The Man Who Witnessed the Assassination of Abe Lincoln

This is Lee Habib, and this is Our American Stories, the show where America is the star and the American people. Coming to you from the city where the West begins, Fort Worth, Texas. Up next, the story of the complicated faith of Abraham Lincoln. And here to tell it is Richard Carradine, a Lincoln Prize-winning historian and emeritus Rhodes Professor of American History at Oxford University in England. Let’s get into the story.

Lincoln’s religious views before the Civil War are a matter of controversy or a matter of uncertainty. He had certainly been attracted to the ideas of Tom Paine. He had an inquiring mind. He was an intellectual. He knew his Bible as well as an other book, with the possible exception of Shakespeare. They were the two staples of his reading. He attended the First Presbyterian Church in Springfield with his wife, Mary. They were pew holders. She was a member; he was not a member. He was an adherent. He attended, and I think probably by the late eighteen fifties, we can say that he was broadly in tune with what we would say today in Unitarian theology. It could be summed up in a belief in the fatherhood of God and the brotherhood of man. One thing we do know is that he had no time for pro-slavery theology. And I just say a little about that.

The South in the immediate post-Revolutionary, early Republic period thought that slavery would gradually disappear. They regarded it as a necessary evil. But by the eighteen forties and eighteen fifties, more and more Southerners were standing up for the principle of slavery and the goodness of slavery, and they developed pro-slavery theology, and their position is that slavery is scripturally sound. The Old Testament prophets owned slaves. Nowhere in the New Testament does Christ declare slavery to be unsinful, unlawful, or wrong. Major churches split over the issue of slavery. The biggest church, Methodism, split in the eighteen forties, and it was a really important step on the way to Civil War because the breakdown of these national institutions had implications for politics. When we look at the Secession movement, it’s quite clear that it’s being driven as much by the preachers and the pulpit as it is by the political conventions. Lincoln was deeply unimpressed with this theology, as indeed were very many other Northerners. Lincoln was not a Methodist; he was not a Baptist. He was a possibly Unitarian. He certainly was attached to the Presbyterian Church, and a Presbyterian by the name of Frederick Ross wrote a book on how slavery was ordained of God, and Lincoln wrote a little memorandum to himself in which he said, “Well, there’s a biblical tussle over the Bible’s position on slavery.” But Doctor Ross has come to the rescue, and he’s given us his answer. And if I may quote it, it’s an ironic passage: “Doctor Ross. He sits in the shade with gloves on his hand, and subsists on the bread that Sambo is earning in the burning sun. If he decides that God wills Sambo to continuous slave, he thereby retains his own comfortable position. But if he decides that God will Sambo to be free, he thereby has to walk out of the shade, throw off his gloves, and delve for his own bread. Will Doctor Ross be actuated by that perfect impartiality, which has ever been considered most favorable to correct decisions?”

Lincoln had no time for pro-slavery theology. He’s alleged have had a conversation with that State Superintendent of Education, Newton Bateman, in which he says, “I cannot see how our God could regard slavery as just.” On the eve of the election of eighteen sixty, the vast majority of Calvinist traditional preachers, Presbyterians, Congregationalists, and increasingly Methodists are subscribing to the idea of the United States as having a special mission under God. There’s a torrent of sermons during the Secession Crisis and then subsequently through the war completely immersed in this idea that the United States is a modern-day Israel, and that nations under God are expected to atone for their sins. Nations have a responsibility, just as individuals do, to behave in a godly way, in a godly fashion. God will reward those nations that walk in the hearts of righteousness. God will punish those nations that sin. That deeply, deeply imbued in the American pulpit in the Civil War. Lincoln, on his way to Washington in February of eighteen sixty-one, he stops off at a number of places, including the New Jersey Senate, at which point he refers to the American people as an almost chosen people. There’s that one kind of a Linconian qualification, just tentativeness. Lincoln speaks to those people. I mean, he has innumerable meetings with Presbyterians, with Congregationalists, with Episcopalians, with Methodists, and with Baptists. They’re always coming to the White House in deputations. William Decumcy Sherman says, “I wish Lincoln wouldn’t spend so much time with all these grannies. How does he get on with the business of state?” And the answer is, well, for Lincoln, this is the business of state. And he’s absolutely ofay with understanding of this providentialism, this idea of God as the rural re nations. And whereas individuals can be punished in the afterlife, nations have to be punished here and now, because there is no afterlife for a nation. In fact, the only afterlife for a nation is the destruction of the nation if it actually behaves so completely outside the scope of the plcomorality.

And you’ve been listening to Richard Cowardine, a Lincoln Prize-winning historian and Emeritus Rhodes Professor in American History at Oxford University in England, telling the story of the complicated faith life of Abraham Lincoln. And it is complicated, and one thing we knew for sure is Lincoln had no no time for the pro-slavery theology developing in the South that somehow slavery was ordained by God. Also fermenting around them, time was quite the opposite feeling from the pulpits of the North, that America had this special mission and must atone for our sins, as humans must. When we come back, more of the story of Lincoln’s faith life here on Our American Stories. This is Lee Habib, host of Our American Stories. Every day on this show, we tell stories of history, faith, business, love, loss, and your stories. Send us your story, small or large, to out email oas@OurAmericanStories.com. That’s oas@OurAmericanStories.com. We’d love to hear them and put them on the air. Our audience loves them, too. And we returned to Our American Stories and the story of Lincoln’s faith walk with Richard Cowardine. Let’s get back to the story, and you’ll also be hearing from Hillsdale Collegeist Bill McClay later in this piece.

I don’t think he became the Christian that many Christians wanted him to be. They kept pushing him, and they kept asking him, but there’s no clear evidence that he ever saw Christ as anything more than a prophetic figure—not as a divine figure inspired by God, but not God. But what he does do during the war is turn to faith. He’s a seeker after faith and a seeker after the truth through reading of God. I wouldn’t say there’s anything like guilt in a Lincoln search for an Almighty, but I do think that as the bringer of war, as the person who sees the deaths of hundreds of thousands—in the end, of course, three quarters of a million North and South—who are the victims of war, as he suffers the terrible death of his own son, of a favored favorite son, Willie, in February of eighteen sixty-two, as he loses the emotional support of his wife through the rest of the war. Basically, it is no surprise, it seems to me, that he would turn for nourishment to the Bible. Is to be found frequently reading the Bible. The housekeeper, on one occasion, crept up behind him to see what he was reading and discovered that, no surprise, he was reading the Book of Job. He clearly spent as much time reading the Old Testament as the New Testament, recognizing that there were lessons to be learnt there. And fast days were very familiar to the colonial settlers, to the inhabitants of the colonies, as they were indeed to British Christians in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. That had been pretty few and far between. In the American Republic, there was real tussle as to how legitimate it was. George Washington called one, Madison called one, but when Andrew Jackson was asked to call one at the time of the coolera epidemic, he said, “No, this is tying church and state.” The fast days and federal days of Thanksgiving only come in significant numbers under Lincoln, and Lincoln issues three separate calls for fast days. One is in the after the defeat of Bull Run, the second on the eve of the battles of the summer of eighteen sixty-three, when there’d been severe losses in the period leading up to that, and then again after the terrible summer’s events in eighteen sixty-four, the Battle of the Spotsylvania, the Wilderness, and on each of those occasions Lincoln calls fast days. In addition, he calls days of Thanksgiving after Vicksburg and Gettysburg in eighteen sixty-three, and again after the fall of Atlanta. These are moments where the theology that I’ve explained earlier, this theology of nations under God, spelt out in some detail. These are religious occasions. These are profoundly theological occasions. The citizens will attend church, they will be preached at by ministers who are exploring the ways in which the nation—the American nation—has failed. Now for some people, that failing has absolutely to do with slavery, but for others, it has to do not with slavery, but with the shortcomings of the people in other particular. And Lincoln, at the Second in overall, at odds with the majority pulpits of the North. In March of eighteen sixty-five, it was very clear that the war was in its final stages and the Union was going to triumph. But instead of saying as you might have expected a triumphalist president to say, he says, “We both, North and South, pray to the same God. And each invokes his aid against the other. It may seem strange that any men should dare to ask a just God’s assistance in wringing their bread from the sweat of other men’s faces. But let us judge not that we be not judged.”

Maybe in praying to the same God, we are actually speaking the language that he doesn’t accept from either of us. The Deist God was utterly predictable. The God of Tom Paine was here. He was the clockmaker, and the world was just rather accorded to. Lincoln’s God is unpredictable.

“The prayers of both could not be answered. That of neither has been answered fully. The Almighty has his own purposes.”

Maybe we both, North and South, are to blame for the sin of slavery.

“If we shall suppose that American slavery is one of those offenses which, in the providence of God, must needs come, but which, having continued through his appointed time, he now wills to remove, and that he gives to both North and South this terrible war as the woe due to those by whom the offense came.”

Justice is at the heart of this Second Inaugural. This is an American sin. It is not simply a Southern sin. We are being commercially and politically embraced in the sin of slavery. We’ve not stood up as we should have done. How God chooses to punish the unjust is for God to side, and God is punishing us all.

“Shall we discern therein any departure from those divine attributes which the believers in a living God always ascribe to him? Fondly do we hope, fervently do we pray that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away? Yet, if God wills that it continue, until all the wealth piled by the bondsman’s two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword. As was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said, ‘The judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.’ With malice towards none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right. As God gives us to sa see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation’s wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle, and for his widow and his orphan, to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.”

It is, in fact, a remarkable plea for national unity in a basement, in religious abasement before God, for the sins that the nation has committed. And this is what’s at the heart of the Second Inaugural, forgiveness and reconciliation of the true Christian virtues. He knew when he delivered this that he was saying something that was not likely to be acceptable to many people, and he wrote this to Thurlow Weed, the political boss. Though Weed, who had written to Lincoln—and Lincoln, I think, Lincoln misread his letter—thinking that Thurlow Weed had commended the Second in overall. I don’t know Weed had done that, but anyway, Lincoln took it to be such, and he said it expected the speech—I quote—”to wear as well as perhaps better than anything I have produced.” But “I believe it is not immediately popular. Men are not flattered by being shown that there has been a difference of purpose between the Almighty and them. To deny it, however, in this case, is to deny that there is a God governing the world.” And that’s Lincoln in a private letter, very clearly stating that this document, the Second Inaugural, it was not just for public consumption, but he personally—Lincoln believes—there is a God governing the world, a mysterious God who intervenes in human affairs. And that’s a dramatic statement. And then he ends and says, “It is a truth which I thought needed to be told. And as whatever of humiliation there is in it falls most directly on myself, I thought others might have falled for me to tell it.” So, that extraordinary humility. “We are all sinful, and I’m saying that I am one of us who have committed this sin.” To that extent, it’s reasonable for me to say that this is a sin of all Americans. It is a remarkable document and the nearest thing that I guess one has ever had from a president that could be called a sermon.

And last, special thanks to the Bill of Rights Institute for allowing us to access this wonderful audio, originally a part of their Scholar Talk Series, “The Story of Lincoln’s Faith.” Here on Our American Stories.