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Authors: Richard J. Carwardine
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five years beyond the political mainstream.
Yet Lincoln’s “transformation” need hardly surprise us. His assault on Douglas and the Democratic administration sprang naturally from well-established elements in his thought. To the Whiggish respecter of law and precedent, one who had urged in his landmark Lyceum speech of 1838 that reverence for the laws should become “the
political religion
of the nation,” the Nebraskaites had perpetrated a statutory violation; to the proponent of economic progress and the intensive cultivation of the American West, the act was a blow against self-improving, independent laborers. Most of all, the measure presented a potent moral challenge to a man who had held a lifelong conviction that slavery was a wrong, tolerable only because it was slowly stumbling to a natural death. Lincoln saw the repeal of the Missouri Compromise threatening to revive an otherwise doomed institution; no morally responsible citizen could passively watch this reversal of the nation’s ethical direction. From Lincoln’s perspective, the real transformation of these years was not in his own moral calculus, but in that of the nation’s leaders.
THE RELIGIOUS ROOTS OF MORAL POWER
Lincoln’s most intimate friend, Joshua Speed, wrote of his fellow Kentuckian, “Unlike all other men there was an entire harmony between his public and private life. He must believe that he was right and that he had truth and justice with him or he was a weak man. But no man could be stronger if he thought that he was right.” Likewise, Joseph Gillespie, another long-standing, shrewd, and trusted friend, considered Lincoln’s powerful sense of justice the essential key to his colleague’s actions. “[T]he sense of right & wrong was extremely acute in his nature,” he recalled. “He was extremely just and fair minded. He was as gentle as a girl and yet as firm for the right as adamant.” Gillespie located Lincoln’s earnest hostility to slavery and to the Nebraska Bill—“about the only public question on which he would become excited”—in an affront to his sense of justice. 45
Lincoln’s succinct formulation, “if slavery is not wrong, nothing is wrong,” may have owed something to a New Haven Congregationalist minister, Leonard Bacon, whose essays on slavery, published in 1846, used similar phraseology and had found their way to Springfield. 46 That Lincoln appears to have acknowledged this debt to a Yankee clergyman, and that a deep ethical conviction marked the period of his reengagement with serious politics, inevitably raises the issue of the religious sources of that moral concern. It is a question more easily put than answered. Lincoln made no public statement of personal faith in the 1850s, and many of those close to him had no idea about his private views. Judge David Davis, in whose company Lincoln spent many hours on the Eighth Judicial Circuit, considered him “the most reticent—Secretive man I Ever Saw—or Expect to See,” and thought it absurd that any but rare intimates should claim to have known his mind. 47 Those who, after Lincoln’s death, did profess to fathom him were scarcely disinterested parties, and their unseemly tussle for his soul leaves us chary about accepting their conflicting judgments at face value.
When Lincoln’s first biographer, Josiah Holland, poured him into the mold of a Christian president, a disbelieving William Herndon found the outcome unrecognizable as the man with whom he had practiced law. He set about interviewing those who might be in a position to know, and in a series of lectures denied there were any Christological elements in Lincoln’s spiritual thought. Still, few religious traditions have subsequently failed to embrace him. Friends have pointed to his Virginia Quaker forebears, Baptists to his parents’ faith, Methodists to a supposed conversion at a camp meeting, Catholics to a surreptitious joining of their church, and Presbyterians to a public
Yet Lincoln’s “transformation” need hardly surprise us. His assault on Douglas and the Democratic administration sprang naturally from well-established elements in his thought. To the Whiggish respecter of law and precedent, one who had urged in his landmark Lyceum speech of 1838 that reverence for the laws should become “the
political religion
of the nation,” the Nebraskaites had perpetrated a statutory violation; to the proponent of economic progress and the intensive cultivation of the American West, the act was a blow against self-improving, independent laborers. Most of all, the measure presented a potent moral challenge to a man who had held a lifelong conviction that slavery was a wrong, tolerable only because it was slowly stumbling to a natural death. Lincoln saw the repeal of the Missouri Compromise threatening to revive an otherwise doomed institution; no morally responsible citizen could passively watch this reversal of the nation’s ethical direction. From Lincoln’s perspective, the real transformation of these years was not in his own moral calculus, but in that of the nation’s leaders.
THE RELIGIOUS ROOTS OF MORAL POWER
Lincoln’s most intimate friend, Joshua Speed, wrote of his fellow Kentuckian, “Unlike all other men there was an entire harmony between his public and private life. He must believe that he was right and that he had truth and justice with him or he was a weak man. But no man could be stronger if he thought that he was right.” Likewise, Joseph Gillespie, another long-standing, shrewd, and trusted friend, considered Lincoln’s powerful sense of justice the essential key to his colleague’s actions. “[T]he sense of right & wrong was extremely acute in his nature,” he recalled. “He was extremely just and fair minded. He was as gentle as a girl and yet as firm for the right as adamant.” Gillespie located Lincoln’s earnest hostility to slavery and to the Nebraska Bill—“about the only public question on which he would become excited”—in an affront to his sense of justice. 45
Lincoln’s succinct formulation, “if slavery is not wrong, nothing is wrong,” may have owed something to a New Haven Congregationalist minister, Leonard Bacon, whose essays on slavery, published in 1846, used similar phraseology and had found their way to Springfield. 46 That Lincoln appears to have acknowledged this debt to a Yankee clergyman, and that a deep ethical conviction marked the period of his reengagement with serious politics, inevitably raises the issue of the religious sources of that moral concern. It is a question more easily put than answered. Lincoln made no public statement of personal faith in the 1850s, and many of those close to him had no idea about his private views. Judge David Davis, in whose company Lincoln spent many hours on the Eighth Judicial Circuit, considered him “the most reticent—Secretive man I Ever Saw—or Expect to See,” and thought it absurd that any but rare intimates should claim to have known his mind. 47 Those who, after Lincoln’s death, did profess to fathom him were scarcely disinterested parties, and their unseemly tussle for his soul leaves us chary about accepting their conflicting judgments at face value.
When Lincoln’s first biographer, Josiah Holland, poured him into the mold of a Christian president, a disbelieving William Herndon found the outcome unrecognizable as the man with whom he had practiced law. He set about interviewing those who might be in a position to know, and in a series of lectures denied there were any Christological elements in Lincoln’s spiritual thought. Still, few religious traditions have subsequently failed to embrace him. Friends have pointed to his Virginia Quaker forebears, Baptists to his parents’ faith, Methodists to a supposed conversion at a camp meeting, Catholics to a surreptitious joining of their church, and Presbyterians to a public
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