Read an Excerpt
from the Introduction (pages 18-21)
Abraham Lincoln would become, personally and publicly, one of the most determined and eloquent apostles of liberal capitalism, and a stalwart of the Whig party, the enemies of the Jeffersonian legacy. At the same time, Lincoln would also become the president best known through the nineteenth century for pouring public policy into the molds of religious thought, the one most often claimed after his death as "the Christian president"; and he would conduct a lifelong dalliance with Old School Calvinism which attempted to acknowledge the significance of religion in a republic's character without surrendering to the fiery agenda of New School evangelicalism.
Yet, his place in these contexts was complex, shifting, and not always consistent. His life was a pursuit of transformations in his rise from the son of a Baptist dirt-farmer to a cultured corporate lawyer, but he sought transformation while all the while denying that he had sought anything, that he was "an accidental instrument, temporary" and "a piece of floating driftwood." While liberal capitalism was supposed to expand the horizons of one's choices and opportunities, Lincoln insisted all through his life that he did not believe in free choice, but rather in a "doctrine of necessity." Intellectually, he was stamped from his earliest days by the Calvinism of his parents. But he rebelled vigorously against that influence in adolescence, declined to join his parents' church, and turned instead toward the Enlightenment as his intellectual guide, toward "infidelity," "atheism," and Tom Paine in religion, to Benthamite utilitarianism in legal philosophy, and to "Reason, all-conquering Reason" in everything else.
Taking these as the principal guideposts for understanding Abraham Lincoln asks that we do something with Lincoln which virtually no modern Lincoln biographer has managed to do, which is to read Lincoln seriously as a man of ideas. As Mark Neely has complained, Lincoln biography tends to travel either the road of personality-history (as blazed by William Henry Herndon) in which Lincoln's achievements are explained in terms of temperament or genealogy; or else the road of public-history (the model for this being the ten-volume biography by Lincoln's White House secretaries, John G. Nicolay and John Hay) in which Lincoln is lauded mostly for his public management skills as a president, a politician, or a commander-in-chief. The fruits beside these roads are not inconsiderable; nor is it going to be claimed here for the sake of difference that Lincoln was a philosopher, a theologian, a mystic (all of which have been tagged on Lincoln for reasons that have more to do with self-interested authors than with Lincoln). In particular there is no intention here to add to the delusive mythology that seeks to baptize (literally or figuratively) Abraham Lincoln as an evangelical Protestant (which he was not) or as a devout believer in Swedenborgianism, Universalism, Presbyterianism, or even Freemasonry (he was not any of those, either).
What is sought here is to take Lincoln at his own word when he declared in the spring of 1860 that great political questions could not be answered by mere political solutions. "Whenever this question shall be settled," Lincoln wrote about slavery, "it must be settled on some philosophical basis. No policy that does not rest upon some philosophical public opinion can be permanently maintained." For Lincoln, a "philosophical basis" was not a school-philosophy; but it was certainly a coherent intellectual scheme of things which transcended mere policies. Lincoln, it is true, was a professional politician, and not an intellectual; but he was not a mere politician. Poorly schooled (by his own definition) and too poor in his youth to afford either college training or even the law-office tutoring which educated most of his fellow lawyers in the 1830s and 1840s, he was gifted with an amazingly retentive memory and a passion for reading and learning. "A capacity, and taste, for reading, gives access to whatever has already been discovered by others," Lincoln believed, and his reading provided three large-scale contexts for his intellectual maturation. The first of these was the rigid Calvinism in which he was raised during his early years in Kentucky and Indiana. It was, as William Barton once wrote, "a Calvinism that would have out-Calvined Calvin." It was also a Calvinism which Lincoln rejected, partly because it was his father's religion, partly because he could make no ultimate intellectual sense of it; and yet it was ingrained so deeply into him that his mental instincts would always yield easily to any argument in favor of determinism or predestination, in favor of the helplessness of humanity to please God, in favor of melancholy as the proper estimate of the human condition.
The second of these contexts was the Lockean Enlightenment, which made Lincoln religiously skeptical, suspicious of the Rousseauean passions (he confessed that he had never read a novel, and failed to get more than halfway through that paragon of Romantic novels, Ivanhoe), convinced of the supremacy of individual rights over community conventions. And yet, whatever skeptical nourishment Lincoln derived from reading religious "infidels" like Tom Paine and Robert Burns, he also arrived chronologically at the very end of the "long Enlightenment" and lived most of his life as a Victorian. This meant that, like Carlyle and Mill and George Eliot, the loss of faith was not for Lincoln a triumphant emancipation but instead the source of what A. N. Wilson calls a "terrible, pitiable unhappiness" and a wearying sense of "metaphysical isolation" that could be stanched only by sub-mission to "impersonal and unrecompensing law."
The last of these contexts was classical liberalism, especially the economic liberalism which in Lincoln's decades seemed so full of promise of liberation and mobility for the talented and morally self-restrained, and the Benthamite utilitarianism which he accepted as finding a rational—and thoroughly deterministic—cause for human conduct in self-interest. And yet he would come at the end of his liberal's progress to see that liberalism could never achieve its highest goal of liberation and mobility without appealing to a set of ethical, even theological, principles that seemed wholly beyond the expectations and allowances of liberalism itself. While he would hold organized religion at arm's length, he would come to see liberalism's preoccupation with rights needing to be confined within some public framework of virtue, a framework he would find in a mystical rehabilitation of his ancestral Calvinism and an understanding of the operations of divine Providence.
Looking at Lincoln in this way, we may address Neely's complaint about the bifurcation of Lincoln biography by understanding Lincoln's ideas, and the cultural scaffolding that emerged around them, as the bridge by which we can reunite the mysterious fascination we have with Lincoln's inner personality with the public life that guided the republic through its direst political crisis.