Today marks the 160th anniversary of Abraham Lincoln’s death. Almost immediately after the terrible event of his assassination, the martyred president was elevated to the heights of American civil religion. Despite their earlier opposition to the conduct of the war, Radical Republicans sought to appropriate his legacy to justify their extreme plans for Reconstruction. They wanted to draft him as a kind of secular saint to symbolize their revolutionary cause. As one historian put it, they turned him into the “Christ of the passion play of democracy.”
While Lincoln’s own plans for Reconstruction are not entirely clear, what is certain is that he would have rejected this religious triumphalism. In his short religious biography of the 16th president as the “theologian of American anguish,” Quaker author Elton Trueblood argued that “the major key to Lincoln’s greatness is his spiritual depth.” Lincoln did articulate a kind of theology of liberty, but it was always tempered by a humility born of suffering—both his own and the nation’s. He knew that the “new birth of freedom” came with an immense cost.
To understand Lincoln’s religious development, it is important to begin with the strange religious context of the 19th century. America has always been home to bizarre religious movements, but the Second Great Awakening sparked even more sectarian oddities. From revivalism in mainstream denominations to the emergence of less orthodox movements such as millenarianism and Mormonism, the Early Republic’s frontier was on fire with religious fervor.
A young Abraham Lincoln would quietly reject this spiritual climate. Although raised in a Baptist home, he preferred the religious skepticism of a Thomas Paine to the enthusiasm of the camp meeting. His law partner and biographer William Herndon even wrote that Lincoln penned a pamphlet defending “infidelity,” which he and his friends later suppressed for the sake of his political ambitions. As a young man, Lincoln strove above all to be a partisan of rationality. He had little patience for ostentatious ceremony or the intense passion of the traveling preachers he encountered. Instead, Lincoln praised “cold, calculating, unimpassioned reason.”
But as the literary critic Alfred Kazin put it in his masterly God and the American Writer, “Lincoln never got over the superstitions of the primitive frontier.” Throughout his whole life, the Railsplitter showed a certain inclination toward the doctrine of predestination taught in his Calvinist homestead. In the words of William Shakespeare’s Hamlet—one of his favorite plays— “There’s a divinity that shapes our ends, / Rough-hew them how we will.” Whatever youthful dalliances he had with atheism and skepticism, Lincoln was constantly haunted by the idea of a divine being who ordered the universe.
Over time, Lincoln spoke more openly about the ways this divine order shaped humankind’s moral obligations. He especially praised the theology of the Declaration of Independence and its assertion that God created all men with certain natural rights. “I have never had a feeling politically that did not spring from the sentiments embodied in the Declaration of Independence,” he said in one 1861 speech that seemingly prophesied his assassination, because its principles were “what I am willing to live by, and, in the pleasure of Almighty God, die by.” For Lincoln, freedom was something holy—not just a low concession to fallen nature, but rather a high spiritual aspiration. Only a politics of freedom, he believed, could help men achieve the ends for which they were created.
The greatest affront to those principles in America, of course, was the “peculiar institution” of chattel slavery. Lincoln saw its horrors firsthand on trips he took down the Mississippi to New Orleans in the late 1820s and ’30s. From the moment he saw his first slave auction, he knew that this moral blot would corrupt the entire Union and had to be driven to extinction. Slaveholders constituted a dangerous factional interest, as they would corrupt the Constitution itself to preserve their power and wealth. As early as the 1850s, Lincoln understood on some level that the preservation of the Union required the extinction of slavery.
As Lincoln began his meteoric rise to the heights of national politics, the debate over slavery was quickly expanding into a full-blown theological crisis. Both pro- and anti-slavery ideologues attempted to use the Bible to justify their positions. Entire denominations divided into Northern and Southern wings over the question. As the controversy continued to boil, the opposing factions became more and more zealous. Religious extremism fueled political violence.
Although Lincoln was a powerful critic of pro-slavery theology, he also worked hard to distinguish himself from the most radical abolitionists. His position was that Congress did not have the power to abolish slavery outright but only to halt its expansion further into the frontier. He was especially opposed to the religiously inspired violence of certain abolitionists, such as the self-proclaimed prophet and revolutionary John Brown. Lincoln feared every sort of mob—even the well-intentioned ones.
It would be wrong to mistake Lincoln’s humility for moral neutrality. “His doubts accord with his sense of a universe not made exclusively for man’s self-interest,” Kazin wrote, and made him “interestingly unlike the divines, South and North, who were perfectly assured that God spoke to them and acted entirely in their behalf.” Lincoln was fully persuaded that abolitionist attempts to dissolve the Union or overturn the Constitution for the sake of moral purity would not actually redeem the nation. The will of God is not subject to the manipulations of men, Lincoln insisted. He held therefore that the remedy for slavery must be constitutional, not revolutionary.
This political wisdom could be seen from his very first days as president and throughout his entire conduct of the war. Lincoln’s goal, first and foremost, was to save the Union. Without it, American liberty was doomed to fail. But he also wanted to preserve what he called the Union’s “philosophical cause,” the Declaration’s principles of liberty. “If we do this, we shall not only have saved the Union; but we shall have so saved it, as to make, and to keep it, forever worthy of the saving,” he declared in one speech, concluding that “we shall have so saved it, that the succeeding millions of free happy people, the world over, shall rise up, and call us blessed, to the latest generations.”
Throughout the entire war, Lincoln wrestled with these world-historical stakes and his own place in God’s plan for America. “In his torturing [sic] responsibility to the nation, to the future of democratic government in the world, Lincoln had come through a terrible experience to submit to a power higher and greater than anything his political ambition had prepared him for,” Kazin wrote, and “now he felt himself responsible before God for whatever he did and said to guide the nation.” Any order he gave could lead to the deaths of hundreds, if not thousands, of men. The only place a man in his position could turn for consolation was to the divine.
In the White House, Lincoln wrote a number of profound reflections on the meaning of divine will and the price of freedom. He believed, as many other Americans did, that the scale of violence was so massive it could only have a theological explanation. But, along with many of his countrymen, he struggled to understand it. In one note dated September 30, 1862, for example, he meditated that:
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 cannot be for and against the same thing at the same time. In the present civil war it is quite possible that God’s purpose is something different from the purpose of either party; and yet the human instrumentalities, working just as they do, are of the best adaptation to effect His purpose. I am almost ready to say that this is probably true; that God wills this contest, and wills that it shall not end yet. By His mere great power on the minds of the now contestants, He could have either saved or destroyed the Union without a human contest. Yet the contest began. And, having begun, He could give the final victory to either side any day. Yet the contest proceeds.
But far from absolving Lincoln of any personal responsibility for the horrors of war, these metaphysical ruminations often led him to consider his own role in bloodshed. One striking example of his sense of grief—and even guilt—can be found in a letter he wrote to the Shakespearean actor James H. Hackett. In what the president called a “small act of criticism,” he declared, “Unlike you gentlemen of the profession, I think the soliloquy in Hamlet, commencing, ‘O, my offence is rank,’ surpasses that commencing, ‘To be or not to be.’” That speech is uttered by the usurping king Claudius to express his guilt for murdering his brother and stealing his crown. “But, O, what form of prayer,” he cries out, “Can serve my turn?” Perhaps Lincoln sympathized somewhat with this searing anguish. Was the war destroying the Old Republic he loved like Claudius murdered the old king? Would compromise with the moral evil of the Slave Power have prevented this terrible cataclysm?
What saved Lincoln from this sense of despair was his conviction in the fundamental justice of the Union’s cause. At Gettysburg, for instance, he depicted the Civil War as a civilizational struggle to determine if a free government could defend itself against the temptations of the will to power. “We have, as all will agree, a free Government, where every man has a right to be equal with every other man,” he said in another speech. “In this great struggle, this form of Government and every form of human right is endangered if our enemies succeed.” But it was in his Second Inaugural Address that Lincoln’s defense of American civilization achieved its greatest theological insight.
By the time Lincoln arrived at the U.S. Capitol to take the Oath of Office for a second time, it was clear that the Union would win the Civil War. What remained unclear, however, was how the conquered South could be restored to the Union. Should the leaders of the Confederacy be punished for their rebellion? How long would Northern troops have to occupy the region to truly pacify it? What would the integration of emancipated slaves look like? In the speech, Lincoln did not outline a specific policy plan to answer any of these questions. Instead, he offered something far more profound.
The Second Inaugural begins with a history lesson. Lincoln recounts the origins of the Civil War, and places the blame squarely at the feet of the Slave Power. “To strengthen, perpetuate, and extend this interest was the object for which the insurgents would rend the Union, even by war,” he said, “while the government claimed no right to do more than to restrict the territorial enlargement of it.” There was no doubt in Lincoln’s mind that the rebels he fought stood for a fundamentally unjust cause, one utterly at odds with the moral core of the American republic.
And yet, Lincoln noted, “The Almighty has His own purposes.” The North was by no means blameless—its economy may not have relied on actual slave labor to powers its factories, but it certainly depended on the cotton harvested by slaves on Southern plantations. The only way to understand the war, Lincoln seems to have suggested, is as a kind of punishment upon the entire American nation.
The speech concludes with one of Lincoln’s most famous lines: “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.” Unlike the Radical Republicans who called for blood and revolution, but also unlike the Copperhead Democrats who simply wanted a negotiated ceasefire, Lincoln understood that the rebels really were enemies in need of forgiveness. Only this kind of charity could reconstitute the great republic; only this love could save liberty.
This humility was the substance of Lincoln’s true greatness. The war led him to a certain realization of the finitude of man and the infinitude of God. He came to understand, and then taught the nation, that this theological truth—and not any sort of prideful triumphalism—had to be at the heart of any free government.
Tragically, the man who attempted to bring this gospel of forgiveness to a nation divided became the victim of an assassin’s bullet. In the epilogue to his magisterial history of the Civil War, Shelby Foote described it as a years-long “holocaust” that was “begun by one madman, John Brown, and ended by another, J. Wilkes Booth.” The assassin sought vengeance for the Southern cause, but his murderous actions served only to inflame the North’s rage and turn Reconstruction into an even more fiery ordeal. The cycle of violence continued, and its scars can still be witnessed across American society.
But independently of the Radicals’ manipulation of his image, or the ongoing fury of the defeated South, Lincoln’s example continues to influence the American republic. In part because he paid the “last full measure of devotion,” Lincoln’s life itself has become a symbol of our national unity. His sense of justice and humility are the highest expressions of American character. And almost like a ghost, he haunts us to this day through what he once called “the mystic chords of memory,” summoning us to heed “the better angels of our nature.”
