The book was based both on Lamon’s firsthand observations and on extensive material supplied by William H. Herndon, Lincoln’s law partner in Springfield since 1844. Herndon had begun to gather reminiscences from those who had known the future president from his teenage years, but he decided not to write a book himself at that time and sold his collection to Lamon. He would write his own book on Lincoln in the 1890s and would outrage conservative critics with the statement “Now let it be written in history and on Mr. Lincoln’s tomb: ‘He died an unbeliever.’” Herndon also had a reputation for drinking, and Mary Todd Lincoln despised him—but Lincoln, as attested to by their amicable and successful sixteen-year partnership, held him in high regard. It is possible that Herndon’s unsavory reputation influenced the negative reception of Lamon’s biography, but the real reason for the antipathy was that Herndon and Lamon presented a side of Lincoln that no one wanted to acknowledge. Many sincere Christians, Lamon suggested, were understandably eager to believe that Lincoln shared their religious beliefs because “his great prominence in the world’s history, and his identification with some of the great questions of our time, which, by their moral import, were held to be eminently religious in their character, have led many good people to trace in his motives and actions similar convictions to those held by themselves.”13
Lamon’s testimony is persuasive because—unlike Herndon—he was not a crusading agnostic but instead regarded Lincoln’s religious skepticism as both a personal and a political liability. “It is very probable,” he asserted, “that much of Mr. Lincoln’s unhappiness, the melancholy that ‘dripped from him as he walked,’ was due to his want of religious faith. When the black fit was on him, he suffered as much mental misery as [John] Bunyan or [William] Cowper in the deepest anguish of their conflicts with the evil one. . . . To a man of his temperament, predisposed as it was to depression of spirits, there could be no chance of happiness, if doomed to live without hope and without God in the world.”14
As a young man, Lincoln had read both Paine’s The Age of Reason and the French philosopher Constantin Volney’s The Ruins, another influential treatise on religious skepticism written in the 1790s. (The first twenty chapters of the book were translated by Thomas Jefferson for an American edition.) Lincoln apparently read these books in 1831–32, while he was a clerk in the general store at New Salem, Illinois, a town of twenty-five families but with a much larger population of transients. The self-educated store clerk probably borrowed the books from Dr. John Allen, a neighbor and Dartmouth College graduate who had moved west for health reasons and had founded a debating society of young men. Twelve years later, after Lincoln had been admitted to the bar and taken on Herndon as a law partner in Springfield, the two men discussed the “infidel” books. Herndon, who was a self-proclaimed agnostic by the 1860s, later maintained that it was Lincoln whose arguments had helped undermine his religious faith. There are good reasons to take Herndon’s recollections with more than a grain of salt, since freethinkers were just as eager as religious believers to project their own beliefs onto the martyred president. However, the fact that Herndon’s view of Lincoln was shared by many old friends certainly suggests that the freethinking side of Lincoln’s nature should be included in any overall evaluation of his beliefs. In the 1870s, few commentators (with the exception of the critic of the New York World, a newspaper more favorably disposed than most toward liberalism in religious matters) saw any merit in Lamon’s book or Herndon’s publicly expressed views. An article in the journal Christian Union, which many believed to have been written by its editor, the prominent minister and orator Henry Ward Beecher, declared that Lamon was inspired by an “anti-Christian animus” and added that “he does not know what Lincoln was, nor what religion is.” Beecher, a son of the Enlightenment foe Lyman Beecher, would grow much more liberal in his views as he aged. One of his funeral orations would be delivered in 1887 by Robert Ingersoll, a close personal friend in spite of their differing views of religion. When the Christian Union article appeared, Lamon wrote Beecher an indignant, bluntly phrased reply. “That I did not know what Mr. Lincoln was,” he said, “I must take leave to contradict with some emphasis; that I do not know what religion is, in the presence of so many illustrious failures, I may be permitted to doubt.” Lamon continued:
Speaking of Mr. Lincoln in reference to this feature of his character, I express the decided opinion that he was an eminently moral man. Regarding him as a moral man, with my views upon the relations existing between the two characteristics, I have no difficulty believing him a religious man! Yet he was not a Christian. He possessed, it is true, a system of faith and worship, but it was one which Orthodox Christianity stigmatizes as a false religion.
. . . Those who would canonize Mr. Lincoln as a saint should pause and reflect a brief moment upon the incalculable injury they do to the cause which most of them profess to love. It would certainly have been pleasant to me to have closed without touching upon his religious opinions; but such an omission would have violated the fundamental principle upon which every line of the book is traced. Had it been possible to have truthfully asserted that he was a member of the Church of Christ or that he believed in the teachings of the New Testament, the facts would have been proclaimed with a glow of earnest and unfeigned satisfaction.15
Whether Lincoln was or was not a devout religious believer—and a Christian—is a question that has never been answered. As the twentieth century progressed, the definition of “Christian” expanded; most modern scholars who insist on faith as the animating force in Lincoln’s life do not feel obliged to claim that he believed in the divinity of Christ or the Bible as the revealed word of God. But the same scholars, like their counterparts in the nineteenth century, tend to dismiss out of hand the credibility of those who emphasized Lincoln’s skeptical side. In Abraham Lincoln: Theologian of American Anguish, Elton Trueblood offers the characteristic argument that “no serious modern historian” accepts Herndon’s characterization of Lincoln as an unbeliever. The author declares that if the freethinking Herndon was right, “we are forced to the conclusion that Lincoln was the arch-hypocrite. His hundreds of statements affirming the reality of God’s guidance would have to be assigned to insincerity, a task too great even for the most inveterate debunker.”16
So we are to dismiss the Lincoln who repeatedly refused to join any church and believe the ministers who claimed that he was just about to join their congregations before being felled by an assassin’s bullet. We are to remember the Lincoln with a command of the Scriptures unusual even in an era when the Bible was the basic text for every literate person and to forget the Lincoln who observed that the Bible could be used in support of just about any cause. Hypocrisy is hardly the only explanation for the divergence between the religious references in Lincoln’s speeches and the private skepticism observed by his friends. The public Lincoln, attempting to steer the nation through its greatest crisis, may well have longed for the guidance of a power greater than man and referred to that guidance in his speeches—even if he himself lacked unquestioning and wholehearted faith. Lincoln was renowned, and often criticized, for the slowness of his decision-making processes, and he repeatedly rejected the notion of a revealed truth that descends from on high in a sudden burst of clarity, sweeping away all doubts. He explicitly, and sardonically, expressed this viewpoint during the long and tortuous deliberations leading to his decision to issue the Emancipation Proclamation. Responding to a demand for immediate emancipation from a mass assemblage of Chicago Christians, Lincoln replied:
I am approached with the most opposite opinions and advice, and that by religious men, who are equally certain that they represent the Divine will. I am sure that either the one or the other is mistaken in that belief, and perhaps in some respects both. I hope it will not be irreverent for me to say that if it is probable that God would reveal his will to others, on a point so connected with my duty, it might be supposed he would reveal it directly to me; for, unless I am more deceived in myself than I often am, it is my earnest desire to know the will of Providence in this matter. And if I can learn what it is, I will do it! These are not, however, the days of miracles, and I suppose it will be granted that I am not to expect a direct revelation. I must study the plain, physical facts of the case, ascertain what is possible and learn what appears to be wise and right.17
In the same ironic tone, Lincoln outlined a concern that he would articulate more fully in his unforgettable Second Inaugural Address. He noted that “the rebel soldiers are praying with a great deal more earnestness, I fear, than our own troops, and expecting God to favor their side; for one of our soldiers, who had been taken prisoner, [said] . . . that he met with nothing so discouraging as the evident sincerity of those he was among in their prayers.” The utility of religion in support of slavery had pushed radical abolitionists like Garrison away from all established churches, but Lincoln—to the dismay of abolitionists who favored immediate emancipation—did not see either religion or its relation to slavery in such Manichean terms. Lincoln’s evolution from a cautious gradualist on abolition into the Great Emancipator is of course a remarkable case study of the complementarity and conflict between morality and pragmatic politics.
What makes Lincoln a compelling figure to religious believers and nonbelievers alike is that his character was suffused with a rare combination of rationalism and prophetic faith in almost perfect equipoise. Lincoln’s strong rationalist side, as well as his sardonic wit—“I hope it will not be irreverent for me to say that if it is probable that God would reveal his will to others . . . it might be supposed he would reveal it directly to me”—was evident in his response to the Chicago ministers. A man who does not expect to be the beneficiary of revealed truth, who must make a decision based on his evaluation of the “plain, physical facts of the case,” should not be cast in the role of a Moses, Isaiah, or Jeremiah. At the same time, Lincoln’s public statements—even those permeated by doubt—surely do not support Herndon’s description of him as a convinced unbeliever. The man who wrote the Second Inaugural Address, with its majestic cadences calling on his countrymen to act “with malice toward none; with charity for all; with firmness in the right, as God gives us to see the right,” cannot have been an unbeliever in the twentieth-century sense. But in both the eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries, the word unbelief, used in a religious context, was more likely to connote doubt than outright rejection of all religion. And if one substitutes “doubter” or “skeptic” for “unbeliever,” the sixteenth president of the United States surely qualifies.
Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Address, his last major speech, has frequently been called a sermon. One religious scholar, William Wolf, describes the address as “one of the most astute pieces of Christian theology ever written,” adding that Lincoln “achieved a religious perspective above partisan strife that was not shared by most of the Christian theologians of his day or any day.”18 In a moving line-by-line analysis of the text, the historian Ronald White argues that “the religious cast of the Second Inaugural gave it a power and authority that were singular.”19 But that was not how the speech was perceived at the time. As contemporary newspaper commentary makes clear, many Americans found the Second Inaugural Address puzzling and pedestrian, filled with doubt and ambiguity rather than with a prophetic sense of purpose. Everyone is right—and therein lies the difficulty of classifying Lincoln’s true religious outlook. In the heart of the address, Lincoln returned to the troubling issue he raised before the Chicago ministers in 1863—the fact that both northern and southern combatants believed God to be on their side:
Both read the same Bible, and pray to the same God; and each invokes His aid against the other. It may seem strange that any men should dare to ask a just God’s assistance in wringing their bread from the sweat of other men’s faces; but let us judge not that we be not judged. The prayers of both could not be answered; that of neither has been answered fully. The Almighty has His own purposes. “Woe unto the world because of offences! for it must needs be that offences come; but woe to that man by whom the offence cometh!” If we shall suppose that American Slavery is one of those offences, which, in the providence of God, must needs come, but which, having continued through His appointed time, He now wills to remove, and that He gives to both North and South this terrible war, as the woe due to those by whom the offence came, shall we discern therein any departure from those divine attributes which the believers in a Living God always ascribe to Him? Fondly do we hope—fervently do we pray—that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. Yet, if God wills that it continue, until all the wealth piled by the bond-man’s two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash, shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said, “the judgments of the Lord, are true and righteous altogether.”
With due respect to the theologians who see Lincoln as a profound religious thinker, it is easy to understand why many of Lincoln’s contemporaries saw this section of the speech as a muddle. The president’s declaration that “it may seem strange that any men should dare to ask a just God’s assistance in wringing their bread from the sweat of other men’s faces” was greeted by the audience, according to the New York Herald, as “a satirical observation,” which “caused a half laugh.”20 But it is unlikely that Lincoln meant to convey satire or sarcasm, in view of his immediate admonition to “judge not that we be not judged.” The next sentences, so deterministic in their view of God’s relationship to slavery, can be read in several ways—as evidence of the fatalism that was another strong element in Lincoln’s character, as a statement that men cannot comprehend the ways of God, and as either a rhetorical or a genuine questioning of God’s ways: shall we discern therein any departure from those divine attributes which the believers in a Living God always ascribe to Him? If this clause was an intentional rhetorical device (and surely it was, given Lincoln’s skills as an orator), it was also a real question—one that flowed from the skeptical side of Lincoln’s religious persona. To the doubter, Lincoln’s reassertion of belief in the goodness of God’s plan—the judgments of the Lord, are true and righteous altogether—is in some sense profoundly undermined by his having raised the issue of whether war, not to mention slavery itself, posed a serious challenge to the conventional attribution of goodness to a Living God. If Lincoln was a theologian, his was a theology filled with inconsistencies, hesitations, and unanswerable questions.
The absence of triumphalism and religious certainty in the Second Inaugural merits particular notice in view of the political rhetoric, combining religion and the doctrine of American exceptionalism, that surrounds and attempts to sanctify America’s current military actions. As White notes, Lincoln “offered little comfort for those who in every crisis or war want to chant, ‘God is on our side.’” And even though the arguments of the Second Inaugural are grounded in biblical concepts, “Lincoln speaks forever against any ‘God bless America’ etiology that fails to come to terms with evil and hypocrisy in its own house.”21 Indeed, the impartial stewardship of Lincoln’s God—He gives both North and South this terrible war, as the woe due to those by whom the offence came—may explain the initial coolness of the reception accorded his “greatest speech” in the North. The unmistakable implication of complicity in slavery on the part of all Americans, including Lincoln himself, was as far removed from the fervid moral righteousness of “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” as it is from George W. Bush’s pious excoriation of evildoers.
Nevertheless, the theological cast of Lincoln’s address elicited a fair amount of editorial criticism on grounds that it represented a departure from the American tradition of separation of church and state. The New York World, which rashly went so far as to compare Lincoln’s views on church and state to those of the reactionary Pope Pius IX (which would have been news to the pope as well as to the president’s freethinking friends), sternly declared that Lincoln had abandoned “all pretense of statesmanship” by taking “refuge in piety” in the address.22 This reaction is notable not because it is an accurate evaluation of Lincoln’s general views or of the address itself but because it demonstrates how unaccustomed nineteenth-century Americans were to hearing presidents use any religious rationales (as distinct from commonplace biblical references) in their speeches on public affairs.
It is significant that almost no one, apart from Lincoln scholars, remembers the quasi-theological portions of the Second Inaugural, while the closing paragraph is familiar to every American with a scintilla of historical knowledge: “With malice toward none; with charity for all; with firmness in the right, as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in; to bind up the nation’s wounds; to care for him who shall have borne the battle, and for his widow, and his orphan—to do all which may achieve and cherish a just, and a lasting peace, among ourselves, and with all nations.” Lincoln, who had less than six weeks to live, was speaking not as a theologian or a saint but as a good and merciful man (too merciful, in the view of many northerners who wished to see their southern compatriots punished severely for their rebellion against the Union). After Lincoln’s death, his would-be canonizers would appropriate that goodness and mercy under the banner of religion. The attempt to Christianize a president who had never been a member of a Christian church was predictable, if paradoxical, after a war of extraordinary brutality fought by both sides in the name of Christian righteousness. “There was something in the hearts of good and typical Christian[s] . . . which exploded,” commented a Union general who had witnessed the savage guerrilla warfare between northern and southern sympathizers in Missouri and Kansas, where thousands of civilians were tortured, mutilated, murdered, or driven from their homes.23 If these were typical Christians, could Christianity truly be termed good? Could religion be relied on to soften the exploding hearts of men? The transformation of the martyred leader into patron saint of the new American political religion was an attempt to proclaim, in a confident affirmative, that religion was the answer. For Lincoln, poised between belief and unbelief, religion was the question.