Abraham Lincoln: Redeemer President 2nd Edition | Preview

A braham L incoln

Redeemer President

A

Second Edition

C.

“ is co-winner of the 1999 Lincoln Prize is a subtle, insightful, and con vincing analysis of Abraham Lincoln. . . . Guelzo’s analysis is sound and generally convincing. . . . is is one of the most important books in a decade rich in Lincoln scholarship.”

—

e Filson Club History Quarterly

“One of the subtlest and deepest studies of Lincoln’s faith and thought in many years. . . . Seldom has the complex connection between Lincoln’s predispositions and Lincoln’s achievements been more insightfully studied than in Allen Guelzo’s superb book.”

— e Weekly Standard

“Guelzo’s is a satisfying portrait, perhaps because he has been a scholar of Jonathan Edwards, so is more conscious of the intellectual and political contexts that preceded and made Lincoln, but less concerned with the retrospective usefulness of Lincoln as a national icon.”

— e Historical Journal

“Is there really a place for yet another work on Abraham Lincoln? Allen C. Guelzo has superbly demonstrated that there is. . . . Not only does the reader of this volume learn much about Lincoln but also about those inter twining economic, intellectual, political, and religious aspects of American life that so in uenced the thought of Abraham Lincoln and others in the nineteenth century. is book deserves its rightful place among other ex emplary Lincoln biographies.”

—

e Journal of Southern History

“Solid, well researched, and thought-provoking. A welcome addition to our ceaseless national fascination with Kentucky’s most famous citizen. . . . e millennial scholarship on Lincoln is o to an excellent start.”

— Register of the Kentucky Historical Society

LIBRARY OF RELIGIOUS BIOGRAPHY

Mark A. Noll, Kathryn Gin Lum, and Heath W. Carter, series editors

Long overlooked by historians, religion has emerged in recent years as a key factor in understanding the past. From politics to popular culture, from social struggles to the rhythms of family life, religion shapes every story. Re ligious biographies open a window to the sometimes surprising in uence of religion on the lives of in uential people and the worlds they inhabited.

e Library of Religious Biography is a series that brings to life im portant gures in United States history and beyond. Grounded in careful research, these volumes link the lives of their subjects to the broader cul tural contexts and religious issues that surrounded them. e authors are respected historians and recognized authorities in the historical period in which their subject lived and worked.

Marked by careful scholarship yet free of academic jargon, the books in this series are well-written narratives meant to be read and enjoyed as well as studied.

Titles include: Emily Dickinson and the Art of Belief by Roger Lundin

A Short Life of Jonathan Edwards by George M. Marsden

Sworn on the Altar of God: A Religious Biography of omas Je erson by Edwin S. Gaustad

e Religious Life of Robert E. Lee by R. David Cox

Harriet Beecher Stowe: A Spiritual Life by Nancy Koester

For a complete list of published volumes, see the back of this volume.

Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co. 4035 Park East Court SE, Grand Rapids, Michigan 49546 www.eerdmans.com

© 1999, 2022 Allen C. Guelzo

All rights reserved

First edition 1999 Second edition 2022

Printed in the United States of America

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Guelzo, Allen C., author. Title: Abraham Lincoln : redeemer president / Allen C. Guelzo. Description: Second edition. | Grand Rapids, Michigan : William B. Eerd mans Publishing Company, 2022. Identi ers: LCCN 2022014490 | ISBN 9780802878588 (hardcover)

Subjects: BISAC: Biography & Autobiography / Presidents & Heads of State | Biography & Autobiography / Historical Classi cation: LCC E457.2 .G88 2022 | DDC 973.7/092 [B]—dc21 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022014490

Reproduced on the endsheets is one of the original manuscripts of Lincoln’s second inaugural address, presented by Lincoln to one of his private secretaries, John Hay. Used by permission of Lloyd Ostendorf.

For Jack Kemp

Preface

Abraham Lincoln: Redeemer President was not a book I had planned to write.

I am an American historian, and within that academic tribe, I am an American intellectual historian—which is a way of saying that I am in terested in writing about the history of American ideas. Puritanism, pragmatism, political theory, and moral philosophy are, so to speak, my bookshelves. None of these are usually seen as having much intersection with Abraham Lincoln, nor did I expect them to. Lincoln had been an in terest of mine ever since my grandmother bought me a Lincoln-biography comic book o a train-station newsstand in Philadelphia in 1962. But my dissertation at the University of Pennsylvania was on Jonathan Edwards and the problem of free will and determinism in eighteenth-century moral philosophy, and when I embarked on my college teaching career in 1991 at Eastern College, I expected to ourish as an Edwards specialist, write a university-press Edwards biography, and oat upward professionally to bigger and better things.

e 1990s did not turn out to have a favorable wind for those ambitions, or the ambitions of many other young history academics. e generation before us had earned their PhDs, took up jobs at small colleges, and even tually advanced, book by book, to major public or research universities. By the 1990s, that sort of advancement had evaporated. What was worse, the fraternity of Edwards scholars was a tightly closed shop. A er my disser

tation had been published as Edwards on the Will: A Century of American eological Debate (Wesleyan University Press), I cheerfully announced to a religious-history scholars’ group in Stowe, Vermont, that I aspired to take on a full-scale Edwards biography. I was bluntly informed by a senior Edwards scholar that this was a project he intended to pursue, and would I kindly back o . For years a er that, I thought seriously about leaving teaching entirely for academic administration. I was tagged for department chair, and served two terms as moderator of the faculty senate at Eastern, so I soon learned something of that territory. By the end of the ’90s, I was a candidate for two provost positions; I was even nominated for the pres idency at Eastern. But academic ambitions did not are out completely; some were kept alive by an o er, brokered by James Hankins and extended by Bernard Bailyn, to spend the academic year 1995 96 at Harvard as a Fellow of the Charles Warren Center.

By this time I had conceived an alternative to the Edwards biography: I would write a sequel to Edwards on the Will, tracing the twists and turns of determinism and moral theory up through the nineteenth century to the present. I recollected that Lincoln had made more than a few comments about “fatalism” and determinism, and I thought it would be exceptionally clever of me to roll Abraham Lincoln into a story about American philoso phy. What emerged was a paper on Lincoln and his “doctrine of necessity,” which, in another stroke of providential timing, I was invited to read to the annual meeting of the Abraham Lincoln Association in Spring eld, Illinois, by omas Schwartz, the ALA’s secretary and my rst friend in the Land of Lincoln. e paper went over like a rocket, and Mark Noll, who had been a friend and informal counsellor over the years, nudged his longtime pub lisher, William B. Eerdmans, to sign me up for something about Lincoln.

In due course, I received a phone call from Charles Van Hof, then the managing editor at Eerdmans, who wanted to know if I would be inter ested in writing a “religious biography of Lincoln” for Eerdmans’ Library of Religious Biography series.

I said no.

I was familiar with a number of books on Lincoln and religion, most of which varied from bad to worse, and I had seen the reputations of their authors sink into the quicksand of academic obloquy. I was not eager to join them.

Soon enough, Van Hof was back with the same query. I said no—again. Even Mark Noll took a hand. Once more, politely, I declined. Finally, Van Hof called one day, made the ask, and told me that if I didn’t do this book, the assignment would go to Professor X. I pondered this, privately shuddering at what I was certain Professor X would make of such a project. At last, I o ered Van Hof a compromise: I would write a Lincoln biography, but it would be a broadly based “intellectual biogra phy,” locating Lincoln on the larger map of American religion and liberal democratic political theory in the nineteenth century. He agreed; I agreed. e book was launched.

Launched, but not sailing. I was still in the throes of that presiden tial search, and in 1997 throes became very much the operative word. e search became a long, drawn- out, and ultimately humiliating embarrass ment; my consolation was an appointment instead as the founding dean of the Templeton Honors College at Eastern. In the dreary months of that agonized process, writing Lincoln became a species of therapy—not sur prising in the life of a man who had experienced more than a few cruel professional disappointments himself. I had originally meant to entitle the book Redeemer President: Abraham Lincoln and the Ideas of Americans, borrowing that quasi-theological tag Redeemer President from an 1856 ar ticle by Walt Whitman. My editor was wiser. Van Hof compressed it to Abraham Lincoln: Redeemer President, and it was released in the spring of 1999, with a jacket sporting the glorious Edward Marchant portrait of Lincoln as the Emancipator. To my unquali ed amazement, I received a notice from Gabor Boritt, the head of the Gettysburg College Civil War Institute, that it had been nominated for the Lincoln Prize. Even more to my amazement, a few months later Gabor called back to say that it had won, sharing the prize with a work by the great John Hope Franklin. From that moment, there was never any question about eeing to administrative jobs. Once the hand was in the Lincoln cookie jar, I was never going to get it out, and in due course, I followed Redeemer President with Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation: e End of Slavery in America (2004), Lincoln and Douglas: e Debates at De ned America (2008), Lincoln: A Very Short Introduction (2009), Lincoln as a Man of Ideas (2009), Fateful Lightning: A New History of the Civil War and Reconstruction (2012), Lincoln Speeches (2012), Gettysburg: e Last Invasion (2013), Lincoln: An

Intimate Portrait (2014), Redeeming the Great Emancipator (2016), and Re construction: A Concise History (2018). In the course of writing these books, I moved in 2004 to Gettysburg College as the Henry R. Luce Professor of the Civil War Era and director of the undergraduate Civil War Era Studies Program, and then in 2019 to Princeton University to become the Senior Research Scholar in the Council of the Humanities and the Director of the James Madison Program’s Initiative in Politics and Statesmanship. ere is an old Scottish proverb: God writes straight on crooked lines. I had never imagined a more personal illustration of that wisdom.

L ooking back after the passing of a quarter- century over the acknowledgments that begin Redeemer President, I am sobered by how many of those who helped this book to the nish line have now passed their own nishing line: the gentle and invariably helpful Rod Davis, who brought to my attention Herndon’s description of Lincoln and Je erson; the marvelous Jack Diggins, who spoke of Lincoln as the rescuer and ren ovator of the founders’ republic, giving Americans “an old past” rather than “a new past”; James Rawley, who enticed me into my rst Lincoln project, an edition of Josiah Gilbert Holland’s Life of Abraham Lincoln; Bill Hutchison at Harvard Divinity School; and Bill Gienapp and Bud Bai lyn at Harvard, who rst heard out my tentative initial plan to write about “Abraham Lincoln as a man of ideas.” Above all, I remember Jack Kemp, to whom Redeemer President was dedicated, who shared the Lincoln pas sion and whom I always believed would have been one of the greatest of American presidents.

I am surprised, in the best sense, that a number of the judgments I made then have stood up pretty rmly in the brisk and shi ing breezes of interpretation. I thought then that the Lyceum Speech needed to be seen in the context, not just of Jacksonian lynch mobs and antislavery politics, but also of the catastrophic panic of 1837; that positioning Mary Todd Lincoln as a feminist avant le temps was a mistake; and that Lincoln’s “fatalism” did not make him passive, as David Donald had insisted only a few years before. On the other hand, I am more inclined now to wonder if I was too critical of Lincoln’s early antislavery positions. e “indi erence” I discovered in his letter to Mary Speed, as he described a group of slaves being transported on the Ohio to some unknown fate further South, may have been more

the result of a comparison of himself, unable to control his emotions over his breakup with Mary Todd, to the slaves’ seeming serenity under even greater stress. And there were, I admit, some simple blunt mistakes, the most egregious concerning the venue in which Lincoln chose to publish his August 1862 reply to Horace Greeley. (It was the National Intelligencer, the Washington “paper of record,” to which Lincoln turned for publication of his reply, not the Daily National Republican, edited by a former Greeley employee, Simon Hanscom.) A number of those mistakes have been dis creetly corrected in this new edition.

What I missed entirely in 1999—because no one else had bothered to do the homework—was the actual vote tally in the Lincoln-Douglas Senate election of 1858. Since the 1858 contest between Lincoln and Douglas was actually decided in the state legislature in January 1859 (US senators were then elected by the state legislators, not by direct vote of the people), Lin colnites have routinely relied on the vote tallies for the two state line o ces which were up for direct election in November 1858, and extrapolated from the votes recorded for the Democratic and Republican candidates what the likely vote for Lincoln or Douglas would have been. ose numbers are usually the ones cited in Greeley’s Tribune Almanac for 1859, as either 124,566 Republican for the state education superintendent’s race (against 122,413 for the Democratic candidate) or 125,430 (as opposed to 121,609 for the Democratic candidate) for the state treasurer’s race. Not until six years later, when I actually went through the precinct voting tallies in the Illinois secretary of state’s archive for Lincoln and Douglas: e Debates at De ned America, did I tabulate the balloting cast for the state legisla ture, where people would clearly have understood their vote as a proxy for Lincoln or Douglas. If the votes for state legislators are the indirect key to the actual vote pattern, Lincoln should have defeated Douglas decisively (and in what would have been the political upset of the nineteenth cen tury). Counting all the votes cast in the state House districts, there were actually 366,983 ballots, of which 166,374 were for Democratic candidates and 190,468 for Republicans; so that if those votes really were proxies for Lincoln or Douglas, Lincoln “won” 52 percent of those votes. Of the 99,482 votes cast in the twelve open state senate races, 44,750 went to Democrats, but 53,784 went to Republicans, so that Lincoln would have “won” there with an overwhelming 54 percent of the vote.

e most signi cant novelty of Abraham Lincoln: Redeemer President remains the simple fact that it was an intellectual biography of an Ameri can with whom we are more likely to associate Joe Miller’s Joke Book and pragmatic political shrewdness than the niceties of literature, science, or political economy. As a subset of American history, American intellectual history had its sunniest era in the mid-twentieth century, when it was the handiwork of great historians—Perry Miller, Ralph Gabriel, Louis Hartz— who sought to nd the essence of America in its ideas, in the midst of a Cold War which was itself a war of ideas. I was lured into the path of intellectual history by Miller’s erce biography of Jonathan Edwards and my two greatest mentors at the University of Pennsylvania, Alan Charles Kors and Bruce Kuklick, who were the nation’s preeminent practitioners of American and European intellectual history. at did not mean, though, that I saw Lincoln automatically as a historical person of interest. It was not until I took what I thought was a brief detour that would fold Lincoln into my larger history- of- determinism project that I found far, far more behind that supposedly pragmatic, joke-telling curtain than I could ever have guessed. In fact, I found there was nothing particularly pragmatic about Lincoln at all.

Of course, I am (as be ts an American intellectual historian) using the term pragmatic, not as it is o en loosely used, as a synonym for practical, but in the strict sense, as the philosophy developed in the post– Civil War years by Charles Sanders Peirce and William James. For them, the high ide als of the Civil War had scarcely been justi ed by the volume of bloodshed and destruction generated by the war, and from that disenchantment, they determined that moral decisions were better guided by their results, by what James called “a doctrine of relief.” Lincoln could not have disagreed more. Practical as a politician, and wise as a serpent while as harmless as a dove, he nevertheless took certain principles of natural law (especially the ones captured in the Declaration of Independence) as his nonnegotiables, and regarded the price paid for them as only what we must expect as the price paid for sin to a just God. “Moral principle is all, or nearly all, that unites us of the North,” Lincoln said in 1856. “Pity ’tis, it is so,” he added wryly, because moral principle “is a looser bond, than pecuniary interest.” But loose or not, slavery was “a moral, social and political wrong,” and

its great o ense was that it was “blowing out the moral lights around us.” Nothing could be further removed from a doctrine of relief.

What is curious to me is how few historians have followed the track of Abraham Lincoln: Redeemer President in tracing the outlines of Lincoln as a thinker. Apart from the late William Miller’s Lincoln’s Virtues (2004); Robert Bray’s wonderful investigation of Lincoln’s reading, Reading with Lincoln (2010); and Lucas Morel’s brief Lincoln and the American Found ing (2020), comparatively little curiosity has been invested in the deeper sources of Lincoln’s thought. Granted: Lincoln was not an intellectual, in the sense in which we today use the term. He was a politician and a lawyer, and for him ideas were more of a resource and a consolation than an ob ject of systematic inquiry. But the resource and the consolation were still important. As his rst mentor and partner in law, John Todd Stuart, said in 1860, Lincoln had a “mind of a metaphysical and philosophical order . . . of very general and varied knowledge” and “an inventive faculty” which “is always studying into the nature of things.” His love for poetry and his easy familiarity with Shakespeare were regularly noticed by those who worked with him. But his principal intellectual passions were reserved for political economy, especially the political economics of nineteenthcentury classical liberalism. It is not di cult to nd, for instance, a series of allusions to John Stuart Mill’s 1848 Principles of Political Economy scattered through Lincoln’s speeches and letters; in 1859, he nearly li ed an entire paragraph from Mill for a speech he gave to the Wisconsin State Agricul tural Society. Yet, a thoroughgoing study of Lincoln, Mill, the Manchester School, and the larger transatlantic world of classical democratic liberalism remains oddly wanting. e one partial exception to this shortfall is Da vid S. Reynolds’s Abe: Abraham Lincoln in His Times (2020). But it is only a partial exception, since Reynolds’s book is a cultural history rather than an intellectual one; its pages are crowded with a canvas of P. T. Barnum, Davy Crockett, joke telling, and the Hutchinson Family Singers rather than much in the way of formal intellectual history. Minstrelsy makes a strong showing in Reynolds’s index, but not John Stuart Mill. is complaint should not obscure either the importance of Reynolds’s book nor the larger fact that the years since Redeemer President really have been what omas Schwartz once called “the Golden Age of Lincoln stud

ies.” Part of this burst of Lincoln-directed energy was connected to the Lincoln Bicentennial; over y titles devoted to Lincoln were published in the bicentennial year of 2009 alone. Another part was the creation of the Lincoln Prize in 1991 by Richard Gilder and Lewis E. Lehrman, which o ered a highly practical encouragement to the study of Lincoln. And yet another part was surely the rediscovery of Lincoln by the conservative in tellectual revival of the 1980s and 1990s, much of that rediscovery fueled by Harry V. Ja a, a political scientist rather than a historian, but yet one who revered Lincoln as “the greatest of all exemplars of Socratic statesmanship.” And it would not be too much at all to say that it was Ja a’s Crisis of the House Divided (1958), in a secondhand copy picked up in 1980 at Baldwin’s Book Barn in West Chester, which rst persuaded me that Lincoln needed to be taken seriously as a man of ideas.

Any attempt to itemize the succulent outpouring of Lincoln literature in these Golden Age years will do the task injustice, either by its insu erable length, or by shortchanging it—so I will plead guilty to the latter and take the consequences. e pinnacle of all Lincoln writing in the last twenty years is, unequivocally, Michael Burlingame’s enormous two-volume Abra ham Lincoln: A Life (the word enormous is used deliberately; the books measure twenty inches by eight, bound in green and enclosing 1,976 pages, so that Michael himself refers to them as “the Green Monster”). Burlin game’s Lincoln represents a life of prodigious research into the remotest crannies of Lincoln material and reminiscence, and it is safe to say that no Lincoln biography since Ida Tarbell’s in 1900 has broken more new ground. (I use Tarbell as the measure because Tarbell was the last Lincoln biogra pher actually able to interview and correspond with people who had known Lincoln and thus had fresh material to o er a biographer.) Burlingame’s Lincoln is, in that respect, the direct descendant of the original Lincoln researcher, William Henry Herndon, and like Herndon, Burlingame’s prin cipal attention is focused more on the personal and private Lincoln than the public politician. Yet, there has still been room for at least one remarkable single-volume biography of Lincoln—Richard Carwardine’s Lincoln: A Life of Purpose and Power (2003), which also pays serious attention to Lincoln’s religious ideas.

Much more of the Lincoln literature of the Golden Age has been formed around the public Lincoln, and on two particular lasts: Lincoln the law

yer and Lincoln the president. One major component of the Golden Age was the Lincoln Legal Papers Project, begun in the 1980s and reaching its culmination in 2000 with the publication, in digital format, of all the documents associated with Lincoln’s practice as a lawyer. (A four-volume printed selection of the sixty- ve most important Lincoln cases and their documents, e Papers of Abraham Lincoln: Legal Documents and Cases, was produced by Daniel W. Stowell and published in 2008.) e “Lin coln Legals” became the sca olding on which a number of new studies blossomed, opening up as never before an understanding of Lincoln as a lawyer. ese studies included Guy C. Fraker’s Lincoln’s Ladder to the Presidency: e Eighth Judicial Circuit (2012), Robert S. Eckley’s Lincoln’s Forgotten Friend, Leonard Swett (2012), Stacy Pratt McDermott’s e Jury in Lincoln’s America (2012), Brian McGinty’s Lincoln’s Greatest Case: e River, the Bridge, and the Making of America (2015), and George Dekle’s Prairie Defender: e Murder Trials of Abraham Lincoln (2017). e most comprehensive examinations of Lincoln as a lawyer, however, came almost simultaneously, from Mark Steiner, whose An Honest Calling: e Law Practice of Abraham Lincoln (2006) sets Lincoln clearly in the context of lawyering and politics in Illinois over the twenty-four years Lincoln was a practicing attorney, and from Brian Dirck in Lincoln the Lawyer (2007), which described Lincoln not as a legal Robin Hood but as “a moderately positioned attorney with a steady income and a wide range of cases.”

Almost as important as the new worlds of Lincoln the lawyer were a range of vital new inquiries into Lincoln the politician and Lincoln the president—and here, if Burlingame’s Lincoln marks the Mt. Everest of modern Lincoln biography, then the second-highest peak has been Sid ney Blumenthal’s ongoing multi-volume biography, e Political Life of Abraham Lincoln, whose rst volume—A Self-Made Man—appeared in 2017. As a former political operative and Washington insider (rather than, like Burlingame and myself, an academic), Blumenthal displays precisely the understanding of the inner springs of Lincoln’s political success—his timing, networks, audiences—which had been so lacking in other surveys of the public Lincoln, while at the same time writing with a sophistication and research depth equal to that of any major academic author.

Lincoln’s most famous presidential document is the “address”—the “few appropriate remarks”—he was invited to utter as the dedication of the Sol

diers’ National Cemetery at Gettysburg. Although it has been endlessly discussed since the Gettysburg Address itself was uttered in 1863, no single volume has been more impressive, more sweeping in its research, or more valuable in its judgments than Martin P. Johnson’s Writing the Gettysburg Address (2013). Given the sheer volume of commentary which presses on Lincoln’s “remarks,” it is almost inconceivable that any modern writer could say anything particularly new or interesting about them; yet, this is exactly what Johnson did, and it earned him perhaps the easiest and most irresistible nomination for the Lincoln Prize ever made a er Burlingame’s Lincoln. But hardly less important as a document in its political signi cance is Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation of January 1, 1863. James Oakes, who had al ready established himself as an important writer on the slavery experience (in the generation a er Eugene Genovese’s Roll, Jordan, Roll: e World the Slaves Made), turned his attention to Lincoln’s Proclamation in Freedom National: e Destruction of Slavery in the United States, 1861 1865 (2013). Freedom National is not, strictly speaking, about either Lincoln or the Procla mation: it is an exhaustive delineation of the real roots of antislavery thought and a decisive demonstration that Lincoln moved solidly within a genuine antislavery tradition that had real power when he issued the Proclamation. Oakes is, in that sense, a massive riposte to the Proclamation skepticism which had come to infect writing about the end of slavery, attributing the end of slavery to the slaves’ “self- emancipation” and belittling both Lincoln’s motivations and the real role of the Proclamation in e ecting freedom.

Almost as signi cant as a presidential document is Lincoln’s memorable Second Inaugural Address, which received a lively and loving treatment from Edward Achorn in Every Drop of Blood: e Momentous Second In auguration of Abraham Lincoln (2020). Lincoln did not, by contrast, write a document in reply to Chief Justice Roger Taney’s early attempt to derail the Lincoln presidency in ex parte Merryman in 1861; that was just the point. Lincoln had no intention of allowing his decision to suspend the writ of habeas corpus to be appealed to the Supreme Court. And if it is possible to weave a signi cant story out of something Lincoln did not write, but instead wrote around, then Jonathan W. White’s Abraham Lincoln and Treason in the Civil War: e Trials of John Merryman ts that order perfectly.*

* I remember, in 2010, receiving the manuscript of White’s book from the editors

Lincoln’s presidency had nineteenth- century Washington as its back drop, and Kenneth J. Winkle’s Lincoln’s Citadel: e Civil War in Wash ington, DC (2013) lls in huge swaths of the background of Lincoln’s city which had been le uncolored since Margaret Leech’s vivid Reveille in Washington in 1941. Turning the eye even closer to Lincoln’s White House, James B. Conroy explores the ins and outs, drawing rooms and o ces, of the Executive Mansion in Lincoln’s presidency in Lincoln’s White House: e People’s House in Wartime (2016). (And mentioning Conroy reminds me that he also contributed an exceptionally skillful volume on a moment of Lincoln’s presidential diplomacy in his 2014 book on the Hampton Roads peace conference, Our One Common Country: Abraham Lincoln and the Hampton Roads Peace Conference of 1865.) Of course, there would have been no Lincoln presidency at all if the election of 1860 had turned out di erently, and it required Michael Holt’s e Election of 1860: “A Cam paign Fraught With Consequences” (2017) to remind us that that election was a referendum on both the Union and on slavery, that parties and their platforms meant more to voters than the candidates, and that Lincoln was actually a much more radical candidate than he has been portrayed for insisting that slavery was a moral, and not merely a political, question. No description of the post-1999 Golden Age would be worthwhile that did not include a remarkable series of small-scale topical Lincoln studies, deliberately scaled to appeal to a general readership (and usually not more than 150 pages in length) and yet resting on the new wealth of scholarship the Golden Age was generating. is was the Concise Lincoln Library (CLL), published by Southern Illinois University Press under the editor ship of Richard Etulain and Sylvia Frank Rodrigue (both with longtime ex perience with Lincoln publications). Starting with Michael Green’s Lincoln and the Election of 1860 in 2011, the CLL has expanded to twenty volumes, including Richard Carwardine’s Lincoln’s Sense of Humor (2017), William C. Harris’s Lincoln and the Union Governors (2013), John Rodrigue’s Lincoln and Reconstruction (2013) and Lincoln and Congress (2017), Lucas Morel’s at the Louisiana State University Press with their request to review it for possible pub lication. I sat down at my desk with something of a heavy heart, anticipating a long slog through a tedious academic dissertation. Instead, by the time I had turned over the tenth page, I was hooked. I read the entire manuscript through at a single long sitting, and wrote what amounted to an ultimatum to the editors at the Press to publish it.

Lincoln and the American Founding (2020), and Edna Greene Medford’s Lincoln and Emancipation (2015). Occasionally, the CLL has reviewed the ndings of familiar territory in Lincoln studies, as in Kenneth Win kle’s Abraham and Mary Lincoln (2011) and Brian Dirck’s Lincoln and the Constitution (2012); on other occasions, these slim books have moved in unprecedented directions for Lincoln studies, as in omas A. Horrocks’s Lincoln’s Campaign Biographies (2014). At every point, though, they are illuminating and refreshing, and the comparatively modest investment of time it would take to read them all would make any novice into a Lincoln scholar just on their own strength.

A lmost ninety years ago, James Gar eld Randall delivered the pres idential address of the American Historical Association, posing the ques tion, “Has the Lincoln eme Been Exhausted?”* Randall was the rst academic student of Lincoln, or at least the rst to hold a university chair devoted to the subject, and his intention was to answer his own ques tion with a resounding no. Rereading Randall, however, is a shock, for although his no has been amply justi ed by the unceasing outpouring of Lincolniana since Randall’s day, very little of it has followed the directions Randall hoped to chart for it. e besetting sin of Lincoln biography and writing has been to trundle along contentedly in the same ruts, decade a er decade, and answer the same schedule of questions, perhaps with ever-increasing skill, but nevertheless ignoring the broad meadows of Lincoln inquiry beyond the edges of those ruts. To turn back to Randall is to discover a wide fan of research agendas which have gone a-begging for explorers, and which should form the prospect for a second Lincoln Golden Age.

Randall was a political and constitutional historian, and the range of his hoped-for research owed out into a series of (mostly) political inter rogations. “Do we yet have the full story of Lincoln’s connection with the ‘neutrality’ policy of Kentucky in 1861?” (No, although William C. Harris’s Lincoln and the Border States in 2011 has come the closest to answering that question.) “What part behind the scenes did Lincoln have in the doings

* American Historical Review 51 (January 1936): 297 94.

of the Baltimore convention of 1864?” (We don’t really know, despite the fact that the decision at that convention to substitute Andrew Johnson for Hannibal Hamlin as Lincoln’s running mate unwittingly set up the greatest political failure in US history.) On the jabbing questions go: “Why was Lincoln so bold in assuming power independently of Congress and yet so ine ective in exerting in uence on Capitol Hill?” (I am not convinced he really was as “ine ective” in his management of Congress as Randall feared. Even his most persistent critics in Congress were wary of how Lin coln’s “executive magnet had reached some members,” and Ohio’s Radical Republican senator Ben Wade complained about Lincoln’s “back-kitchen way of doing this business,” even as he recognized its e cacy.) But the only large-scale investigation of the congressional-presidential rivalry is Fergus Bordewich’s Congress at War: How Republican Reformers Fought the Civil War, De ed Lincoln, Ended Slavery, and Remade America, which throws all its attention onto Congress rather than Lincoln. Randall’s querulous demands for new research also touched on the need for biographies of individuals in the Lincoln orbit, and even for an examination of “the part taken by Lincoln the Whig in the shaping of important laws in a Demo cratic legislature.” (On this latter point, only Kenneth J. Winkle’s 2001 e Young Eagle: e Rise of Abraham Lincoln has given us a convincing and wonderfully contextualized social portrait of the up-and- coming Illinois Whig politician. We are still wanting a larger history of the Whig Party in Illinois.) One arena of study which has blossomed in Lincoln-land is, cu riously, Randall’s own specialty of constitutional and legal history, which he pioneered in 1926 with Constitutional Problems under Lincoln. e chief advocate here has been Mark Neely, whose e Fate of Liberty: Abraham Lincoln and Civil Liberties (1991) and Lincoln and the Triumph of the Nation (2012) have returned the centrality of constitutionalism to the study of Lincoln. Otherwise, the edgling Lincoln scholar could hardly do better than to ponder the directions laid out long ago by Randall as the game plan for a scholarly career. at student will discover one other thing about a plunge into the world of Lincoln studies, and that is the fraternity of Lincoln scholars themselves. I have been part of a number of such historical interest groups—Civil War historians, biographers and theological commentators on Jonathan Ed

wards, Episcopal Church historians—and in many cases, they have, sadly, proven icy, defensive policemen of intellectual territory which they fear to share with others, very much like Whittier’s Preacher who

. . . hugged the closer his little store Of faith, and silently prayed for more.

My experience of the Lincolnians has been entirely di erent. From the very rst, in Spring eld in 1995, I was welcomed as a man and a brother, and over the years, Lincoln scholars—and I mention here only Michael Burlingame, Douglas Wilson, Lucas Morel, and Jonathan White—have been irrationally unstinting and openhanded in their sharing of research, notes, and ideas. To have worked with them, and within their circle, has been to catch some small re ection of the great heart whose life and ideas motivate them as well. If there is a spirit of Abraham Lincoln who still hovers over his modern acolytes, it has been well represented in the years of interactions I have enjoyed with them. Abraham Lincoln: Redeemer Pres ident was only the rstfruits of that spirit.

I am grateful, in the last moment, to David Bratt and James Ernest, whose idea it was to come forward with this anniversary edition of Abra ham Lincoln: Redeemer President. e book has continued, over the years, to be a xture in the Eerdmans catalog, as well as in Lincoln biography, and on both counts I am grateful for the impulse—which I almost extin guished—on the part of William B. Eerdmans to bring the book to life many years ago, and to renew that life today. No thanks, however, would be even part- of-the-way complete without my acknowledgment of Lew Lehrman, who was the rst to single out Abraham Lincoln: Redeemer Presi dent as a contribution to the Lincoln literature, and who has since that time been an encourager, a director, and an example.

A llen C. Guelzo

Senior Research Scholar, e Council of the Humanities Director, e James Madison Program on Politics and Statesmanship Princeton University September 2021

Acknowledgments

e writing of acknowledgments is one of the more deliciously sel sh plea sures an author can enjoy, since it allows a one-by-one recollection of the entire circle of friends, contributors, and critics from whom he has been allowed to borrow re ected glory and wisdom. e work was actually born in the Charles Warren Center for American Studies at Harvard University, where some of the preliminary research work was carried out in the Widener Library’s quite-considerable collection of Lincolniana. But it has continued in many other Lincolnian places as well, including Spring eld, Galesburg, Peoria, Chicago, Gettysburg, and numerous points in between. Organizationally, I must single out for recognition the encouragement I have received from the Abraham Lincoln Association, the Lincoln Studies Institute at Knox College, the Civil War Institute at Gettysburg College, and the Abraham Lincoln Institute of the Mid-Atlantic. Michael Burlin game has been chief among those who have devoted time and e ort to this project, and I have bene ted from both his work and personal friendship. But I must also single out omas F. Schwartz (Secretary of the Abraham Lincoln Association), Rodney O. Davis and Douglas L. Wilson (Lincoln Studies Institute, Knox College), Ronald Rietveld (California State Univer sity/Fullerton), John Patrick Diggins (City University of New York), David Hein (Hood College), Scott Sandage (Carnegie-Mellon University), Kim Bauer (Illinois State Archives), Mark E. Steiner (University of Houston), Cullom Davis (Lincoln Legal Papers Project), Paul Verduin (Abraham

Lincoln Institute of the Mid-Atlantic), William E. Gienapp (Harvard Uni versity), Lucas Morel (John Brown University), and James A. Rawley and Kenneth Winkle (University of Nebraska/Lincoln) for their special acts of comment and generosity. In particular, Burlingame, Rietveld, Diggins, Wilson (and Mark Noll) all read and criticized parts of this manuscript; Burlingame, Schwartz, Sandage, Davis, and Wilson all shared freely manu script sources they themselves have been working upon. In thanking them, I attempt no shi ing of interpretive blame onto their shoulders for any of the ideas or arguments o ered herein.

I am grateful to Roger Lundin and omas O. Kay of Wheaton Col lege, George Marsden and James Turner of the University of Notre Dame, William R. Hutchison of the Harvard Divinity School, and Bernard Bailyn of the Charles Warren Center for the opportunity to present some of the rst pieces of this work in Wheaton, South Bend, and Cambridge. Charles Van Hof, Jennifer Ho man, Amanda Dombek, and Anita Eerdmans of Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing have exhibited, more than patience, a sense of Lincolnian “Highlarity” in the long gestation of this book. anks are also due to the editors of the Lincoln Herald for permission to reprint material from “ at All Men Are Created Equal: Lincoln’s Dec laration of Independence” (Winter 1995) and to the editors of the Jour nal of the Abraham Lincoln Association for permission to reprint material from “Abraham Lincoln and the Doctrine of Necessity” (Winter 1997) and “Come- Outers and Community-Men: Abraham Lincoln and the Idea of Community in 19th-Century America” (Winter 2000). Among the manu script collections used in this study, I should acknowledge the permission of the New York Public Library for the use of the Josiah Gilbert Holland Papers, the University of Chicago Library for citations from the papers of William E. Barton, the Firestone Library at Princeton University for cita tions from the papers of Josiah Royce, and Allegheny College for citations from the papers of Ida M. Tarbell. I am grateful to Mr. James A. Mundy, the Archivist of the Union League of Philadelphia, for obtaining the League’s permission to reproduce on the cover Edward Dalton Marchant’s portrait of Lincoln, which Marchant painted from life between February and Au gust 1863 on commission from John W. Forney. e portrait hung in Inde pendence Hall from 1863 till 1866, when it was hung in the League House. Today, it occupies the place of honor in the Union League’s Lincoln Hall.

Acknowledgments

is book represents more than simply a new way of speaking about Abraham Lincoln. For this and for so much else, only my beloved wife and children know how peculiar but how comforting it was to have this strange friend, and friendly stranger, take up prolonged, if metaphorical, residence with them. ese thanks are for them, too. e dedication is for you, Jack, in salute of a common interest in our nation’s most uncommon man.

A llen C. Guelzo e Villas Cape May, New Jersey June 21, 1999

Pensive by Nature, he had gone of late To those who preached of Destiny and Fate, Of things fore- doomed, and of Election-grace, And how in vain we strive to run our race; at all by Works and moral Worth we gain, Is to perceive our Care and Labour vain; at still the more we pay, our Debts the more remain; at he who feels not the mysterious Call, Lies bound in Sin, still grovelling from the Fall. . . . For ever to some evil Change inclined, To every gloomy thought he lent his Mind, Nor rest would give to us, nor Rest himself could nd. . . .

George Crabbe, e Borough (1810)

Civil War. . . . What did the words mean? Was there any such thing as ‘foreign war’? Was not all warfare between men warfare between brothers? Wars could only be de ned by their aims. ere were no ‘foreign’ or ‘civil’ wars, only wars that were just or unjust. . . . Outside the sacred cause of justice, what grounds has one kind of war for denigrating another? . . . Are we to condemn every resort to arms that takes place within the citadel, without concerning ourselves with its aim? What cause can be more just, what war more righteous, than that which restores social truth, restores liberty to its throne, restores proper sovereignty to all men . . . reasserts the fullness of reason and equity, eliminates the seeds of antagonism by allowing each man to be himself, abolishes the hindrance to universal concord represented by monarchy and makes all mankind equal before the law.

Victor Hugo, Les Miserables (1862), trans. Norman Denny

Southerners knew full well that the Constitution’s heart was a moral com mitment to equality and hence condemned segregation of blacks. e Con stitution was not just a set of rules of government but implied a moral order that was to be enforced throughout the entire Union. Yet the in uence, which has not been su ciently noted, of Southern writers and historians on the American view of their history has been powerful. ey were remarkably successful in characterizing their “peculiar institution” as part of a charming diversity and individuality of culture to which the Constitution was worse than indi erent. e idea of openness, lack of ethnocentricity, is just what they needed for a modern defense of their way of life against all the intrusions of outsiders who claimed equal rights with the folks back home.

Allan Bloom, e Closing of the American Mind (1987)

It is very common in this country to nd great facility of expression and less common to nd great lucidity of thought. e combination of the two in one person is very uncommon; but wherever you do nd it, you have a great man.

Abraham Lincoln to Edward Dicey, Macmillan’s Magazine (May 1862)

Introduction

The Strife of I deas

It had taken a good deal of trawling through old, downstate newspa pers, but during the rst week of September 1860, the Chicago Times nally found something from the past that could embarrass Abraham Lincoln.

It was a speech the Times’ editors exhumed from a dusty 1844 issue of the obscure Macomb Eagle, when Lincoln had been campaigning for Henry Clay’s last presidential bid, a speech that dared to attack the father of American independence, omas Je erson. “ e character of Je erson was repulsive,” the speech declared, and the chief evidence of Je erson’s deg radation was the long-whispered story of Je erson’s liaison with his slave, Sally Hemings, and the slave children he had sired by her. “Continually pul ing about liberty, equality, and the degrading curse of slavery, he brought his own children to the hammer, and made money of his debaucheries.” is was not usually the stu out of which serious political embarrass ments were made, but when Anson Chester passed a copy of the article to Lincoln, the tall Spring eld lawyer’s reply crackled with irritation. Lincoln was now in the midst of his own campaign for the presidency of the United States, and over the last six years, he had made Je erson’s Declaration the moral touchstone of his argument against the extension of slavery in the American republic. He had gone out of his way to praise Je erson as one of “those noble fathers—Washington, Je erson, and Madison,” and in 1859 he had pinpointed “the principles of Je erson” as “the de nitions and axioms of free society.”

All honor to Je erson—to the man who, in the concrete pressure of a struggle for national independence by a single people, had the cool ness, forecast, and capacity to introduce into a mere revolutionary document, an abstract truth, applicable to all men and all times, and so embalm it there, that to- day, and in all coming days, it shall be a rebuke and a stumbling-block to the very harbingers of re-appearing tyranny and oppression.

Lincoln’s response to the Chicago Times accusation was a sharp, harsh de nial, published in the Illinois State Journal on September 6, 1860. “ is is a bold and deliberate forgery. . . . Mr. Lincoln never used any such language in any speech at any time.”

Oddly, the denial was not signed by Lincoln. “I wish my name not to be used,” Lincoln wrote back to Chester, “but my friends will be entirely safe in denouncing the thing as a forgery, so far as it is ascribed to me.” And he may have had good reason, for in fact, as William Henry Herndon (Lincoln’s law partner and biographer) wrote years later, “Mr. Lincoln hated omas Jef ferson as a man” and “as a politician.” In Je erson, Lincoln saw a compound of hypocrisy and aristocracy, a commitment to freedom in words but not in deeds, the champion of an agrarian order that concealed an elite class agenda within a fog of solidarity with farmers and laborers. At the same time, though, Je erson by the 1850s had become an American icon, and it ill-behooved Lincoln to air his “hatred” too publicly. Besides, icons can be used for more purposes than their designers plan. Lincoln upended the Je ersonian icon by embracing Je erson’s words on freedom and equality, and then using them as a way of highlighting how Je erson’s own party now seemed to be deserting them in favor of protecting the political interests of the slaveholding South. During the great debates he held in 1858 with his Democratic rival, Stephen A. Douglas, Lincoln delighted in drawing as vast a gulf as he could between Je erson’s declarations and the justi cations Je erson’s political heirs were now weakly uttering in defense of slavery, as if to make the founder of the Democratic party a useful convert to Lincoln’s antislavery Republicanism. But behind the tactical shrewdness of wrenching omas Je erson out of his opponents’ hands, the editors of the Chicago Times had been right to see Abraham Lincoln as sitting far from Je erson’s seat, and shrewd in their own way in digging up old speeches that would prove it.

e Strife of Ideas

Lincoln was born only three weeks before Je erson nished his second and last term as the third president of the United States. But for all of his life, Lincoln would stand uneasily in the shadow of the great Virginian. His life was entwined around a pattern of cultural values that parted sharply from Je erson’s. Je erson carefully pared apart his political principles from his personal life, demanding public virtue from o ceholders but pursu ing his own hedonistic satisfactions in private, lauding liberty but holding between 150 and 200 African-Americans in slavery during his lifetime. By contrast, Lincoln was a moral rigorist who made a fetish of his own sin cerity and honesty, who endured a di cult political marriage without ever arousing the slightest imputation of faithlessness, and who claimed that he was so “naturally anti-slavery” that “I can not remember when I did not so think, and feel.” Je erson was also notorious for his religious unor thodoxy. Lincoln, on the other hand, started in the 1830s from a position of unorthodoxy not much di erent from Je erson’s, but throughout his life he increasingly wrapped his political ideas around religious themes, appealing at the very end to a mysterious Providence whose inscrutable and irresistible workings both ba ed and comforted him. e moment the focus shi s from omas Je erson the icon to omas Je erson the political man—the anti-Federalist, the critic of Washington and avowed enemy of Alexander Hamilton, the patrician republican and slaveholder, the agrarian opponent of cities, of industry, of any form of wealth not tied to land—then it has to be said that Abraham Lincoln grew and matured as an American political thinker into an adversary of almost every practical aspect of omas Je erson’s political worldview. When Je erson spoke about freedom and equality, he spoke for a gen eration of classical patrician republicans who hoped to replace the arti ci alities of monarchy with a “natural” gentry aristocracy and a broad base of independent yeoman farmers who worked the land to provide for them selves rather than working for others, as dependents, for wages. Lincoln spoke for a later generation of middle-class northern and western merchants and professionals who came to see “natural” aristocrats as no di erent from any other kind. It was not the stability of a benign gentry-ruled republic that Lincoln prized, but the mobility of a self-interested liberal democracy. Like the great English liberals—James Mill, John Stuart Mill (whom Lincoln read and admired), Jeremy Bentham, Richard Cobden, John Bright—Lincoln

glori ed progress, middle- class individualism, and the opportunities for economic self-improvement which the new capitalist networks of the nine teenth century were opening up across the Atlantic world. “I hold that while man exists, it is his duty to improve not only his own condition, but to assist in ameliorating mankind,” Lincoln said in 1861, and promptly explained this amelioration in terms of Bentham’s famed utilitarian tag: “I am for those means which will give the greatest good to the greatest number.”

To Je erson and the Je ersonians the opposite of stability was simply instability, not opportunity. Part of this fear grew from Je erson’s own desperate yearning for settledness, which in his case meant a world without creditors in which all republican citizens would plant themselves under their own vines and g trees without fear of taxes or debt, free of manipu lation and refusing all temptations to make themselves greater at someone else’s expense. Nothing symbolized this more in Je erson’s mind than the image of the virtuous farmer. In one of his most famous bon mots, Je erson rhapsodized on the link between political virtue and the life of the rural republican farmer:

ose who labour in the earth are the chosen people of God, if ever he had a chosen people, whose breasts he has made his peculiar de posit of substantial and genuine virtue. It is the focus in which he keeps alive that sacred re, which otherwise might escape from the face of the earth. Corruption of morals in the mass of cultivators is a phenomenon of which no age nor nation has furnished an example.

is was not merely a matter of rural sentimentality. In the 1790s, the United States was still overwhelmingly a nation of small-scale farmers, and unlike England, where by 1800 only 36 percent of the population was engaged in agriculture, the American republic had anywhere between 75 and 90 percent of its population still on the farm. What was more, the extraordinary availability of cheap land (especially a er the Revolution had removed imperial restraints on settlement westward across the Appa lachians) and the absence of an American aristocracy meant that American farmers usually owned their land outright, with no feudal obligations and only the most minimal taxation. In rural Hampshire County in western Massachusetts, 65 percent of all taxpayers owned their own land, and 92

e Strife of Ideas

percent of all the housing was owned—not rented or leased—by the people living in it. What indebtedness there was usually involved the widespread borrowing of small sums back and forth along kinship and neighbor net works, with interest o en neither asked for nor given.

Since land titles were not usually jeopardized by indebtedness, tax ation, or fees, the American farmer’s chief incentive for production was household or local consumption. American farm households grew or pro duced by themselves as much as three-fourths of what they required, and then purchased the remainder with the surplus of their own agricultural production. In regions close to major seaports, a rather higher percentage of agricultural output was clearly intended for distant markets. But farmers in Hampshire County, who were sealed o from Boston by land distance and from Old Saybrook by falls and rapids on the Connecticut River, pro duced crops rst for home consumption, and then for barter for goods— liquor, tea, farm tools—which a local storekeeper or another farmer might produce. Few farmers, except those within ve miles of a river or coastline, grew single “staple” crops intended solely for sale or export. e absence of large-scale commercial interests in the United States was, in Je erson’s mind, exactly what guaranteed the survival of liberty. Je ersonian liberty was local rather than national, and its deadly enemy lay in too- great concentrations of power at the center—liberty, in fact, thrived only in inverse proportion to the presence of power, and so the more power could be broken up and distributed round to localities, the less danger there was to liberty. is meant that the great political Satan was either a central government, or big commercial centers, or a lethal combination of both. Big governments required big taxation, and taxation undermined the security of landholders in their property; big cities were sinkholes of corruption, in uence peddling, and suspicious forms of illu sory wealth, like bank notes, bonds, mortgages, and other symbols of debt that threatened the independence of the property holder. “I am the holder of no stock whatever, except livestock,” boasted the most sharp-tongued of the Je ersonians, John Randolph of Roanoke, and am determined never to own any, because it is the creation of a great and privileged order of the most hateful kind to my feelings and because I would rather be the master than the slave. If I must have

a master let him be one with epaulettes, something that I could fear and respect, something I could look up to—but not a master with a quill behind his ear.

Not only liberty, but virtue was most likely to be found in the healthy atmosphere of rural agriculture. To Je erson’s fellow Virginian John Taylor of Caroline, “the ideal of a republican statesman” is “a skillful, practical farmer, giving his time to his farm and his books, when not called by an emergency to the public service—and returning to his books and his farm when the emergency was over.” Let loose the genie of self-interest, and corruption was precisely what could be expected, as the pursuit of luxury would lead to competition and accumulation on the part of the success ful, dependence and misery for the failures, and the end of stability in the republic. “I consider the class of arti cers as the panders of vice,” wrote Je erson, “and the instruments by which the liberties of a country are generally overturned.”

Stability, however, does not pay its own bills, which is why Je erson’s distaste for markets, manufacturing, and mobility was inextricably bound up with race. e agricultural wealth Je erson relied upon (and spent his life vainly trying to shore up) was sustained by the coerced labor of black slaves, who may have constituted as much as 25 percent of the Englishspeaking population of North America on the eve of the Revolution. e number of people who actually owned these slaves and pro ted directly from their labor was always comparatively small in the American republic, but the Je ersonians could always rally large numbers of nonslaveholding farmers and urban workers to their side with the whispered threat of what might happen to them if freedom and mobility were extended to blacks. e success of the Je ersonian vision depended on the debasement and exploitation of blacks, which is why race legitimated and maddened the resistance of the Je ersonians to capitalist mobility.

If Lincoln had only criticized slavery as one unpleasant oversight on Jef ferson’s part, nothing that he otherwise did with his life would have required his “hatred” of Je erson. But Lincoln’s opposition to slavery was rooted in a erce resentment of everything that grew out of the slave system, up to the whole agrarian ideology itself. Although Lincoln’s claims to have “always” opposed slavery have been skeptically discounted since the 1960s (because

e Strife of Ideas

he showed little enthusiasm for abolition before the 1850s), Lincoln was not exaggerating in making this claim, since he de ned slavery as any re lationship which forestalled social dynamism and economic mobility, or obstructed “the paths of laudable pursuit for all.” For Lincoln, his rst expe rience of what he called slavery described how his own father, a Je ersonian farmer, manipulated and exploited his labor as a young man. It would take only time and circumstances for Lincoln to expand his resentment at Je er sonian “slavery” to include the blacks who were owned by Je erson’s heirs. Even though he harbored persistent racist doubts about whether blacks could be “equal” to whites “in color, size, intellect, moral developments, or social capacity,” Lincoln came to see black slavery as synonymous with the denial of his own liberal aspirations for “improvement of condition.”

On no other single point was the distance between omas Je erson and Abraham Lincoln more apparent; on no better grounds did Je erson and the Je ersonians fear “the designs of ambition.”

I n 1800 , when Jefferson was elected president in a triumphant landslide over the Federalist John Adams, the perspective had looked very di erent. Je erson’s defeat of Adams and the Federalist ascendancy in the early republic was interpreted by him as a mandate to bring the United States back onto the course he believed it had been created to follow in 1776. Curiously, there was less di erence between Je erson’s “DemocraticRepublicans” and the Federalists than there would later be between Lin coln and the Democrats of 1860. Both Je erson and his Federalist enemies, Hamilton and Adams, agreed rather broadly that the American republic ought to be ruled by an enlightened, benevolent, and gentlemanly elite. Hamilton, as a landless bastard with no family connections to rely upon, had a far higher estimate than Je erson of commerce and merchandising as a means to wealth and independence. For that reason Hamilton, as the rst secretary of the Treasury, o ered a comprehensive economic blue print to Congress which called for the establishment of a national bank (for federal funding of development projects), the full funding of the republic’s Revolutionary War debts (which meant a windfall for Hamilton’s nancier friends who had held United States government securities since the 1780s, but bad news for landowners who would have to pay the taxes to fund the debts), and federal support for manufacturing interests.

But if to Je erson this looked like selling the republic back to British commercial interests, it would be unwise to overdraw the distance between the Federalists and Je erson’s Democratic-Republicans. Hamilton’s notion of a commercial economy was small-scale, and he ridiculed any notion that his projects would turn the United States into an economic oligarchy; Je erson, especially a er the War of 1812, found moments to be friendly to various forms of manufacture and hoped that the products of American agriculture could be aggressively marketed in Europe. “He, therefore, who is now against domestic manufacture, must be for reducing us either to dependence on [Great Britain] or to be clothed in skins, and to live like wild beasts in dens and caverns,” Je erson wrote in 1816. ere was also a good deal of cultural common ground between Je er son and Hamilton. Both read the same books and admired the same po litical theorists, and neither of them made any attempt to link virtue with Christianity or any other form of religious morality. Je erson was a deist who believed that traditional Christianity was little more than “an engine for enslaving mankind . . . a mere contrivance to lch wealth and power,” while Hamilton was a milk-and-water Episcopalian. Unlike more radical American deists in the 1790s like omas Paine and Ethan Allen, Je erson at least professed some respect for Jesus of Nazareth as an ethical thinker of great value, and twice proceeded to assemble an edition of the New Testa ment from parts of it that he thought worth salvaging. But such di erences as there were between Je erson and Tom Paine’s crude but e ective attacks on the Bible as “a book of lies, wickedness and blasphemy” were lost on pious observers in the new republic, and when Je erson was put forward as the Democratic-Republican nominee for president, New England divines prophesied that should America “impiously declare for JEFFERSON— AND NO GOD,” the Je ersonian victory would provoke “the just vengeance of insulted heaven.” Notwithstanding, Je erson took 53 percent of the elec toral vote in the election of 1800, and the world did not end.

If anything looked like being close to its end in 1800, it was orthodox Christianity in America. Although many of the British North American colonies were settled by religious communities—such as the Quakers of Pennsylvania or the Puritans of Massachusetts Bay—the potential of these groups for developing any kind of stable religious culture in America turned out to be severely limited. Most of the émigré religious commu

e Strife of Ideas

nities (and the Puritans and Quakers are prime examples) belonged to the radical fringes of English Christianity, with deep grudges against the English state church, the Church of England, and an almost suicidal hostil ity to formal assertions of authority by their own leaders. e Puritans of Massachusetts Bay imported a fairly straitlaced predestinarian Calvinism as their o cial theology, but they also imported a highly decentralized and well-nigh uncontrollable Congregational church order which licensed any individual congregation to revise Calvinist theology as it saw t. And revise it they did, as the intellectual allure of Enlightenment rationalism persuaded New England’s established leadership to shuck o Calvinism for the more prestigious and “rational” religion of the deists and unitarians. e home government in England, which was supposed to support and foster the establishment of Christianity through the Church of England, might have done more to straighten out these irregularities, but regulation was an expensive proposition. For almost a century the British govern ment, in order to save administrative costs, preferred to let the colonial governments run their own shows; it was just as inclined to continue the savings by letting the colonial religious dissenters do what they liked. is meant that in the better- developed colonial settlements, the Church of England installed only a few token outposts. In other places, where English colonists had settled with no particular religious motive in view at all, there was liable to be little or no formal Christianity. Not until the 1690s did British imperial planners decide to end this era of benign neglect and begin the strategic organization of Church of England parishes in the colonies. But it turned out to be too little, too late. In 1739, a major revival of religion known as the Great Awakening swept through large parts of New England and the mid-Atlantic colonies, preach ing a hard-hitting but radically personalized “new birth” of spiritual trans formation and redemption through Christ. It lasted only a comparatively short time—it was e ectively over by 1742—but it successfully managed to reawaken all of the most individualistic and anti-authoritarian urges of the radical religion that the colonies had started out with. en, in 1775, came the Revolution, which completed the religious disruptions the Awakening had begun thirty years before. e Anglican churches, torn by their loyalty to the mother country, fell to pieces; but the “New Lights” of the Awakening were too preoccupied with their own

brands of spiritual radicalism to have much hope of claiming the allegiance of the gentleman revolutionaries who populated the Continental Congress. New Lights might support the Revolution, but their support was received without enthusiasm and without much reward. e new federal Constitu tion of 1787 made no provision for public funding or even recognition of any Christian church. Everywhere, the “natural” religion of Enlightenment deism seemed a more appropriate religion for the natural aristocracy of the new republic, and in state a er state—New Jersey in 1776, New York in 1777, Je erson’s Virginia in 1785—all public support for Christian churches was eliminated. As late as 1822, Je erson did not hesitate to predict that in his agrarian republic, every young man then alive would die a unitarian.

But this was not what happened. In the rst place, no one doubted that Je erson was a great writer and talker, but his mismanagement of his own nancial a airs at Monticello suggested that he had substantially fewer gi s as an administrator. Although he promised that the “revolution of 1800” would be “as real a revolution in the principles of our government as that of 1776 was in its form,” reversing the tide of Federalist government proved much harder than he had thought. He struggled from the rst to pay o the remaining federal debt from the Revolution so that he could cancel the taxes Hamilton imposed for funding the debt, but not even Je erson’s scrimping and saving could reduce the debt by more than a third. Je er son also hesitated to tamper with Hamilton’s pet creation, the federally chartered Bank of the United States, since the Bank of the United States had turned out to be the primary engine for establishing good American credit ratings in Europe.

Je erson’s most serious embarrassment grew directly out of his serene conviction that self-su cient agriculture and home-shop manufacture were all that the American republic needed. From 1806 onward, Britain and Napoleon Bonaparte’s France declared mutual blockades on the North Atlantic, and caught in the middle were American merchant ships. Je er son would have preferred to blame his ancient enemies, the British, for all this havoc, but not even Je erson could turn a blind eye to the outrages of Bonaparte. So, in the absence of an e ective American navy to fend o interference by the British and French, Je erson proposed a universal boy cott: the United States would break o all trade with the warring powers,

e Strife of Ideas

and self-su cient American farmers would simply keep their produce for themselves. In December 1807, an overwhelmingly Je ersonian Congress approved an Embargo Act, and sat back to applaud the results. e results were anything but worthy of applause. American exports plunged from $108 million in 1807 to $22 million in 1808, in the process bankrupting seaport merchants, then attening the banks that lent them money, and inging dock workers, artisans, and the trades that depended on them into unemployment. Je erson thus learned that, whatever the virtues of rural agriculture, the American economy was more dependent on the international web of imports and exports than he had thought. Although he would not admit it, by the time he le o ce, in the early spring of 1809, the embargo was a dead letter. “We can never get rid of [Hamilton’s] nancial system,” Je erson moaned. “It morti es me to be strengthening principles which I deem radically vicious, but this vice is entailed upon us by the rst error.”

What Je erson thought he was encountering was a corruption of Amer ican virtue. What he was actually encountering was the leading edge of an economic transformation that was only just beginning to impact the American republic in a large way as he was leaving o ce and as Abraham Lincoln was born. And that transformation was itself only part of the far larger story of how European-based capitalism emerged in the late eigh teenth and nineteenth centuries as the most successful pattern in the world for creating and exchanging goods. Unhappily, de ning capitalism can be a very slippery business, since it forms a pattern involving four disparate factors: the entrepreneurial drive for pro t, the use of cash as the means of exchange (so that all economic relationships can be painlessly converted into paper, and made rational, impersonal, and long-distance), markets (any location, literal or abstract, where goods and services are exchanged), and governments (which could, a er all, shut down all forms of capitalist exchange if they wished).

What gave capitalism its luster was how neatly its claims for being a natu ral economic order gelled with the eighteenth-century Enlightenment’s pas sion for rational and natural orders of things. Capitalism also thrived on how perfectly its valences suited the political shape of liberalism, so that capital ism (as an economic theory) and liberalism (as a political one) became a po tent engine for mutual promotion throughout western Europe. Commerce,

wrote Richard Cobden, was “the great panacea” for political oppression, and he could not sympathize in the slightest with those who “seem bent on destroying manufacturers in order to restore the age of gothic feudalism.”

Looked at in this way, the dramatic expansion of capitalist patterns of exchange involved more than merely rewriting the rules of the economic game. It amounted to a transformation of human relationships in which cash, merchandising, and markets could open up vast new personal alter natives to the agrarian economy, and even transform the agrarian economy itself into a competitive, mobile enterprise. Land, the source of all wealth for the Je ersonians, would cease to be the prime factor in social and eco nomic relationships, and be replaced by markets. is kind of transformation was what the Je ersonians dreaded. Al though Je erson was himself a man of the Enlightenment, it was not the liberal Enlightenment of Locke and Adam Smith he espoused so much as the critical Enlightenment of Rousseau. e liberal Enlightenment prided itself on reason’s conquest of nature, including the various forms of tradi tional “natural” society; the critical Enlightenment replied that conquer ing nature also alienated humanity from it, and that the only solution to this experience of alienation was a lapse back into nature. is endowed agrarianism in the Je ersonian mind as a quasi-religious axiom as much as an economic idea, and it undergirded the Je ersonian contempt for eco nomic rationalism as a kind of disease. e ideal society was an exercise in unity and stability, the free play of the passions, the glori cation of culture rather than commerce as a form of community (a glori cation which for the Je ersonians only further underscored the impossibility of considering whites and blacks as political or economic equals). Even though Je erson himself never once cited Rousseau in his vast assemblage of writings, he hardly needed to. As Conor Cruise O’Brien writes, “ e intellectual in heritance here is quite clear, and it is a heritage of awesome import.”

But at least economic transformation represented the kind of threat the Je ersonians could recognize and understand, even as they deplored it. ere was another kind of transformation at work in the early repub lic, and this one would have surprised Je erson beyond telling, and that was the extraordinary revitalization of evangelical Protestant Christian ity in the decades a er the Revolution. Instead of fading into a unitarian future, the trinitarian Christian denominations embarked on a voyage of evangelistic expansion and empire building that easily outstripped the

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overall growth of the entire American population, building ten thousand new churches between 1780 and 1820, quadrupling that number again by 1860, and making church building into “a ubiquitous feature of the early national and antebellum landscape.”

e most obvious reason for this astonishing growth was the resiliency of evangelical revivalism, based on the model of the colonial Great Awak ening. Between 1812 and 1830, a second Great Awakening erupted in New England, only this time the revivalist heirs of the “New Lights” spilled over into upstate New York and Ohio, joined hands with evangelical Baptists from the upper South and a new wave of imported evangelical fervor in the form of John Wesley’s Methodists, and carried the preaching of the new birth across the Appalachians.

In numbers alone, the second Great Awakening was a formidable achievement: one revivalist, Asahel Nettleton, was credited with the con version of “above thirty thousand souls.” But what made the revivals cul turally formidable was the extent to which the temperamental pro le of the revivals coincided with the new economic language of liberal capitalism. Both were based on the promise of personal self-transformation: in the market of exchanges, personal identities became uid and could be ad opted or shu ed o as the demands of a cash economy dictated, while in the res of revival old sinful identities could be regenerated by the power of the Spirit and all things made new. “ ese two programs, the improvement of the nation and that of the individual,” writes Daniel Walker Howe, “were mutually reinforcing.”

e revivalists were not the only ones at work to redeem the re public. e remnants of the old Congregational and Episcopal church establishments, and their near kin among the “Old School” mid-Atlantic Presbyterians, looked almost as dimly on “New School” revivalism as they did on Je erson. But they had been pulled back at almost all points by the impact of the revivals from the pre-revolutionary dalliance with deism and unitarianism to create a “rational” synthesis of confessional orthodoxy and Enlightenment epistemology which could talk about the new birth but without the emotional radicalism of the revivalists. ey, too, sought to turn the ank of Je ersonian in delity by criticizing the weakest link in the liberal ideology, virtue. Every good liberal knew that republics were politically fragile and, unlike monarchies, depended for their existence on the virtue of their peoples. But the excesses of the

French Revolution had demonstrated that the ethical formulas of Je er son’s deism did not o er much protection from anarchy and the guillotine. e alternative, as proposed by John Witherspoon and Samuel Stanhope Smith (two presidents of Old School Presbyterianism’s intellectual citadel, Princeton), was to de ne religion as the necessary virtue-component of the republic: “to promote religion as the best and most e ectual way of making a virtuous and regular people.”

In making religion synonymous with virtue, Witherspoon was not so unwise as to insist that religion was also synonymous with Presbyterianism or even revivals, and for that reason Old Schoolers who shared Je erson’s suspicion of instability and accumulation tended in the nineteenth century to gravitate toward the Democratic party, while the New School revivalists went elsewhere. But if it was true, as Samuel Stanhope Smith insisted, that virtue was best secured when religion was publicly supported by “laws for the punishment of profanity and impiety,” then Old Schoolers and New Schoolers alike could hardly miss garnering precisely the public sponsorship of Christianity that Je erson hoped to avoid. is, then, became the refrain sung through the American republic’s colleges (which were mostly churchowned) and through the high intellectual discourse of their moral philoso phy textbooks: that new public order required virtue, that virtue required belief in God, and that the Christian God was the most obvious nominee. is allowed Charles Hodge, Francis Wayland, Mark Hopkins, Francis Bowen, James Haven, Archibald Alexander, and other academic moral philosophers to speak in general, nonsectarian terms about the need for a public theism as the basis for republican virtue, while at the same mo ment subtly securing a Protestant “in uence” on American culture. By the 1840s, Protestant churches, whether through Old School persuasion or New School revival, commanded an overall audience (when we com bine both the o cial membership numbers and the penumbra of “hearers” who were associated with them) of almost 40 percent of the American population, and in the estimate of Richard Carwardine, nine out of ten of that audience were pledged to a Protestant orthodoxy that Je erson had overcon dently thought obsolete. e great danger of this Protestant return was that it might choke on the very virtues that had made it so irresistible. is was especially true of the New Schoolers. e great moral demand of the revivalists, based upon

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the strenuous Calvinist scheme of Jonathan Edwards, was for a religion of absolute submission to a sovereign God, in which everyone was understood to be helpless and in need of redemption, but which everyone was obliged to seize for themselves as an expression of their own moral responsibility. e tension between these two ideas was artfully framed by Edwards’s heirs to promote an atmosphere of almost unbearable tension, leading to a shattering emotional conversion of purpose and intention, even to the point of embrac ing absolute “disinterested benevolence.” “Pure, disinterested, universal benevolence is a plain and infallible criterion, by which men may determine whether they truly love God, or not,” preached Nathanael Emmons. To do anything less than this suggested that in fact one’s claim to conversion was a hypocrisy, and the slightest tinge of hypocrisy leavened the whole lump. is was all well and good for the morally heroic, and it gave the repub lic Charles Finney, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and John Brown. But for those who, a er self-searching, found themselves in any way shy of the mark, it produced devastation and alienation. Emily Dickinson, who tried to put herself in the way of conversion and failed, could only mourn the distance that separated her and God. “God’s Hand is amputated now/And God can not be found,” she would write, and her mingled sense of loss and inability to put the loss to rights would chart an eerie parallel to Abraham Lincoln’s half-antagonistic, half-wistful loss of his own youthful Calvinism. But the Old Schoolers also were in danger of promising more than could be easily delivered. Just as New School moralists set the bar of expectations higher than many people could hurdle, so too the moral philosophers rashly predicted that virtue was a matter of paying attention to self-evident intu itions. is seemed to o er no problem, until the problem was slavery, at which point the moral philosophers fell to quarreling and hesitating, and the whole enterprise of a common front of liberal virtue began to unk. Even the American Bible Society could not be persuaded to sponsor a program of free Bible distribution to slaves for fear of alienating Southern contributors to the society. But for the time being, the Protestant return made the United States the most apparently Christianized polity in the world, the nation with the soul of a church. “Never a erward,” writes Alfred Kazin, “would Americans North and South feel that they had been living Scripture.” ese were not the only surprises American society could have o ered Je erson, but they were the ones that were already starting to cut through

Je erson’s con dence as he le o ce in the spring of 1809 ey were also the ones that would most decisively distance Lincoln from the Je ersonian legacy. 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 Je ersonian legacy. At the same time, Lincoln would also become the president best known through the nine teenth century for pouring public policy into the molds of religious thought, the one most o en claimed a er his death as “the Christian president”; and he would conduct a lifelong dalliance with Old School Calvinism which at tempted to acknowledge the signi cance of religion in a republic’s character without surrendering to the ery agenda of New School evangelicalism.

Yet, his place in these contexts was complex, shi ing, 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 trans formation while denying that he had sought anything, that he was “an acci dental instrument, temporary” and “a piece of oating dri wood.” 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 be lieve 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 in uence in adolescence, declined to join his parents’ church, and turned instead toward the Enlightenment as his intellectual guide, toward “in delity,” “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 tem perament 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. e fruits beside these roads are not inconsiderable; nor is it going

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to be claimed here for the sake of di erence that Lincoln was a philoso pher, 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 guratively) 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 profes sional politician, and not an intellectual; but he was not a mere politician. Poorly schooled (by his own de nition) and too poor in his youth to a ord either college training or even the law-o ce tutoring which educated most of his fellow lawyers in the 1830s and 1840s, he was gi ed 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. e rst 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.

e 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), and convinced of the supremacy of individual rights over community conventions. And yet, whatever skeptical nourishment Lincoln derived from reading reli gious “in dels” like Tom Paine and Robert Burns, he also arrived chrono logically at the very end of the “long Enlightenment” and lived most of his life as a Victorian. is 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 submission to “impersonal and unrecompensing law.”

e last of these contexts was classical liberalism, especially the eco nomic 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 nding a rational—and thoroughly deterministic—cause for human conduct in self-interest. And yet he would come at the end of his liberal progress to see that liberal ism could never achieve its highest goal of liberation and mobility with out 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 con ned within some public framework of virtue, a framework he would nd in a mystical reha bilitation 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 sca olding 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.

Part of our difficulty in beholding Abraham Lincoln as a man of ideas is that he wrote nothing more sustained than a speech or a lecture or a public letter. (A small book or essay on “in delity” which he wrote in his youth was destroyed by well-intentioned friends who feared the trouble it would make for him.) But a larger part stems from the di culty we have

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had in conceding that the American republic has any intellectual history at all. We are too numbed by fanfares for the Common Man, by Ralph Waldo Emerson’s sni ing laments about the absence of American scholars, by Hollywood glori cations of sharpshooting hillbillies in coonskin caps, to hear the frantic solemnity with which the most isolated patriarch on the most godforsaken acre of wiregrass would sit up all the night alongside a wandering evangelist to discuss the intricacies of predestination and free will, or to hear a Scottish freethinker and an itinerant elder hold two thou sand people in Cincinnati spellbound for a week in 1829 debating the pos sibility of intelligent design in the universe. From our images of hard cider and log cabins, we have assembled an impression of the American mind as the ultimate exercise in pragmatism, unconcerned with larger realms of ideas and de cient in any culture but popular culture, the Sahara of the Bozarts. Within this, Lincoln appears only as the Great Fixer, the political moralizer, the policymaker who made it his policy to have no policy. e antebellum United States would scarcely recognize itself in this mir ror. In the English-speaking world of the new republic, writes John Brewer, “ ere were not only more books in circulation than ever before, but new and more varied means by which the reader could secure them. . . . Even those who could not read lived in an unprecedented degree in a culture of print.” Although the United States was still an intellectual province of west ern Europe a er the Revolution, it was a self- conscious and vital province all the same. Even if it lacked its own philosophical tradition, it developed what Bruce Kuklick has called a “speculative tradition,” especially in moral and intellectual philosophy, which was shared impartially among college presidents, divines in their parishes, and public professionals. “Drank Tea,” wrote a New England lawyer, “and spent the whole Evening, upon original sin, Origin of Evil, the Plan of the Universe, and at last, upon Law.” And its colleges, for all their ties to religious denominations and their dominance by clergy with theology at the forefront of their concerns, teemed with com mentary on the same epistemological questions that animated Kant, Berke ley, Reid, and Hutcheson over the “dead- end of British empiricism.”

Despite the absence of great universities and an established literary tradition, republicanism infected Americans with the conviction that “everyone should have access to learning,” while the commodi cation of writing and printing which the markets made possible presented Ameri

cans in the early republic with a varied range of intellectual choices. Over Lincoln’s lifetime, writes David Newsome, “ e Victorian consumption of books reached a peak never even contemplated before and probably never exceeded since.” e riotous urban theaters where workers and artisans lounged, gu awed, and argued with the stage players also produced more Shakespeare than any other playwright in the 1830s, to the point where James Fenimore Cooper named him “the great author of America.” “When foreigners accuse us of extraordinary love for gain,” wrote an irritated Jo siah Royce twenty years a er Lincoln’s death, “they fail to see how largely we are a nation of idealists.”

Wherever you go, you nd the typical American sensitive to ideas, curious about doctrines, concerned for his soul’s salvation, still more concerned for the higher welfare of his children, willing to hear about great topics, dissatis ed with merely material objects, seeking even wealth rather with a view to more ideal uses than with a mere desire for its sensuous grati cations. . . . He pauses in the midst of the rush of business to discuss religion, or education, or psychical research, or mental healing, or socialism. . . . In our country it is extraordinarily easy, and as one may at once admit, it is too easy, to get a hearing for any seemingly new and large-minded doctrine relating either to social reform or to inspiring change of creed.

Even as Lincoln was rst establishing himself in law practice, cheap pirated editions of Dickens, Bulwer-Lytton, Wilkie Collins, omas De Quincy, George Eliot, and Frederick Marryat were regularly serialized in urban weeklies, alongside a series of new literary quarterlies like e Knick erbocker (1833), the North American Review (1823), the Southern Literary Messenger (1834), the Southern Literary Journal (1835), the Boston Quarterly Review (1839), e Dial (1840), the Western Literary Messenger (1835), Bur ton’s Gentleman’s Magazine (1839), and DeBow’s Review (1846). American science already had long roots into the eighteenth century, and it supported publication of the Transactions of the American Philosophical Society, the American Journal of Science and the Arts (1818), the New England Journal of Medicine (1812), and the American Farmer (1819). Behind the journals stood the scienti c institutions, including the She eld Scienti c School at Yale,

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the Lawrence Scienti c School at Harvard, the Philadelphia Academy of Natural Sciences, the American Geological Society, the New York Lyceum of Natural History, and even, in 1831, the Historical and Philosophical So ciety of Ohio (which had only become a state in 1803). English ballad opera was supplanted on New York stages by Rossini as early as 1818, Weber in 1825, and a complete Don Giovanni in 1826, not to mention Meyerbeer, Flo tow, Balfe, and (by the 1850s) Verdi. In 1855, Musical World editor Richard Willis boasted that his magazine was read by the president, vice president, members of the cabinet, and seventy members of Congress. ose who lacked science, the arts, or philosophy at their doorsteps could get it on wheels. e 200 newspapers printed in the United States in 1800 rocketed to over 2,500 by midcentury (subsidized by free exchanges of newspapers and free local delivery of weeklies through the post o ce), magazine circulation rose from 125 in 1825 to 600 in 1850, and the American book trade exploded from $2.5 million worth of books in 1820 to $16 mil lion by 1856, and by 1850 employed 22,000 men. Private book collections of over a thousand volumes became frequent rather than rare. Touring soloists like Louis Moreau Gottschalk traveled over 50,000 miles to give over 900 concerts in three years, while popular collections of parlor piano music featured bel canto operatic arias—Rossini, Donizetti—side by side with “ e Wood-Up Quickstep.”

In 1826, Josiah Holbrook launched a plan for an “Association of Adults for Moral Education” in the pages of the American Journal of Education, and ended up creating a system of 3,000 lecture associations across the republic known as the American Lyceum, with Daniel Webster and Ralph Waldo Emerson as the star attractions. Holbrook’s Lyceum was only the largest of these associations: in 1828, even a village as small as Utica, New York, with only 8,000 inhabitants, contained forty- one “Benevolent and Charitable Institutions.” A young Philadelphia law student in 1841 could be a member of “ e Washington Library, the Henry Institute, and the Camden Literary Association.”

By paying four dollars a year to the last of these I have access to about twenty- ve of the best periodicals of this country and England. e newspapers which are taken by our family of three, are e Saturday Courier and Pennsylvanian; the Trenton Emporium; and the Mail and

Democrat, of Camden: weekly; Kendall’s Expositor, Washington: ir regularly; and e Spirit of the Times, Philadelphia. In addition to these I receive every few days from some old schoolmate papers from all parts of the country.

And none of this begins even to touch the mania for social experimentation staged at Brook Farm, New Harmony, Hopedale, Northampton, and else where by “come- outers and community-men” like Robert Owen, George Rapp, and John Humphrey Noyes. is is, enthused Yale professor Benja min Silliman in 1821, “the intellectual age of the world.”

Without in any way trying to obscure other ways of stating the case of Abraham Lincoln, the work we have to do here is an intellectual biography about a man not usually thought of as an intellectual in an era which, unfortu nately, is not o en thought of as an arena of ideas. Modern Americans, stand ing on this side of pragmatism, are not used to seeing antebellum America as a cornucopia of ideologies, and modern American pragmatists like Richard Rorty reinforce that prejudice by suggesting that ideas may actually be dan gerous for democracy. “A liberal democracy,” wrote Rorty in 1988, “will not only exempt opinions on such matters from legal coercion, but also aim at dis engaging discussions of such questions from discussions of social policy.”

Or else, what is more likely, we are too afraid now to think of what ideology might do if we let it loose across the land the way it was let loose between 1800 and 1860. e conventional genealogy of American ideas, which runs us from Franklin to Emerson to Dewey, is ipso facto a con fession of failure, an “American evasion of philosophy” (in the words of Cornel West). But it has this virtue: it provides a conveniently harmless backdrop to a bland and undisturbing secularism, shorn of religious debate and principled acrimony, and oblivious to its connections to the world at its margins. We know, however dimly, that once in the past the strife of ideas brought us civil war, and it is not comfortable to re ect on what it might bring us in the future in the form of “culture wars.”

But then again, the strife of ideas also brought us Abraham Lincoln.