Lincoln: A Life of Purpose and Power (41 page)

Mary Lincoln, soon to become a president’s wife, posed with young Willie and Tad in a bucolic studio setting in Springfield soon after the election of 1860. A year later, in a photograph by Mathew Brady, she showed off one of her many favored floral dresses.

Attention to religion is not the same as a profession of faith, though there were those, like Speed, who judged that the prewar skeptic now “sought to become a believer,” and others who saw in the wartime Lincoln such a deepening of devotion that they thought he had realized the ambition. Noah Brooks stated that Lincoln had spoken to him of “a process of crystallization” in his mind during the crisis after his election, and that he constantly prayed. In the main, though, those who felt they were close to Lincoln during the war saw no change of heart, and no evangelical-style conversion: rather, they thought his trials had released a latent interest in religion. Browning recalled a “naturally . . . very religious man” and Leonard Swett considered Lincoln so “full of natural religion” that, as he confronted “great responsibility and great doubt, a feeling of religious reverence, and belief in God—his justice and overruling power—increased upon him.” Mary Lincoln told Herndon, “He was a religious man always, as I think,” beginning to address the subject seriously when Willie died, and “felt religious More than Ever about the time he went to Gettysburg.” But “he was not a technical Christian”—indeed, Christ himself is notably absent from Lincoln’s authenticated words. Lincoln was not being falsely modest when he told Gurley and a group of Presbyterian visitors, “I have often wished that I was a more devout man than I am.”
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Lincoln’s sense of his devotional inadequacy was only sharpened by the persistent efforts of the Christian community to guide him. Never before had he been made so forcefully and inescapably aware of the religious imperatives driving the populous groups who made up northern Protestantism. Mainstream Protestants represented a formidable constituency, and their combined expressions of opinion, especially when underscored by sympathizers amongst the president’s political colleagues, presented an insistent drumbeat that Lincoln could not so easily ignore.

Collectively, three broad themes emerged. First, the Union amounted to more than a glorious experiment in liberty and republicanism, and the rebellion to more than simple treason: the struggle for national destiny resonated beyond the earthbound political sphere. Illinois Congregationalists told Lincoln that the rebels, by launching “a revolt against the Divine scheme for the world’s advance in civilization and religion,” had embarked on “impious defiance of Divine Providence.” From cranks as well as political friends, Lincoln heard a common message: “One God! One Union! One People! . . . all the powers of hell are just now against us.” Orville Browning held that “God is entering into judgment” with the cotton states, and continued to remind Lincoln that the Union cause was “as holy . . . as ever engaged men’s feelings.” United States Senator James R. Doolittle knew that “God the Almighty must be with us,” and in the dark days of late 1862 Edwin Stanton found hope in the knowledge that “our national destiny is as immediately in the hands of the Most High as ever was that of the Children of Israel.”
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Second, Lincoln learned that in this sanctified struggle between darkness and light he was God’s chosen instrument. “It is your high mission under God to save us,” the New Hampshire Congregationalist minister Elias Nason told him at start of hostilities, and repeatedly he heard the sentiment that “God has raised [you] up for such a time as this.” Lincoln’s campaign biographer, the Methodist John Locke Scripps, reminded him that he had “voluntarily accepted the highest responsibilities which any one not endowed with the Godhead could assume” and that from God alone would come the strength, will, and wisdom he needed. As the agent of divine providence, he would enjoy the prayers of all faithful people. From every quarter Lincoln received the reassurance that, in the words of one correspondent, “Heaven give you & your Advisors the Wisdom for Our emergency is the daily prayer of Millions.”
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God, however, would listen only if Lincoln followed his teachings. For the vast majority of religious petitioners—Protestant, largely evangelical, and strongly leavened with New England and new-school Calvinism—those lessons were clear. As the Chicago Congregationalist William W. Patton explained, the war was “a just rebuke from God, of the tolerance of slavery by our fathers after the revolution, & of the numerous concessions made to it from that period to the present.” The conflict of arms, once under way, could only be stayed by ending the whole nation’s complicity in an “unchristian & barbarous” system, “the abomination that maketh desolate.” Emancipation alone would free the Union from the sin of covenant-breaking, of reneging on the pledge of freedom in the Declaration of Independence.
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Lincoln avoided complete immersion in these evangelical waters swirling around him, but under the pressure of wartime events he was without doubt swept along to a new religious understanding, one much closer to the historic Calvinism that had profoundly shaped most of northern Protestantism. At the heart of evangelicals’ dialogue with Lincoln stood a bundle of notions about God, humankind, and the workings of Providence: that the Almighty was an all-seeing, active force in history, ready to dispense retributive justice on a naturally sinful people and delinquent nation, but also ready to intervene to help human efforts directed toward a righteous end. Belief in the operations of Providence, as several historians have emphasized, played a large part in Lincoln’s thinking throughout his life. Before the war, he regarded Providence as a superintending but remote and mechanistic force, which operated not by capriciously suspending the rules of the universe, but by working predictably within them. As a war president, however, he discovered new meaning in the Calvinism with which he had been acquainted over a lifetime. Lincoln’s “Providence” now became an active and more personal God, an intrusively judgmental figure, more mysterious and less predictable than the ruling force it superseded.

Precisely when this shift in conception occurred is hard to pin down. The consensus is that Lincoln’s invocations of Providence during the first year of the war, and his increasing public calls for God’s assistance, precede the change and can be slotted into his antebellum framework of understanding.
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Even so, Lincoln himself later remarked that “from the beginning” he had seen that “the issues of our great struggle depended on the Divine interposition and favor. If we had that all would be well.” A clear sign of the change came with Lincoln’s proclamation for a national day of fasting and prayer after the defeat at First Bull Run, in which he confessed private and national sins, acknowledged a justly vengeful God, and prayed for his intervention in support of Union arms. If the Calvinist language here may have reflected not conviction but formulaic convention, the same cannot be said of Lincoln’s words to Browning at about the same time. When his friend urged that only by striking against slavery would the Union open the door to divine assistance, Lincoln replied, “Browning, suppose God is against us in our view on the subject of slavery in this country, and our method of dealing with it?” Browning later admitted he had been deeply impressed by this reply, “which indicated to me for the first time that he was thinking deeply of what a higher power than man sought to bring about by the great events then transpiring.”
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Lincoln’s “Meditation on
the Divine Will,” probably composed in early September 1862, reflects the growing profundity of the president’s personal theology.

The idea of an unfathomable God, operating actively but mysteriously to shape events, surfaced again in Lincoln’s remarks during the summer of 1862. A visiting delegation of Quakers urged him to proclaim freedom to the slaves. “Perhaps,” he replied, “God’s way of accomplishing the end which the memorialists have in view may be different from theirs.” That this was an authentic expression of his innermost views is evident from an arresting personal memorandum, probably composed in September, after the disaster at Second Bull Run. “In great contests each party claims to act in accordance with the will of God,” Lincoln wrote. “Both
may
be, and one
must
be wrong. God can not be
for,
and
against
the same thing at the same time.” There followed, however, not a statement of Unionist certainty, but a startling hypothesis: “In the present civil war it is quite possible that God’s purpose is something different from the purpose of either party. . . . I am almost ready to say this is probably true—that God wills this contest, and wills that it shall not end yet.” God
chose
to let the contest begin. “And having begun He could give the final victory to either side any day. Yet the contest proceeds.”
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These were the words of a man whose changing ideas on divine intervention indicated some movement toward the evangelical mainstream, but whose hesitancy over equating the Union cause with God’s will, or with Christian holiness, set him apart from it. This was just one aspect of his ambivalence in the face of orthodoxy. Lincoln shared most Protestants’ understanding of his dependence on, and responsibilities to, a higher power. “It has pleased Almighty God to put me in my present position,” he told his old Springfield neighbor, the Baptist minister Noyes Miner, in the spring of 1862, “and looking up to him for divine guidance, I must work out my destiny as best I can.” Impressed, Miner concluded that “if Mr. Lincoln was not a christian he was acting like one.” At other times, too, Lincoln spoke in orthodox language—of his “firm reliance upon the Divine arm,” of seeking “light from above,” and of being “a humble instrument in the hands of our Heavenly Father.” Even more significant, he began to use the possessive pronoun—“responsibility to my God,” “promise to my Maker”—in ways that suggested a belief in a more personal God. Yet at the same time, as he tried to discern God’s wishes in the “signs of the times,” he showed much more humility than did most Protestant preachers. As he said rather testily to the delegation from the Chicago churches, religious men who were “equally certain that they represent the Divine will” had badgered him with opposite demands. “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 . . . 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
!
” But since he could expect no miracles or direct revelation, he had to use the limited means available to him: observation and rational analysis. “I must study the plain physical facts of the case, ascertain what is possible and learn what appears to be wise and right.”
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Lincoln’s new religious position, expressed in his search to discover God’s purposes, was inextricably entwined with his developing emancipation policy during the spring and summer of 1862. It culminated in his remarks at the landmark cabinet meeting on September 22, when, according to Welles, Lincoln explained how he had vowed before Antietam that he would interpret victory as “an indication of Divine will, and that it was his duty to move forward in the cause of emancipation”: not he but “God had decided this question in favor of the slaves.” This does not mean Lincoln’s religious transformation “caused” the change in war policy, to which he was being beckoned by military need, political pressure, and the slaves’ own pursuit of freedom. Rather, it represented Lincoln’s need for new sources of philosophical support at a time when the old ones were losing their power. Unlike the majority of evangelical Protestants, who could easily shelter emancipation within ready-made millennialist doctrine, Lincoln had to seek out a new theological framework of his own, albeit one with familiar elements of Calvinism. In earlier times and in other moods, he would—as we have noted—“ridicule the Puritans.” But by New Year’s Day 1863, the president and the earnest Protestants who entreated him had come to stand on much the same ground of practical policy, even if they had reached it by different intellectual routes.
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FAITHFULNESS OF PURPOSE: EMANCIPATION, RECONSTRUCTION, AND BLACK CITIZENSHIP

“I can only trust in God I have made no mistakes,” Lincoln told a crowd of well-wishers who had gathered to congratulate him on his preliminary proclamation. The remark was that of a president who would continue for the remainder of the war to address issues from the standpoint of both religious conviction and hard-nosed pragmatism. Those two elements reinforced each other, ensuring that Lincoln would hold to his new policy of emancipation as steadfastly as he had to his “fundamental idea,” the restoration of constitutional government. The president who could emotionally say at the time of the Peninsula debacle, “I expect to maintain this contest until successful, or till I die, or am conquered, or my term expires, or Congress or the country forsakes me,” would bring the same steely resolution to the cause of black liberty.
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