Poet Walt Whitman called for the election in 1856 of “the Redeemer President of These States.” Many Americans believe that that Redeemer President was born in 1809 and died violently in 1865. 

The year 2009, Bicentennial of the birth of Abraham Lincoln, draws near. Looking forward to it are scholars like Eastern College History Professor Allen C. Guelzo. He  explains the 16th President’s public policy through Lincoln’s inner life, especially his ethical and religious beliefs. Guelzo asks how those beliefs impacted Lincoln’s attitude toward slavery, the Constitution and preserving the Union.  He argues that Lincoln’s deepest non-political beliefs  permitted our forefathers to drift into an avoidable civil war and then made that war last too long. 

Allen Guelzo’s book is ABRAHAM LINCOLN: REDEEMER PRESIDENT, Grand Rapids, Eerdmans, 1999,  hard cover, 516 pp., available for $20.30 through http://www.amazon.com.

Most scholars long concentrated on the public Lincoln, especially the President, the Commander-in-Chief, the policy-maker. Personal reminiscences by contemporaries were not taken seriously. More recently scholars have gone back behind the war years and studied the “subjective” dimensions of Lincoln: his family background, the books he read, his role models. He is seen as one who constructed an unorthodox personal religion and ethics both of which were modified and deepened when reality and external crises demanded deeper insights. 

Professor Guelzo acknowledges a debt to 1994’s THE INNER WORLD OF ABRAHAM LINCOLN by Michael Burlingame. Burlingame pointed to untapped treasures of reminiscences by Lincoln’s contemporaries. Those treasures lie ready to hand in unpublished research materials and hints in footnotes of reminiscence-gathering writers like Lincoln’s secretary John Nicolay, his partner William Herndon and journalist Ida Tarbell. 

Professor Guelzo sees young Abraham create mature Abraham by rejecting almost every attitude and belief associated with his much disliked father, Thomas Lincoln.  Abraham would not accept a Christian God as unmerciful and harsh as his father believed in. Nonetheless, Lincoln took the Christian religion seriously. He wanted to be a Christian but did not find that Providence (or God) has given him the grace to convert (p. 155). 

From mental interaction with his Calvinist Baptist upbringing, Abraham spun an abiding belief that man is not free and that some great power behind the universe determines human outcomes for reasons inaccessible to men (p. 36). People close to the young Lincoln of the 1830s agreed that he knew his Bible but he often mocked Christian dogmas and preferred atheist rationalist Tom Paine to the four evangelists. 

Throughout his adult life Lincoln was not known to sing hymns, to offer grace at meals or pray with his family. He twice paid pew rent at Presbyterian churches but was never baptized or formally joined any non-political group, including the Masons. Some contemporaries found similarities in his personal beliefs to Unitarians. But Lincoln did not share Unitarian enthusiasm for free will. Others thought him closer to Universalists and their belief in the ultimate salvation of all human souls (p. 154).

Abraham always believed in predestination and in a kind of providence, initially totally impersonal. There was no human freedom, he argued, because all action flows from motives and motives are likely to be selfish. Since he did not believe that men are free, neither could he believe in man’s eternal punishment. Lincoln’s abiding belief was that slavery was evil, a sickness of the body politic. Inevitably it would lose out to free labor. Providence’s work was best supported by containing slavery within its original boundaries and not allowing it to spread into the Federal Territories.

By the late 1850s, however, Lincoln’s Providence took on overtones of intellect and will and personality as Lincoln felt the need for deeper explanations for Southern support for expansion of slavery. As a thorough-going Whig in politics and culture, Lincoln distrusted emotions and consistently commended self-control and dignity.  Abraham Lincoln  also matured politically in a strongly embraced Whig milieu more favorable to public religion than was the Jeffersonian Democracy, north or south. In the 1830s he had scorned orthodox Christianity. But over time this Whig milieu made him seem to draw closer to central Christian insights. 

Slowly, as slavery loomed larger in his thoughts, Abraham  worked out a personal theory of natural law and natural theology whose sacred text became the preamble to the Declaration of Independence. That is one reason why, at Gettysburg in 1863, Lincoln dated the bringing forth of the new nation to 1776 and the Declaration and not to the later Articles of Confederation or Constitution which actually created the American Union. Unlike Jefferson, Abraham did not believe that man’s equality was “self-evident.” Rather it was a “proposition” to be reached by painful, systematic, careful thought and public debate.

Lincoln loved the theater. He knew Shakespeare intimately.  HAMLET (v.2) expressed his personal belief:  “There’s a divinity that shapes our ends,/ Rough-hew them how we will.” Man can at best only roughly outline his life; Providence fills in the important details.

Abraham Lincoln accepted “a distant and implacable Judge who revealed himself only through crisis and death” (446).  Lincoln did not believe in personal redemption. According to Allen Guelzo, 

“Lincoln’s own peculiar providentialism, his Calvinized deism, in fact played a controlling role in the outcome of the civil war” (447). 

Allen Guelzo occasionally spins sweeping conclusions from slim evidence. But as more scholars delve into contemporary reminiscences of Lincoln, our knowledge of Lincoln’s religion will correct itself and become more accurate.

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for Asheville TRIBUNE