ABRAHAM LINCOLN AND THE ALMOST CHOSEN PEOPLE
GILDER LEHRMAN LECTURE, COLD WAR STUDIES CENTRE,
LONDON SCHOOL OF ECONOMICS, 7 MARCH 2006
© RICHARD CARWARDINE, MARCH 2006
A short stroll from here, on a granite pedestal in Parliament Square, there
stands a bronze statue of Abraham Lincoln. You may be aware that it is a copy
of an original, the work of Augustus Saint Gaudens, located in Lincoln Park,
Chicago. Depicting the sixteenth president in contemplative mode, it
impressively lives up to its title of ‘Lincoln the Man’.
The replica, ‘a gift of the American people’, was unveiled in July 1920 under
the auspices of the Anglo-American Society. Lord Bryce presided over a
public meeting at Central Hall, Westminster, at which the American
ambassador – the ex-Secretary of State, Elihu Root – made a speech of
presentation. The Prime Minister, David Lloyd George, responded, accepting
the statue on behalf of the British people. A procession of worthies then made
its way to the Canning enclosure, on the west side of Parliament Square, where
the Duke of Connaught, the president of the Anglo-American Society, unveiled
the monument. The choir of Westminster Abbey sang the ‘Battle Hymn of the
Republic’; American Civil War veterans laid a wreath; and the proceedings
concluded with the British national anthem.
This episode was just one manifestation, during the years of the Great War and
its aftermath, of what George Bernard Shaw described as a ‘cult of Lincoln’
amongst the British, particularly amongst liberals. This was the period when a
replica of George Barnard’s Cincinnati statue of a rugged, angular, rough-hewn
Lincoln was placed in Manchester: known as the ‘stomach ache statue’, since
Lincoln’s hands unintentionally suggest a man troubled with colic, it
commemorates the president’s tribute to suffering Lancashire mill-operatives
during the wartime cotton famine. A little later, David Lloyd George, by then
‘Abraham Lincoln and the Almost Chosen People’
2
an ex-prime minister, made a triumphal tour of North America. Feted as a
wartime statesman of ‘almost superhuman’ character (as the New York Times
put it), he spent what he called ‘a glorious day’ visiting the Kentucky birthplace
of his life-long hero; a little later, like other European pilgrims, he journeyed to
pay his respects at Lincoln’s tomb at Oak Ridge cemetery in Springfield.
Even before the Great War ended, the poet John Drinkwater had published a
celebratory play, Abraham Lincoln, the first effective stage dramatization of
Lincoln’s life. It opened in Birmingham in 1918 and, at Arnold Bennett’s
instigation, transferred with ‘spectacular success’ to London, to the Lyric,
Hammersmith. As a piece of history, the play is decidedly shaky. And much
of the characterization is stereotypical (ludicrously so in the case of Frederick
Douglass, the pre-eminent black abolitionist, who speaks in a form of pigeon
English: ‘Mista Lincoln great friend of my people … My people much to learn.
... Ignorant, frightened, suspicious people. But born free bodies. Free. I born
slave, Mista Lincoln. No man understand who not born slave.’). However,
complete with a verse-speaking chorus, the play provided a stirring portrait of a
president weighed down, but not defeated, by the pressures of war. Although
the part of Lincoln himself was incongruously played by an actor with an Irish
brogue, it was reported that ‘All Mayfair went to see it. Hammersmith became
a nightly pilgrimage for the West End.’ The play ran for hundreds of
performances, crossed the Atlantic, and was several times revived in London
over the next decade.
Drinkwater’s inspiration was one of the earliest and most durable of all the
scholarly lives of Abraham Lincoln, that by Godfrey Rathbone Benson, Lord
Charnwood. In that study, published during the course of the Great War, in
1916, the Oxford-educated Charnwood brought a sympathetic eye to bear on
Lincoln’s moral purpose, while avoiding the hagiography that had marked so
many earlier biographies of the Great Emancipator. It remains a discerning
study. Charnwood told his readers to seize on Lincoln as an example of what
‘Abraham Lincoln and the Almost Chosen People’
3
wise, determined and noble leadership might achieve. The author’s English
bearings prompted the occasional local allusion: he cast the American state
governors as ‘independent potentates acting usually in as much detachment
from … [the nation’s President] as the Vice-Chancellor of Oxford … from the
Board of Education’. But Charnwood’s essential vision was not provincial. It
was panoramic, even universal: the Liberal peer attributed to Lincoln a main
role in what he called the ‘wider cause of human good’. Here was a plain,
coarse tongued master of political cunning whose honesty, intellectual rigour
and moral determination fashioned ‘a statesman guided in shifting
circumstances by great [democratic and emancipatory] principles’ – a leader
driven by ‘a larger philosophy than that of simple abolitionism’: ‘His
statesmanship stands out as a singular instance of what the Greeks were after
when they dreamt of a “philosopher king.”’
In the post-war world of Versailles and national reconstruction, others seized
on Charnwood’s Lincoln to fashion a figure of universal, and not local,
relevance. Lincoln – the tragic, humble, Christ-like figure of history – had
shown an exemplary devotion to democracy and freedom. ‘He hit us’, Arnold
Bennett said, ‘in our historical Puritan’s wind. He seemed to incarnate our
purpose, our usefulness, our sacrifice … This nobility – was it not ours? This
man of government of the people by the people for the people – was this not
the new order promised by our politicians, nay actually being made in Paris by
the peoples’ representatives? And so Lincoln became the stuff our dreams are
made of.’
Even the Times, which during Lincoln’s presidency had been scornful at best,
now recanted: ‘We know now, as neither [his countrymen] nor we could then
discern, that to him was given vision; and the measure of our present reverence
is the measure of an earlier incomprehension. Here in England we … should
find in him inspiration[,] … in the impartial and comprehensive quality of his
mind, … in the deep sanity and distinction of his character.’ In the charity and
‘Abraham Lincoln and the Almost Chosen People’
4
ambition of Lincoln’s second inaugural address, a prospectus for post-Civil
War reconstruction, lay a prescription for the regeneration of the western world
in the aftermath of a war to make the world ‘safe for democracy’.
No one made more of Lincoln’s ‘universal significance in history’ than John
Drinkwater, in a set of essays addressed to the English-speaking world, and
which spelt out the underlying idealism of his play. Lincoln: The World
Emancipator (not history but a romantic prospectus), presented Lincoln as a
supreme exponent of ‘the great principle of individual liberty within national
unity’; as the embodiment and inspiration of ‘a profound community of
constitutional method and ideal’ now offered the chance to shape ‘the present
affairs of the world’. Drinkwater articulated the shared self-understanding of
Britons and Americans as joint defenders of progressive, democratic
government. As Lloyd George put it: ‘[Lincoln] is one of those giant figures,
of whom there are very few in history, who lose their nationality in death.’
***
Now there are indeed elements in Lincoln’s moral philosophy and political
achievement whose broad, near-universal, relevance help explain the appetite
with which those in other societies and later generations have seized on him as
a model. Let me set out the key elements of that philosophy and achievement.
In essence, Lincoln’s social and moral project was to construct an enterprising,
commercially prosperous nation in which, under the equal operation of
republican laws, each and every citizen would enjoy the right to rise and get the
education needed to seize the chances presented by a fluid and expanding
society.
The logic of Lincoln's economic thought dictated a social and moral order at
odds with southern slavery. 'I am naturally anti-slavery,' Lincoln later wrote.
‘Abraham Lincoln and the Almost Chosen People’
5
'If slavery is not wrong, nothing is wrong. I can not remember when I did not
so think, and feel.' His argument drew especially on the doctrines of natural
rights and human equality set out in the nation’s founding texts. All men, black
and white, should be free to enjoy the fruits of their own work. Free labour
offered the prospect of 'improvement in condition' and kept the social order
fluid. Lincoln had no fear of a permanent proletariat: he saw no insuperable
barriers to the social progress of any free, enterprising and conscientious
working man. Slavery, however, the enemy of this kind of economic
meritocracy, stifled individual enterprise in both planters and slaves, and
sustained a fundamental inequality: depriving human beings of the just rewards
of their labour.
In 1854 Stephen Douglas's Kansas-Nebraska Act opened up the western
territories to slavery’s expansion. From a position of historical defensiveness,
the South’s peculiar institution now appeared likely to swamp the nation. The
Act set Lincoln on a course that would culminate in his election to the
presidency in 1860, as the candidate of a Republican party united on the
principle of quarantining slavery.
The sharp clarity with which Lincoln identified the larger ethical issues at stake
in the Nebraska Act thrilled his hearers, including radicals who had not
previously considered him a kindred spirit. As well as engaging in a Unionthreatening piece of political perfidy, Lincoln argued, Douglas had reversed the
'settled policy' of the republic at a stroke. Douglas's 'popular sovereignty', he
insisted, assumed a moral neutrality towards slavery, leaving it to local
communities to decide the issue for themselves – with reference only to their
material self-interest. Douglas’s claim that the Nebraska Act had established
'the sacred right of self-government' ran aground on the rocks of African
American manhood: ‘If the negro is a man, why then my ancient faith teaches
me that "all men are created equal;" and that there can be no moral right in
connection with one man's making a slave of another.'
‘Abraham Lincoln and the Almost Chosen People’
6
The Declaration of Independence, in which he rooted his arguments, was for
Lincoln a near-sanctified statement of universal principles, and one that
squared with essential elements of his personal religious faith: belief in a God
who had created all men equal and whose relations with mankind were based
on the principles of justice.
Lincoln was clear enough where the Bible’s principles led: '"Give to him that is
needy" is the Christian rule of charity; but "Take from him that is needy is the
rule of slavery.' He was scornful of southern divines like the Presbyterian
Frederick A. Ross, who had constructed a proslavery theology that concluded,
as Lincoln put it, that 'it is better for some people to be slaves; and, in such
cases, it is the Will of God that they be such.' But how was God's will to be
established? Suppose Ross had a slave named Sambo. To the question 'Is it
the Will of God that Sambo shall remain a slave, or be set free?' God 'gives no
audible answer' and the Bible, his revelation, 'gives none, or, at most, none but
such as admits of a squabble, as to its meaning.' But the fact that the question
was to be resolved by Dr Ross, who 'sits in the shade, with gloves on his hands,
and subsists on the bread that Sambo is earning in the burning sun', gave little
confidence that he would 'be actuated by that perfect impartiality, which has
ever been considered most favorable to correct decisions.'
Lincoln’s election to the presidency in 1860 did nothing to alter his hostility to
slavery but – by provoking the secession of seven states of the deep South – did
everything to change his political priorities. He had expected his chief
presidential task to be to stand firm on the quarantining of slavery. In practice
events had determined that his challenge would be the enforced reunion of a
fractured nation. Yet Lincoln’s underlying vision did not change.
There are a number of strands in the rope which bound Lincoln resolutely to
the Union. There was his profound faith in the nation’s material potential. Far
‘Abraham Lincoln and the Almost Chosen People’
7
more often, however, Lincoln celebrated the political purpose of the Union and
the moral magnificence of the nation’s free institutions. The United States
enjoyed a unique and unprecedented liberty. 'Most governments have been
based, practically, on the denial of equal rights of men...; ours began, by
affirming those rights. They said, some men are too ignorant, and vicious, to
share in government. Possibly so, said we; and, by your system, you would
always keep them ignorant, and vicious. We proposed to give all a chance; and
we expected the weak to grow stronger, the ignorant, wiser; and all better, and
happier together.' Lincoln, then, gave the American Union a special role in
history. As a beacon of liberty to all, it was 'the world's best hope'.
Thus, when the South Carolinians turned their guns on Fort Sumter in April
1861 they raised an issue which embraced, in Lincoln's words, 'more than the
fate of these United States. It presents to the whole family of man, the question,
whether a constitutional republic, or a democracy - a government of the people,
by the same people - can, or cannot, maintain its territorial integrity, against its
own domestic foes. For Lincoln the rebellion had to be put down to prove to
the world that popular government could be maintained against internal
attempts at overthrow, ‘that those who can fairly carry an election, can also
suppress a rebellion’.
Here is the key to the vision that sustained Lincoln throughout his presidency.
The Union vessel was important only for the cargo it carried: liberty, equality,
and a meritocratic society. During the war, Lincoln came to see that, in order
to preserve that cargo, he had to embrace the emancipation of the slaves.
Many, then and since, judge this and his other acts relating to slavery to have
been sluggish, grudging and partial. The case runs as follows:
Lincoln made no mention of slavery when he defined the Administration’s
purpose early in the conflict. During the first year of the war he overturned
military proclamations that freed the slaves of rebel masters; he sacked his
‘Abraham Lincoln and the Almost Chosen People’
8
Secretary of War for publicly proposing the arming of black soldiers; and he
continued to cherish schemes of compensated emancipation and the colonizing
of free blacks overseas. When Horace Greeley published his 'Prayer of Twenty
Million', calling on the President to grasp the nettle of emancipation, Lincoln's
reply seemed only to confirm his cautious pragmatism: 'My paramount object
in this struggle is to save the Union, and is not either to save or to destroy
slavery.' The Emancipation Proclamation, when finally issued, on New Year's
Day, 1863 applied only to those areas still in rebel hands: it freed only those
slaves over whom it could have no immediate influence. It accepted the
arming of black Americans not out of principle but only because the Union
army desperately needed men.
The problem with this assessment is that it neglects the political constraints on
Lincoln’s freedom of action. His priority in the early stages of the war was to
prevent the remaining tier of slave states in the upper South from leaving the
Union: their loss would have sealed the fate of the Union, given their rich
resources. Had Lincoln declared the removal of slavery a war aim, Missouri,
Maryland and (most seriously) Kentucky, would have been lost. His dalliance
with compensated emancipation and colonization has to be seen in this context,
and against a background of deep-rooted northern racism. That the
Emancipation Proclamation did not apply to slave-holding areas under Union
control was a mark not of Lincoln’s cynicism but of his understanding of the
constitutional basis of the Proclamation – namely, as a measure of military
policy which he was free to take as commander-in-chief: by definition it should
not apply to those areas no longer in revolt. Lincoln’s stance over the two
years after he had issued the Proclamation is significant for his determination to
follow through its logic: in the arming of black troops, in the invocation of ‘a
new birth of freedom’ in the majesty of the Gettysburg Address, and in
energetic efforts to secure a constitutional amendment to end slavery. On the
eve of his death, Lincoln was proposing that certain categories of freedmen be
given the vote.
‘Abraham Lincoln and the Almost Chosen People’
9
***
The emancipator, the moral exemplar, the democrat, the exponent of the
principles encoded in the Declaration of Independence: these were the models
which prompted international appreciation of Lincoln and elicited tributes to
his breadth of vision and understanding.
There is, however, another aspect to Lincoln, one with a much more potent
domestic than international appeal. The reality is that Lincoln’s presidential
achievement was also constructed upon his harnessing of a potent American
nationalism, a willingness to tap into the deep well-springs of a specifically
American patriotism. Let me illustrate this with a snapshot.
On the morning of 21 February 1861 Abraham Lincoln stood to address the
New Jersey Senate in the state house at Trenton. By now the president-elect
was entering the eleventh day of an exhausting and roundabout journey that
had brought him by rail from his Springfield home by way of civic and
legislative gatherings in sundry towns and cities across Indiana, Ohio and New
York. He would, the next day, on the anniversary of George Washington’s
birth, travel on to Philadelphia and Harrisburg, and indeed would notoriously
complete his journey to the nation’s capital by night-time stealth, to avoid what
the Pinkerton detective agents deemed a real risk of assassination.
Lincoln made this journey east conscious that he would take office in what had
become, since his election three months earlier, a deeply fractured Union. The
Republicans’ victory in that presidential contest had prompted the separationist
gallop of the lower South, whose seven states had passed ordinances of
secession by 1 February. Indeed, just a week before Lincoln had made his
farewell to friends and neighbours in Springfield, representatives of six of those
‘Abraham Lincoln and the Almost Chosen People’
10
states met at Montgomery, Alabama, to lay the basis of the southern
Confederacy.
By the time Lincoln reached the New Jersey state capital he had already spoken
dozens of times, on some occasions with a prepared speech, more often with
just a few inconsequential remarks made from the platform of his railroad car.
Borne from the Trenton depot by open carriage, and accompanied by mounted
marshals, through muddied streets lined with the cheering crowds, Lincoln
arrived at a senate chamber which, according to his secretary John Hay, was
‘already thronged’. Yet, ‘by some system of compression imperfectly known
to me, room was made for the half hundred or more that the special train had
brought’, and the chamber resounded to cries of ‘Down in front’ and ‘Hats off’.
Lincoln’s eventual appearance prompted a tumult of applause, ‘lasting several
minutes’. As the gathering settled into silence, Lincoln turned to his carefully
prepared text.
‘I cannot but remember the place that New-Jersey holds in our early history’,
he began. ‘[A]way back in my childhood … I got hold of a small book, …
“Weem's Life of Washington.”' I remember all the accounts there given of the
battle fields and struggles for the liberties of the country, and none fixed
themselves upon my imagination so deeply as the struggle here at Trenton ….
The crossing of the river; the contest with the Hessians; the great hardships
endured at that time … I recollect thinking then, boy even though I was, that
there must have been something more than common that those men struggled
for. I am exceedingly anxious that that thing which they struggled for; that
something even more than National Independence; …this Union, the
Constitution, and the liberties of the people shall be perpetuated in accordance
with the original idea for which that struggle was made, and I shall be most
happy indeed if I shall be an humble instrument in the hands of the Almighty,
and of this, his almost chosen people, for perpetuating the object of that great
struggle.’
‘Abraham Lincoln and the Almost Chosen People’
11
This resort to a form of sacred language had not been Lincoln’s conventional or
natural mode of address in his pre-presidential speeches. The allusion to
Americans as a ‘chosen people’, albeit with some qualification and hesitancy,
was not one that came easily to Lincoln’s lips. But it was of a piece with the
themes and tone of his speeches as he travelled east. In his first remarks of
substance, at Lafayette, Indiana, he reflected: 'While some of us may differ in
political opinion', the common bonds of 'christianity, civilization and
patriotism' ensured that 'we are all united in one feeling for the Union.'
Thereafter he continued to harness the common religious sensibilities of his
audience by pointedly stressing his dependence on (sequentially) 'Divine
Providence', 'God', 'the Providence of God', 'that God who has never forsaken
this people', 'the Divine Power, without whose aid we can do nothing', 'that
Supreme Being who has never forsaken this favored land', 'the Maker of the
Universe', 'the Almighty', and 'Almighty God'. And these themes (in language
that played on the ‘sacred sources of national identity’) converged with
particular clarity in his address to the New Jersey Senate.
They would shortly find expression in the new president’s inaugural address,
through which Lincoln appealed for patience to allow for the workings of
'intelligence, patriotism, Christianity, and a firm reliance on Him, who has
never yet forsaken this favored land', and drew to a close by affirming the
nation's bonds of affection: 'The mystic chords of memory, stre[t]ching from
every battle-field, and patriot grave, to every living heart and hearthstone, all
over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again
touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.'
Lincoln’s rhetoric was in part a measure of his need to appeal above and
beyond party, and to find a language in which to do so (‘You give me this
reception,’ he said, ‘as I understand, without distinction of party. I learn that
this body is composed of a majority of gentlemen who, in the exercise of their
‘Abraham Lincoln and the Almost Chosen People’
12
best judgment in the choice of a Chief Magistrate, did not think I was the man.
I understand, nevertheless, that they came forward here …as citizens of the
United States, to meet the man who, for the time being, is the representative
man of the nation, united by a purpose to perpetuate the Union and liberties of
the people’). Lincoln’s resort to religious language was surely also a reflection
of human pressure that he felt as he left his home of twenty-five years to face
the Union’s most serious crisis.
It is not my purpose here to explore the evidence relating to Lincoln’s faith, or
his lack of it, in his early and middle years. Given his taciturnity and the
absence of any private journal, there is far too much room for unedifying
speculation. My judgment is that the young Lincoln, while no atheist, was
influenced by the works of Tom Paine and other deists; but that as a husband,
father and established lawyer during the 1840s and 1850s he drew closer to the
orbit of conventional Protestant Christianity, evincing a faith which owed
something to Universalism and Unitarianism, but which did not shake off the
Calvinistic fatalism under whose influence he had been raised as a boy.
Whatever Lincoln’s religious views on the eve of his presidency, his wartime
experience encouraged an increasing profundity of faith. Not only did he feel a
sense of personal responsibility for a war of unimagined savagery, but the
conflict brought him trials closer to home: the death of friends and close
colleagues, and above all the loss through typhoid of his son, Willie, in
February 1862. He attended public worship more habitually than ever before.
He found in his darkest nights increasing solace in the scriptures; on one
occasion Elizabeth Keckley, Mary Lincoln’s seamstress, curious to see what
particular Bible passages he was reading, crept behind him and found him deep
in the book of Job. Before the war, Lincoln regarded superintending
providence as a remote and mechanistic power, but under the pressure of
events he exchanged that providence for an active and more personal God, an
intrusively judgmental figure, one more mysterious and less predictable than
the ruling force it superseded.
‘Abraham Lincoln and the Almost Chosen People’
13
Lincoln made several public theological forays during his presidency. Between
the summer of 1861 and the autumn of 1864, he issued nine separate
proclamations appointing days of national fasting, humiliation and prayer, and
of thanksgiving, many of them prompted by moments of despair or elation
occasioned by battlefield events. In addition, several of his public letters and
responses to visiting clergy, provided the public with a strong sense of the
president’s understanding of the workings of the Almighty. Most notable of
all, Lincoln’s inquiry in his second inaugural address into the meaning of the
war gave the speech the character of a sermon. Collectively these writings
present three major lines of thought: every nation was a moral being with
duties; God’s purposes were wise and mysterious; and the American Union,
under God, promised to be an agent of moral and political transfiguration.
Lincoln’s Calvinistic frame of thought prompted him to conceive of the
Almighty as the ruler of nations as well as of men; to identify nations as moral
entities equally as capable of transgressions against the divine law as the
individuals who composed them. Thus, he explained, ‘nations like individuals
are subjected to punishments and chastisements in this world.’ Lincoln made
clear his conviction that the nation’s continuing trials related specifically to its
perpetuating the wrong of slavery. God’s punishment of the nation for slavery,
Lincoln frequently reflected, was part of the Almighty’s purposes, which were,
he declared, ‘mysterious and unknown to us’. He offered no clearer and more
memorable statement of his views than in two remarkable letters to Eliza P.
Gurney, of the Society of Friends. ‘If I had had my way,’ he said, eighteen
months into a conflict to which he could see no imminent conclusion, ‘this war
would have been ended before this, but we find it still continues; and we must
believe that [God] permits it for some wise purpose of his own’. Two years
later, shortly after William Tecumseh Sherman had transformed the Union’s
military prospects by taking Atlanta, Lincoln told her: ‘The purposes of the
Almighty are perfect, and must prevail, though we erring mortals may fail
‘Abraham Lincoln and the Almost Chosen People’
14
accurately to perceive them in advance. We hoped for a happy termination of
this terrible war long before this; but God knows best, and has ruled otherwise.
… Surely He intends some great good to follow this mighty convulsion, which
no mortal could make, and no mortal could stay.’
However mysterious God’s purposes, then, and however disobedient the
nation, there was reason to believe that a purified Union would emerge from
the fiery trial of war. Lincoln’s thanksgiving proclamations marvelled at the
‘the gracious gifts of the Most High God’ who had delivered ‘fruitful fields’,
productive industry, an increasing population, and reasons ‘to expect
continuance of years with large increase of freedom.’ At the dedication of the
Gettysburg cemetery, he memorably reformulated this idea in a non-scriptural
rhetoric of salvation and renewal: for loyal Unionists the great task was to
‘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.’
***
Lincoln’s theology – with its strain of humility and remarkable lack of selfrighteousness – stands in some contrast to that of the mainstream Union
pulpits, mostly confident that God was on their side. Yet Lincoln and the loyal
northern Protestant clergy largely spoke in a common theological language,
and this would be a matter of considerable political, not just theological,
significance.
Lincoln's call in April 1861 to put down the rebellion generally drew northern
Protestants onto a common platform. Pre-war conservative conciliators and
radical higher-law evangelicals now united in 'a great people's war for Christian
democracy'. This was a unity qualified by a few principled pacifists – Quakers
and Mennonites – and by guarded dissenters, but the vast majority of northern
‘Abraham Lincoln and the Almost Chosen People’
15
Protestant clergy trumpeted their support for a war to prevent national
annihilation. One editor doubted if in the history of the world so many pulpits
had thundered against rebellion as on the last Sunday of the first month of the
war.
Those pulpits then, and during the rest of the conflict, helped crystallize ideas
about the nature and meaning of the American nation. Protestant leaders strove
to make sense of unfolding events. Nations, they knew, had a primary and
essential place in God’s moral economy. He worked through them to achieve
his purposes. He was the supreme arbiter of their affairs. Every nation’s days
were numbered, but no nation would die until its purposes were achieved.
Few, though, conceded that the American Union faced imminent destruction;
indeed, none doubted that God had chosen the nation for special favour and a
particular role. In ‘the finest territory on the face of the globe’, America had
reached ‘a state of advanced civilization’, separated from ‘the discordant …
elements of the old world’. Americans enjoyed 'the richest inheritance of civil
and religious freedom ever bequeathed to any nation in ancient or modern
times'. They were guided by ‘the best government that was ever constituted
since the world began’. America had a mission that would see her ‘conquer
the world’. This was no conventional lust for conquest. As a latter-day Israel,
America’s role was to serve, by example, the welfare of the whole human race.
This made the rebellion of the South not only political treason against the
secular nation, but profanity, or treason against God. .
Protestants used the Pauline doctrine of obedience to civil rulers – ‘Let every
soul be subject unto the higher powers’ – to show that there could, ordinarily,
‘be no such thing as a Christian rebel’. Secondly, they celebrated the ‘the
grand providential purposes’ for which God had raised up their Christian
republic. They were fighting, one said, ‘for free government … in all lands for
all ages to come. Ancient republics stand on the page of history as
‘Abraham Lincoln and the Almost Chosen People’
16
discouraging failures… and the modern republics … in the old world, have
gone down in blood. Our government was organized …with the conservative
element of Christian faith to give stability to [the] work. If [it] … is cast down
…, when may mankind be expected to repeat the experiment?'
If the Confederacy represented 'the vilest treason ever known since the great
secession from heaven' – despatching Jefferson Davis to the same quarters as
Lucifer – then the question arose: why was God putting the whole nation
through this time of trial? For many the war was part of a testing process of
discipline characteristic of America’s history. As Israel had been chastised, to
purge corruption, so the rigours of the early colonial settlements and the
Revolution itself had helped ‘purify’ the American nation. And what above all
explained the nation’s paroxysm was its complicity in the peculiar institution.
As a visiting group of Chicago clergy told Lincoln in September 1862, the
Almighty had ‘bared his arm in behalf of the American slave’ and now
commanded the nation’s rulers as He once had ordered Pharaoh: ‘Let my
people go!’
Yet, whatever punishment God might mete out, there were no grounds for
despair. Out of the severity of war would come a transfigured nation. Homer
Dunning fused Christ and the Union: ‘I rejoice to be with the nation, when …
on its Calvary it is crucified by its own children. … Our children and
children’s children will speak of 1861, as we speak of 1776 … And when the
nation shall have … covered the continent; when it shall have overmastered the
monster of slavery, and … when it shall stand up … transfigured with Divine
beauty for the doing of God’s will, men will give thanks to God for this great
and sore trial.’
Dunning’s words remind us that many antislavery Protestants who would not
have considered themselves abolitionists before the war soon saw that the logic
of events would turn the conflict into an assault on slavery. By the summer of
‘Abraham Lincoln and the Almost Chosen People’
17
1864 even Old School Presbyterians had come to the view that for the
preservation of ‘our national life ... slavery should be at once and for ever
abolished’.
The logic of evangelicals’ understanding of events culminated in the certainty
that, as one Episcopalian simply put it, ‘God is with us; … the Lord of Hosts is
on our side.’ Without question, God was against the rebels: how could He
possibly ‘smile upon rebellion, treason, and a nationality with slavery as its
corner-stone’, a Methodist editor asked. A few preachers warned against
hubris and self-righteousness. As Charles Fowler put it, ‘The only way to get
God on our side is to get on his side.’ But usually this appetite for selfcriticism co-existed with a belief in the North’s moral superiority. A myriad
northern pulpits deemed the Union to be engaged in a ‘sacred cause …
hallowed with … [the] blood’ of its ‘best and noblest sons’. The North’s sins
were stains that could be washed away, but the Confederacy’s were systemic
evils removable only by destroying the body itself. ‘It is not merely war
between sections, between North and South, between Abraham Lincoln and
Jefferson Davis’, explained one Methodist minister. ‘It is war between God on
one side, a gigantic wrong on the other.’
***
If Unionist Protestants were commonly more confident than Lincoln that God
was on their side, in other respects, as this summary suggests, the themes of the
President’s public theology harmonised well with their own. Both he and they
knew that nations had a place in the Almighty’s moral economy; both
conceived of an interventionist God; both understood the Union, under divine
providence, to amount to more than a glorious experiment in liberty and
republicanism; both understood slavery to compromise that design.
‘Abraham Lincoln and the Almost Chosen People’
18
This broad congruence between Lincoln’s public theology and that of religious
loyalists had rich meaning for the wartime politics of the Union. Mainstream
Protestants embraced Lincoln as one of them; Lincoln worked energetically to
mobilise the churches behind the war effort. Amongst the complex of
ingredients that made for the Union’s eventual victory, none was more
important than its capacity to sustain popular patriotism, despite the enormous
cost in human suffering. Without a regenerating patriotism during this
protracted trial the Lincoln administration would have foundered on the rocks
of war weariness, as both Confederates and northern peace Democrats
confidently but mistakenly predicted. The White House understood the
importance of harnessing a range of voluntary organisations to this end: these
included the political parties and the Federal army, but none was more potent
as a moral influence than the nation’s churches. Of these, none could match
the power of evangelical Protestantism – the millions of Methodists, Baptists,
Presbyterians, Congregationalists and others, who made up the country’s most
formidable religious grouping.
Lincoln thus strove to maintain good relations with church leaders. He met a
full gamut of religious visitors who came to lecture him, offer opinions, seek
appointments, or pay their respects. They included nationally-renowned
preachers, well-placed editors of mass-circulation papers, and distinguished
abolitionists. There were representatives of the agencies devoted to the wellbeing of soldiers. Lincoln held meetings with Sabbatarians, Temperance men,
and Covenanters seeking a Christian amendment to the federal constitution.
Some critics missed the political value of these meetings. 'I wish that [General]
Halleck would put a Guard on the White House to keep out the Committees of
preachers [and] Grannies … that absorb Lincoln's time and thought', grumbled
General Sherman. But Lincoln himself recognized that these meetings served a
larger political purpose.
‘Abraham Lincoln and the Almost Chosen People’
19
For their part, thousands of Union clergy saw in Lincoln a president who
warranted respect, even admiration, not simply ex officio but because they
found in him qualities to be extolled. There was no personal cult of Lincoln.
Yet popular perceptions of Lincoln mattered in sustaining the Union
administration as a whole. And those perceptions were shaped to an extent by
preachers who used their position to review the president’s qualities, and to
place him within the divine economy. Scrutinizing Lincoln’s character and
demeanour, loyal clergy mostly provided a counter-weight to popular
impatience over the Union’s snail-like progress on the battlefield and over what
was deemed the paralysis of the administration itself. In sermons, tracts and
newspapers Protestant ministers told of the president’s admirable honesty,
determination, integrity, and unflinching patriotism.
In a quintessential example of loyal preaching, the Methodist George Peck
delivered a two-hour sermon on a text from the book of Nehemiah, in which he
ingeniously turned Nehemiah into ‘the president of the country’ beset by
secessionist rebels who sought to prevent its rebuilding. Peck transparently
wants his audience to view Lincoln in the precise terms in which he describes
‘President Nehemiah’: ‘a man of great executive ability’; of ‘great courage,
great prudence, and a profound knowledge of human nature’; ‘a man of much
prayer, and great faith in God’, whose ‘puritan rule’ elicited the contempt of
‘secessionists’ who ‘don’t pray much’, but ‘curse and swear and never work’;
‘a most obstinate man’ in the face of political mischief; ‘a man of a thousand’
who ‘could not violate his conscience’ and whom ‘[n]either force nor fraud,
threats nor flattery, could jostle … a hair’s breadth’.
This approving association of Lincoln with what his critics disparaged as
‘puritanism’ – that is, the conscience-driven evangelicalism of New England
and its diaspora – derived in part from the president’s setting aside more days
for national religious observance, including the first ever national thanksgiving,
‘Abraham Lincoln and the Almost Chosen People’
20
than any of his predecessors, many of whom had jibbed at a practice which
seemed to trespass on the separation of church and state.
Although Lincoln continued to disappoint those hoping he would confess
Christ as his personal Saviour, many observers perceived in Lincoln a capacity
for reverence and 'deep religious feeling'. Jonathan Turner remarked that both
president and people 'seem … to imagine that he is a sort of half way
clergyman'. Many saw him as an instrument of the divine will, operating under
Providence to become, after George Washington, 'the second saviour of our
country.' As freedom became a reality, African Americans regarded the
president-emancipator as an Old Testament prophet, a Joshua fighting the
battle of freedom. Most vividly of all, a Chicago Methodist believed he had
located 'the true theory & solution of this "terrible war"' in the remark of one of
the city's lawyers: 'You may depend upon it, the Lord runs Lincoln.'
Together, Lincoln’s cultivation of loyalist religious constituencies and their
reciprocal confidence in him, contributed signally to the larger mobilisation of
nationalist sentiment. There was much more to religious Unionists’ activity
than an exposition within consecrated space of a Christian case for patriotism.
Cadres of Protestants acted as ideological shock troops well beyond their
conventional domain, recruiting volunteer soldiers for the Union and Christ,
energising the aid societies that served the Union’s fighting men, ministering as
field chaplains to inspire the troops with the nation’s millennial purposes, and
participating as organisers in the home-front politics of national defence.
Union evangelicals engaged in urgent drum-beating on behalf of the Lincoln
administration. With remarkable consistency, Protestant spokesmen lined up to
defend the administration’s conscription measures, its tolerance of arbitrary
arrests, and its strong-arm action against draft resisters and dissenters.
There were, of course, anti-administration clergy and lay sympathisers who
remained a self-conscious minority within mainstream northern Protestantism.
‘Abraham Lincoln and the Almost Chosen People’
21
But the reality was that most of the North’s politically active Protestants were
either deeply committed to Lincoln’s administration or, as radical critics, had
nowhere else, electorally speaking, to go. The 1864 campaign witnessed the
most complete fusing of religious crusade and political mobilisation in
America's electoral experience. Ministers engaged in a fervent round of ward
meetings, election speeches, sermons, addresses to troops and editorialising.
Religious tract society agents distributed campaign literature. Churches
became Union-Republican clubs. The president’s re-election was due in large
part to the extraordinary mobilisation of support by those who saw themselves
as agents of God and of Lincoln: the leaders of the Protestant churches.
***
Amongst the thousands of correspondents who sought to sustain Lincoln during
the civil war was one Ephraim Shaler, a crippled veteran of the war of 1812.
‘Dont for Gods sake give or yield one inch, or parley a moment with the Rebels
Traitors and Murderers, til they lay down the weapons of rebelion and sue for
peace,’ he urged the president during the first month of the war. ‘Every Traitor
… should be Hung, in accordance with the laws of God and man. … If I had a
foot big enough with body & strength in proportion, [I] would kick the whole
State … of S. Carolina into the gulf of Mexico. Have no fears of the final result
-- the multitudes of loyal Americans will sustain you and God will overthrow
all your enemies. God Speed the right.’
Two and a half years later, the trials of war had shaken none of Shaler’s
confidence: ‘Mr. President; you need have no fears in regard to the termination
of this unholy war. … God is a prayer hearing God, and He will most assuredly
hear and answer the ten-thousand prayers offered up morning and evening by’
– and here Shaler made no concession to doubt – ‘by His own chosen People
through the length & breadth of our land … that He would go forth with our
armies, and give them victory in every future conflict, til the Rebels lay down
‘Abraham Lincoln and the Almost Chosen People’
22
their arms & return to their allegiance. … All the blood and suffering in this
cruel war rests upon their guilty souls; if they have any souls May God of His
Infinite Mercy keep and protect you from all harm, guide you safely through
the Storm, and soon give you and the whole Nation to see His Mighty Power in
giving Peace to our beloved Country’.
It was men like Shaler whose single-minded determination provided the
bedrock of Unionism. It was their nationalism on which Lincoln would rely
politically, and which he encouraged by his allusions to the Union’s special
role in providential dispensation, as the last best hope of the world, as 'hope to
the world for all future time', and as ‘something that held out a great promise to
all the people of the world to all time to come’.
Yet we have to return to the Lincoln who could speak more cautiously of ‘the
almost chosen people’, of a nation which should be wary of self-righteousness
and remain alert to its moral failings. He expressed this idea no more
powerfully than in his second inaugural address, from which I have refrained
from quoting so far. It is there that the ‘almost’ of the ‘almost chosen’ is most
directly confronted: ‘“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, ... 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, … so still it must be said “the judgments of the Lord, are
true and righteous altogether.”’ It was, and is, this Lincoln – St Gaudens’
‘Abraham Lincoln and the Almost Chosen People’
23
‘Lincoln the Man’ – who has exerted such a hold on political and public
imagination well beyond the limits of the United States, above all for his depth
of moral understanding, a profundity both uncommon in political leaders and
timeless in its relevance.