Lincoln: A Life of Purpose and Power (58 page)

Many Americans thus drew from Lincoln’s assassination what Henry Ward Beecher described as “a new impulse of patriotism.” Matthew Simpson felt powerfully the nation’s duty “to carry forward the policy . . . so nobly begun . . . to give every human being his true position before God and man; to crush every form of rebellion, and to stand by the flag which God has given us.” The slain president’s cause—“to decide whether the people, as a people, in their entire majesty, were destined to be the government, or whether they were to be subject to tyrants or aristocrats, or to class-rule of any kind”—was close to resolution. “If successful, republics will spread in spite of monarchs, all over this earth.” Echoing Lincoln’s sense of the nation as “the last best hope of earth,” the interpreters of his death deemed God to be saying “to all the nations of the earth, ‘Republican liberty, based upon true Christianity, is firm as the foundation of the globe.’ ”
²¹

Thus Lincoln, through his life and death, bequeathed an enhanced and ambitious nationalism to his successors. How subsequent political generations harnessed that force lies well beyond the scope of this study. Lincoln cannot be held responsible for the way in which they chose to deploy the power they inherited. But his was a model which offered some check on the arrogance of power. While he was certainly not reluctant to wield political authority, his practical policy grew from a strong sense of moral purpose, and his course as president was shaped not by impulsive, self-aggrandizing action or self-righteousness, but by deep thought, breadth of vision, careful concern for consequences, and a remarkable lack of pride.

AFTERWORD

He is one of those giant figures, of whom there are very few in history, who lose their nationality in death.

—DAVID LLOYD GEORGE ON ABRAHAM LINCOLN

When this book was honored with the Lincoln Prize in 2004, it served as a reminder that Americans are not alone in their fascination with a president who stakes a compelling claim to being the greatest of the nation’s leaders. Indeed, one of the best and most durable of all the scholarly lives of Abraham Lincoln, as well as the earliest, was written by the British peer Godfrey Rathbone Benson, Lord Charnwood. In that study, published in 1916, the Oxford-educated Charnwood brought a sympathetic transatlantic eye to bear on Lincoln’s moral purpose, while avoiding the hagiography that had marked so many earlier biographies of the Great Emancipator. Charnwood encouraged his contemporaries to admire Lincoln’s single-minded defense of the American Union and, more important still, the president’s role in showing that democracy was a political philosophy that could work. Although the author’s English bearings prompted the occasional local allusion (he described Bull Run as “a stream about as broad as the Thames at Oxford but fordable”), his essential vision was not provincial, but panoramic, even universal: the Liberal peer attributed to Lincoln a main role in what he called the “wider cause of human good.”
¹

During the era of the Great War and its aftermath there developed in Britain, particularly amongst liberals, what George Bernard Shaw called a “cult of Lincoln.” A copy of Augustus Saint-Gaudens’s statue of a deeply contemplative Civil War president was erected in 1920 in London’s Parliament Square. At about the same time, a replica of George Barnard’s Cincinnati statue was placed in Manchester: known as the “stomachache statue,” since Lincoln’s hands unfortunately suggest a man troubled with colic, it commemorates the president’s tribute to suffering Lancashire mill operatives during the wartime cotton famine. Even before the war ended, the poet John Drinkwater had published a celebratory play,
Abraham Lincoln.
(Another writer, R. F. Delderfield, born in 1912, would have been christened “Abraham Lincoln Delderfield” had his Tory mother not overruled the wishes of his Liberal father.) David Lloyd George, by then an ex–prime minister, made a triumphal tour of North America in 1923. Feted as a wartime statesman of “almost superhuman” character (as the
New York Times
put it), he spent what he called the most memorable day of his life visiting the Kentucky birthplace of his lifelong hero; a little later, like other British pilgrims, he journeyed to Lincoln’s tomb at Springfield, Illinois. If the underlying reason for this devotion to Lincoln was the shared self-understanding of Britons and Americans as joint defenders of progressive government, dedicated to making the world “safe for democracy,” it was Charnwood in particular who had encouraged them to seize on Lincoln as an example of what wise, determined, and noble leadership might achieve.
²

Charnwood’s biography remained deservedly influential for many years, until well after the Second World War, when the opening to the public of the Lincoln Papers at the Library of Congress spurred a new generation of historians to rethink the Lincoln story. Mostly these were the works of American scholars—notably, Benjamin P. Thomas, Reinhard H. Luthin, Don E. Fehrenbacher, and Richard N. Current—though distinguished British students of the United States, including J. R. Pole, wrote brief assessments of Lincoln. Then came, in the 1960s and 1970s, the turn in historical writing which encouraged on both sides of the Atlantic a powerful interest in social and cultural history, ideological tides, and popular movements: “bottom-up,” not “top-down,” approaches became the vogue, pushing traditional political history to the margins. The academic historian’s disdain for biography meant that the scholarly study of “great men” was rarely attempted. With the exception of Stephen Oates’s
With Malice Toward None
(1977), no biography of Lincoln worthy of note appeared in either Britain or America during the 1970s and 1980s. Equally, works such as Gabor Boritt’s on Lincoln’s economic beliefs, LaWanda Cox’s on Lincoln and black freedom, and Charles Strozier’s psychological pre-presidential portrait were noteworthy for being oases of imaginative Lincoln-focused scholarship during a time of relative drought.

In recent years, however, in both Britain and the United States, there has been something of a return to political history and biographical study—in many cases resulting in work that, thanks to the broadening of historical writing more generally since the 1960s, is even richer and more solidly contextualized than that which preceded it. Symptomatically, several justly acclaimed lives of Lincoln have appeared during the past decade, part of a remarkable renaissance in American Civil War studies. This book, begun during the mid-1990s, may be seen in that context. For British historians of the United States are far less “foreign observers” than they were in Charnwood’s day; rather, they see themselves as part of an Atlantic community of historians engaged in a common scholarly debate largely blind to their particular nationality. Indeed, my own intellectual debts include those to many American scholars—particularly Michael Burlingame, David H. Donald, Don E. Fehrenbacher, Eric Foner, William H. Freehling, William E. Gienapp, Allen C. Guelzo, Michael F. Holt, James M. McPherson, Mark E. Neely, Mark Noll, Phillip S. Paludan, Joel H. Silbey, and Douglas L. Wilson—who have lately enhanced our understanding of Lincoln and the Union during the Civil War era with studies as distinguished as they are substantial.

Still, as well as serving to connect, the Atlantic may also provide the cultural distance that permits a degree of detachment. This study of Lincoln aspires, naturally, to just such an emotional neutrality, though some may judge that the milieu in which I grew up, that of Welsh political Liberalism and the Nonconformist religious conscience, has inflected my approach. Certainly I take very seriously Lincoln’s moral relationship to power, and in this I differ from Charnwood only in emphasis, not in general interpretation. What strikes the neutral reader is the tenacity of Lincoln’s ethical convictions: his faith in meritocracy; his belief that no one’s opportunities for self-improvement should be limited by class, religious beliefs, or ethnicity; his repugnance for slavery as a system that denied people their chance of moral and economic self-fashioning; his unwavering commitment to a Union freighted with moral value, as a democratic model; and his refusal to be complicit in the destruction of the Union. Lincoln’s moral understanding of the demands of power was not founded on a conventional Christian faith. But the evolution of his religious thought, his quest to understand divine purposes during the war, his Calvinistic frame of reference, and the ease with which he rooted his arguments in Scripture, make it essential to take his religion seriously.

I am acutely conscious of the extraordinary honor of the Lincoln Prize, just as I am of the generosity of its founders, Richard Gilder and Lewis Lehrman. It is a pleasure formally to record here my heartfelt thanks to them, as well as to the Board of Trustees and its chairman, Gabor Boritt; to the Prize Jury; and to the Lincoln and Soldiers Institute at Gettysburg College.

I have used the opportunity of this enhanced edition of the book to make a few, minor changes to the text, and to add a glossary, maps, and illustrations. In this enterprise I have been blessed with the energetic support of James G. Basker, the president of the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History; David Godwin and Sarah Savitt, of David Godwin Associates; my editor, Carol Janeway, and Lauren LeBlanc, at Knopf; Sara Dunn and Jody Cary of the Gilder Lehrman Collection at the New-York Historical Society; John Marruffo at the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum; Jill Reichenbach at the New-York Historical Society; Holly Snyder at the John Hay Library, Brown University; and Louise Taper. Jenny Weber also gave me help, as gracious as it was timely. These are not my only debts, gratefully acknowledged. I take pleasure here in thanking, equally warmly, Andrea Bevan, for providing a rare blend of historical grasp and skillful indexing; John Page, for his bravura performance as Intelligent General Reader; and Daniel W. Howe, for his kind response to this book and for his broader encouragement to me, his successor at Oxford.

St. Catherine’s College
Oxford
December
2004

ENDNOTE

*I have aimed to reproduce all quoted material as it is found in the cited source, though I have occasionally made minor alterations to punctuation. Unless I have indicated otherwise, italics in quoted material represent emphasis in the original text. I have avoided the use of
sic
to indicate errors.

NOTES

Abbreviations

Preface

HI,
pp. 161, 438, 706.

HI,
pp. 438, 724.

Allen C. Guelzo,
Abraham Lincoln: Redeemer President
(Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdman’s, 1999), makes this case most compellingly. Guelzo’s Whiggish Lincoln is anticipated in Gabor S. Boritt,
Lincoln and the Economics of the American Dream
(Memphis: Memphis State University Press, 1978), and Daniel Walker Howe,
The Political Culture of the American Whigs
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979), pp. 363
–
98.

1.
Inner Power (1809
–
54)

Michael Burlingame,
The Inner World of Abraham Lincoln
(Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1994), pp. 236
–
37.

HI,
p. 57;
CW,
3:511; N&H, 1:77.

Donald, p. 20.

CW,
2:97.

CW,
4:65.

N&H 1:36.

CW,
2:15
–
16, 81, 111, 4:121; N&H, 1:301
–
3.

CW,
1:5
–
9.

CW,
3:512; N&H, 1:107–8.

CW,
4:65.

Herndon believed Lincoln’s national political aspirations “grew and bloomed and developed into beauty, etc., in the year
1840 exactly.
Mr. Lincoln told me that his ideas of something burst in him in 1840.” Gabor S. Boritt,
Lincoln and the Economics of the American Dream
(Memphis: Memphis State University Press, 1978), p. 78.

CW,
1:307, 319–21.

CW,
1:350.

Donald W. Riddle,
Lincoln Runs for Congress
(New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1948), p. 111.

CW,
1:350–51; Riddle,
Lincoln Runs for Congress,
pp. 102–11.

CW,
1:391, 430–31.

CW,
2:382–83, 3:512, 4:67; Donald, pp. 160–61; Burlingame,
Inner World,
p. 4.

Daniel Walker Howe,
The Political Culture of the American Whigs
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979), p. 265; Burlingame,
Inner World,
pp. 255–57;
CW,
1:8.

CW,
2:220–21.

CW,
1:5–9.

Herndon’s Lincoln,
p. 156.

CW,
1:144, 148, 200–1.

CW,
1:65–66, 69.

Joseph Gillespie, quoted in N&H, 1:158–62.

Paul Simon,
Lincoln’s Preparation for Greatness: The Illinois Legislative Years
(Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1965; rept. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1971), pp. 263–64; Boritt,
Lincoln and the Economics of the American Dream,
pp. 56–57;
CW,
1:159–79, 237–38.

CW,
1:309–13, 334–35.

CW,
1:334, 407–16; Donald, p. 110; Olivier Frayssé,
Lincoln, Land, and Labor, 1809
–
1860,
trans. Sylvia Neely (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1994), p. 101.

CW,
1:320.

CW,
1:271–79, 291–97;
Herndon’s Lincoln,
pp. 206–7.

CW,
1:74–75; emphasis added (“
promulgation
”).

CW,
1:260, 2:320, 4:62, 7:281; Burlingame,
Inner World,
p. 25;
HI,
pp. 457.

Ward Hill Lamon,
Recollections of Lincoln, 1847
–
1865,
ed. Dorothy Lamon Teillard (Lincoln, NB: Bison Books, 1994; rept. from the 2nd ed. of 1911), p. 15.

The words of the Whig-supported Ashmun amendment. Donald W. Riddle,
Congressman Abraham Lincoln
(Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1979), pp. 1, 42.

CW,
1:420–22, 431–42, 457; 2:4.

CW,
1:347–48.

CW,
2:20–22; Giddings’s diary, 11 Jan. 1849, in N&H, 1:286.

HI,
p. 183;
CW,
2:130.

CW,
2:131–32.

CW,
1:108, 347; 2:62, 115–16, 126, 222.

CW,
2:226–27; 3:551–52.

This is the implication of Riddle,
Congressman Abraham Lincoln,
pp. 246–49.

N&H, 1:376.

CW,
2:247–83.

Burlingame,
Inner World,
pp. 1–56.

HI,
pp. 183–84, 499, 507.

Bacon wrote: “If those laws of the southern states, by virtue of which slavery exists there, and is what it is, are not wrong—nothing is wrong.” His uncle taught in Springfield. Leonard Bacon,
Slavery Discussed in Occasional Essays, from 1833 to 1846
(New York, 1846), p. x; Theodore Davenport Bacon,
Leonard Bacon: A Statesman in the Church
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 1931), pp. 269–73.

HI,
p. 348.

William E. Barton,
The Soul of Abraham Lincoln
(New York: George H. Doran Company, 1920), pp. 225–43.

HI,
pp. 156, 441, 476, 505, 521, 576–77.

HI,
pp. 107, 215, 233, 455; Allen C. Guelzo, “Abraham Lincoln and the Doctrine of Necessity,”
Journal of the Abraham Lincoln Association
18, no. 1 (Winter 1997), pp. 66–67.

William J. Wolf,
The Almost Chosen People: A Study of the Religion of Abraham Lincoln
(Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1959), pp. 50–51, 74–75;
RWAL,
p. 457.

HI,
pp. 37, 40–41, 76, 106–7, 499.

HI,
p. 573 (spelling corrected). Lincoln’s text was Luke 17:37.

HI,
p. 106; Douglas L. Wilson,
Honor’s Voice: The Transformation of Abraham Lincoln
(New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1998), pp. 73–80. Burns’s poem includes the stanza: “O Thou that in the Heavens does dwell, / Wha, as it pleases best Thysel, / Sens ane to Heaven an’ ten to Hell / A’ for Thy glory, / And no for onie guid or ill / They’ve done before Thee!”

HI,
pp. 24, 61–62, 432, 441, 472, 576–77; Walter B. Stevens,
A Reporter’s Lincoln,
ed. Michael Burlingame (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1998), pp. 11–12; Wilson,
Honor’s Voice,
pp. 81–83. Matheny subsequently retracted some of his statements, but not those relating to Lincoln’s religion in his younger days. Barton,
Soul of Abraham Lincoln,
pp. 320–21.

HI,
p. 441. Fehrenbacher casts doubt on Cogdal’s reliability.
RWAL,
pp. 110–11.

HI,
p. 549;
Herndon’s Lincoln,
p. 354.

HI,
pp. 516, 547; Barton,
Soul of Abraham Lincoln,
pp. 324, 348–49.

CW,
2:97.

Stevens,
A Reporter’s Lincoln,
p. 12.

HI,
pp. 578–80.

HI,
pp. 360, 464, 524, 576.

Nicolay,
Oral History,
pp. 95–96;
HI,
pp. 167–68, 358, 360, 453, 516.

Isaac N. Arnold,
The Life of Abraham Lincoln
(Chicago: McClurg & Company, 1884), p. 81;
HI,
pp. 185, 358, 360, 426; Emanuel Hertz,
The Hidden Lincoln: From the Letters and Papers of William H. Herndon
(New York: Blue Ribbon Books, 1940), p. 167.

HI,
p. 441; Hertz,
The Hidden Lincoln,
pp. 142, 167–68, 265–66, 407–8;
CW,
1:382; Guelzo, “Abraham Lincoln and the Doctrine of Necessity,” pp. 57–81.

CW,
2:544–47.

Herndon’s Lincoln,
p. 360;
CW,
3:204–5. Ross had, in fact, freed his slaves.

CW,
1:411–12 (Genesis 3:19).

CW,
3:479–80;
HI,
pp. 183–84, 441.

HI,
pp. 162, 167–68, 441.

CW,
3:205; Hertz,
The Hidden Lincoln,
p. 266.

Hertz,
The Hidden Lincoln,
pp. 265–67;
HI,
pp. 162, 506;
CW,
1:289.

Guelzo, “Abraham Lincoln and the Doctrine of Necessity,” p. 79.

2.
The Power of Opinion (1854
–
58)

Historians of the evolution of American party competition have designated the conflict between Federalists and Jeffersonian Republicans the “first party system.” Jacksonians and their National Republican/Whig opponents provided the poles of party politics from the late 1820s to the early 1850s. The “third party system,” in which Democrats confronted Republicans, evolved out of the multiple fracturing of parties in the 1850s.

CW,
2:89, 255–56, 552–53.

CW,
1:48, 108–15.

N&H, 1:233–34, 250, 269–74, 293–94;
CW
1:337–38, 471–73, 2:409; Olivier Frayssé,
Lincoln, Land, and Labor, 1809
–
1860,
trans. Sylvia Neely (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1994), pp. 84–85, 173; Mark M. Krug,
Lyman Trumbull: Conservative Radical
(New York: A. S. Barnes, 1965), p. 171;
Reminiscences of Carl Schurz,
3 vols. (New York: The McClure Co., 1907–8), 2:99, 199–200, 205.

HI,
pp. 91, 193, 348, 508, 539; N&H, 1:304–9.

HI,
p. 588; Waldo W. Braden,
Abraham Lincoln: Public Speaker
(Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1988), pp. 108, 201–2, 616, 727; N&H, 1:79–81, 84, 87–95, 172.

N&H, 1:69–71, 167–69;
HI,
pp. 69, 76, 114, 466, 508.

N&H, 1:304–9;
HI,
pp. 76, 91, 465–66, 539.

Braden,
Abraham Lincoln: Public Speaker,
pp. 16–17, 97–99, 107;
Reminiscences of Carl Schurz,
2:93; N&H, 1:304–9.

HI,
pp. 131–32, 508, 683.

CW,
2:126; N&H, 1:303–9; Braden,
Abraham Lincoln: Public Speaker,
pp. 113, 115;
HI,
p. 508; Daniel Walker Howe,
The Political Culture of the American Whigs
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979), pp. 281–85.

N&H, 1:130–31, 173–77, 182–83, 223.

Thomas Ford,
A History of Illinois from Its Commencement as a State in 1818 to 1847
(Chicago, 1854), pp. 279–82.

Joseph Gillespie,
Recollections of Early Illinois and Her Noted Men
(Chicago, 1880), p. 6; Ford,
A History of Illinois,
p. 105.

Clinton L. Conkling, “Historical Data Concerning the Second Presbyterian Church of Springfield, Illinois,” typescript, 3 vols., Illinois State Historical Society, 1:133–41, 176–79, 3:8–22; Newton Bateman and Paul Selby, eds.,
Illinois Historical
(Chicago, 1910), p. 215; John M. Palmer,
Personal Recollections of John M. Palmer: The Story of an Earnest Life
(Cincinnati, 1901), pp. 48–51; Biographical sketch of N. W. Miner; Mary Hill Miner, “Recollections,” Mary Hill Miner Papers, Illinois State Historical Society.

CW,
1:382–84.

CW,
1:319–21; Harry C. Blair and Rebecca Tarshis,
Lincoln’s Constant Ally: The Life of Colonel Edward D. Baker
(Portland: Oregon Historical Society, 1960), pp. 8–9.

William J. Wolf,
The Almost Chosen People: A Study of the Religion of Abraham Lincoln
(Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1959), pp. 59–62, 69–70.

CW,
1:320.

In central Illinois, John M. Palmer later recalled, “religious controversies raged in every neighborhood to an extent that seemed to me to be absolutely unaccountable.” Like Lincoln, Palmer was born in Kentucky and moved to Illinois in the 1830s. Palmer,
Personal Recollections,
p. 13.

N&H, 1:126.

N&H, 1:370–72;
CW,
2:282.

HI,
p. 266.

William E. Gienapp,
The Origins of the Republican Party, 1852
–
1856
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), p. 122 (quoting the
Chicago Tribune
).

CW,
2:273–74.