by Adam Gopnik
This change had been visible for a while. Whitman wrote about it before the war in terms largely approving and enthusiastic. “I am,” he explained:
an acme of things accomplished, and I an encloser of things to be.
My feet strike an apex of the apices of the stairs,
On every step bunches of ages, and larger bunches between the steps, All below duly traveled—and still I mount and mount.
……………….
Before I was born out of my mother generations guided me,
My embryo has never been torpid … nothing could overlay it;
…………………
the long slow strata piled to rest it on … vast vegetables gave it sustenance,
Monstrous sauroids transported it in their mouths and deposited it, with care.
This is touching, if unintentionally funny—the image of Whitman's embryo being daintily borne in the mouths of dinosaurs is one that Thurber alone could have drawn. Yet it is the same idea—the idea of man placed in history in a way that compensates for any loss of divinity he might experience. On every step bunches of ages—with history at your feet, who needs God on your side?
The Civil War was one place, in America certainly the key place, in which this change got made—no longer as a blessing or an advance but not entirely as a loss either. At the end of the war, the rituals were not merely secular but in their quiet way anti-religious, grounding the meaning of the war entirely in the sublunary realm of gains and losses, in history, in the ages.
And, like Darwin, Lincoln knew death through the death of a favorite eleven- year- old child. In the winter of 1862, Lincoln's son Willie fell ill with what seems to have been typhoid, contracted, most probably, from the untreated polluted water that flowed in Washington. Willie (like Annie a decade before) had become obviously, and fatally, ill in a short time. Lincoln, as president, had three sons, but Robert, the eldest, though loyal and brave, seems to have been intellectually shallow in a way his father found alien, and the baby, Tad, was, as would be said now, “somewhere on the spectrum.”
It is often said—more often than one might imagine—that nineteenth- century people, because they suffered so many more child deaths than we do, felt them less, or differently, than we might think—or made less of a fetish of them or, because they sometimes photographed bodies, had a set of expectations and rituals for child death radically different from our own. As we've seen in the case of the Darwins’ mourning, there is no evidence for this at all—-just the opposite, actually. Their loss was as complete as ours would be, and their grief as deep. If anything, their grief was deeper, because their shock was less. There was no surprise to buffer it, no sense of a million- to- one shot to place it in the realm of things that never happen. It was not a brick that fell on your head from a skyscraper but the one thing you had always actively dreaded. (Parents during the polio era would resonate with that same emotion.)
Certainly that was the case with the Lincolns when Willie died. By a painful coincidence, Willie's illness struck just as Mary Lincoln was arranging a grand White House ball meant to be a kind of social “coming out,” and she went back and forth, dazed, from ballroom to sickroom. After a long up- and- down battle, Willie Lincoln died, drowned by his own fluid, on February 20. “Well, Nicolay my boy is gone—he is actually gone!” Lincoln sobbed to his secretary, and then went into his own office, weeping incon-solably (“I never saw a man so bowed down with grief,” said the woman who helped dress and wash the dead boy and then watched his father look at his face one final time.)
Of course it is possible, using the dry ice of some kind of false historical consciousness, to “universalize” the Lincolns’ loss in the larger losses of the time. It is even possible to find something strange, or tasteless, in Lincoln's grief for his own son's death at a moment when he had sent so many other sons to their graves. Many boys were gone. But for Lincoln, the national experience of death had no real traffic with—offered no “perspective” on— his loss, which belonged to his own irreducible core experience. This space between the common experience of death in battle and the core experience of loss and grief remained unbridgeable by any shared rite. Death was everywhere, death was omnipresent, death was necessary to preserve the people's government, and might very well be dignified by genuine idealism and a belief in the necessity of sacrifice; Willie's death was no different to his parents than the deaths of all those other, slightly older boys who were dying every day were to theirs—but these thoughts provided no pause in the pain. Lincoln's loss was at home, not on the field (though his son Robert did fight). But the central experience of his time—that is, the inability to see death as a preface to immortality but instead to feel it fully as unappeasable loss—was his, too. After Willie fell mortally ill, Lincoln may have turned to the Bible. It would have been unusual if he had not. But we know that he turned to Goethe, taking the German poet's Faust from the Library of Congress. And he is said to have spoken to Rebecca Pomroy an army nurse who had been brought in after Willie's death to help Mrs. Lincoln look after Tad.
She says, “I told him I had a husband and two children in the other world, and a son on the battle- field.” “What is your age? What prompted you to come so far to look after these poor boys?” She told him of her nineteen years’ education in the school of affliction, and that after her loved ones had been laid away, and the battle- cry had been sounded, nothing remained but for her to go, so strong was her desire. “Did you always feel that you could say, ‘Thy will be done?’
And here the father's heart seemed agonized for a reply.
She said, “No; not at the first blow, nor at the second. It was months after my affliction that God met me when at a camp- meeting.”
… Then he told me of his dear Willie's sickness and death. In walking the room, he would say: “This is the hardest trial of my life. Why is it? Oh, why is it[?]” I tried to comfort him by telling him there were thousands of prayers going up for him daily. He said, “I am glad of that.” Then he gave way to another outburst of grief.
Lincoln sought for a religious understanding of his loss, but seems not to have achieved it; glad for prayers, he did not find prayer itself sufficient. The consolations of the camp meeting, the surety of the “other world,” intrigued him without completing him. (Even in Mrs. Pomroy's story, whose lugubrious details some historians have doubted, thinking them more likely a creation of the post hoc sentimental Lincoln than of life, Lincoln hears, but does not second, her faith in the other world.)
The most affecting stories from the Civil War are of people who, as Lincoln did, came to recognize this duality: accepting the fact of death, unable to reconcile themselves to its justice in the eyes of a good God—believing in the goodness of the cause and still finding nothing in the mourning store that fit, ignoring the usual circular, vertical rituals of church and sermon, the rituals of domes and heavens and angels, and trying to improvise flat, horizontal rituals, the new rituals of homes and history and ages, to make sense of what remained intolerable loss.
There is, to place alongside the president, Henry Ingersoll Bowditch, for instance, whose son Nat died in Virginia in 1863 after being left wounded on the battlefield. Grief stricken, the father tried the usual cant of consolation: he listened to sermons; he read inspirational poetry. Nathan, he told himself, died for a great cause; he had “died happily;” he was waiting, as the preachers insisted, “just the other side of the veil.” None of it helped; it was, historically, too late for that. “My heart seems almost breaking,” he said simply, and he couldn't turn his mind from his loss. At last, he made a monument for his son in the shape of his sword, and to “get out of myself” he crusaded for better ambulance service on the battlefield, the kind of thing that might have saved his son's life. There was no comfort to be found, but there was work to do, no pride in death, merely unending sorrow and the possibility, some distant day, of meaning.
Lincoln's whole life and “aura” show him sensitive to the
alteration in mourning and its meaning. But how did Lincoln himself resolve the struggle? What epitaph would he have chosen had he had a moment to choose? The question of Lincoln and the angels leads to the most vexed question in all the Lincoln literature, that of his faith. How religious—how willing to credit more than metaphoric angels—did the men in the room think that Lincoln was? It is vexed because the evidence points to two truths, difficult to reconcile. On the one hand, Lincoln was all his life— aggressively in his youth, more mildly in his age—anti- clerical and anti- dogmatic, not any kind of churchgoing Christian but a profound and declared skeptic. In his first campaign for Congress, he admitted that he was not a member of any church and that “in early life” he had argued for the “doctrine of necessity”—that is, a belief in man as a mere pawn of universal law, without free will.
Both Mary Lincoln and Lincoln's Springfield law partner, William Herndon (also his first major biographer), were unequivocal about his rejection of any standard churchgoing faith, and the various posthumous claims that he “converted” to some form of Christianity have been mostly exploded. Herndon, who surely knew Lincoln better than did any other man, wrote, “He firmly believed in an overruling Providence, Maker, God and the great moral of Him written in the human soul. His—late in life—conventional use of the word God must not by any means be interpreted that he believed in a personal God. I know that it is said Mr. Lincoln changed his views. There is no evidence of this.”
Yet, undeniably, as the war and his presidency progressed, Lincoln, as Herndon knew, did speak increasingly of God—inserted God, as it seems, into the Gettysburg Address—and evidently had some kind of complicated and rich sense of “necessity” and a supernatural presiding power. Oddly, it is a form of belief closer to that of the Old Testament, where God's will is assumed and his strange purposes deduced through human suffering, than to the deism of the Enlightenment, where God's good purpose is assumed to emerge through the ultimate balance of pain and pleasure, and human suffering serves a larger purpose. Job knows that he is suffering for no good reason; what he learns is that feeling pain and being the subject of “good reasons” have nothing to do with each other. There is no justice that we earn, but there is fate that we share.
The historians’ literature on Lincoln's late faith and his late style is rich and growing, but the best studies are perhaps by those whose expertise is in the way words work as much as in the way minds change. Three of the best twentieth- century students of American literature addressed the question of Lincoln's faith, and how it got expressed in his writing and speaking toward the end of his life. The now insufficiently appreciated Van Wyck Brooks wrote in the 1940s that with the mature Lincoln, “the intensity and depth of his conviction, the religious nature that had led so many in the Western country, at a time of signs and wonders, to regard him as a patriarch Abraham returned in the flesh.” Lincoln's conceptions, in this view, were deliberately Old Testament— “patriarchal.” Frankly unbelieving though he might have been, in his tone, his example, “he had reached a positive faith that was much like Whitman's, a religion of humanity that Jefferson had shared with them and that flowed through many Americans, through Emerson and through Melville. In all that Lincoln said and wrote, behind it, underneath it, ran the deep river of feeling that ran through Whitman.”
For Edmund Wilson, writing fifteen years later in his Patriotic Gore, this notion of an American religion of humanity, applied to the man who had pursued and prosecuted this bloody war, was sentimental and foolish (though Wilson blamed Carl Sandburg more than his friend Brooks). He admired Lincoln no less, but admired him for the taut austerity of his vision, and of his prose— an Old Testament vision to be sure, but one not of a wise patriarch but of an avenging tribal priest, sure of himself and hard, and anticipating, in the severities of his speechmaking, the “chastened,” subdued style that Stephen Crane and Grant alike would learn. Wilsons Lincoln came from a sordid childhood, began in a boorish backwater, and by sheer force of purpose became “intent, self- controlled, strong in intellect, tenacious of purpose.” Wilson grants that “[Lincoln] must have suffered far more than he ever expressed from the agonies and griefs of the war” but sees his last speeches as expressions of a tough philosophy of “historicizing” nationalism—the nation is the true unit of meaning in the world, it reveals itself in history, and it must be baptized in blood.
Alfred Kazin, as so often, with his extraordinary gift for emotional reading, for entering sympathetically into the mind and real concerns of the writer, hit a note more moderate and yet accurate: Though lit by Calvinist fatalism and frontier evangelical enthusiasm, Lincoln's view of divinity and providence was original. Lincoln, contemplating the scale of death, and the evil of slavery, and sensing the hand of God in both, came to the realization that “since it all happened as described … one can only yield to the enigma of having such a God at all. It is clear that the terrible war has overwhelmed the Lincoln who identified himself as the man of reason. It has brought him to his knees, so to speak, in heartbreaking awareness of the restrictions imposed by a mystery so encompassing it can only be called ‘God.’ Lincoln could find no other word for it.” For Kazin, Lincoln's God is neither the God of confident Christendom nor the punishing God of the Calvinist imagination but the God of both Job and John Donne, the God who is the stenographic name for the absolute mystery of being alive and watching men suffer while still holding in mind ideals that ennoble the suffering and in some strange way make sense of it. As Donne wrote, “Tribulation is treasure in the nature of it, not current money in the use of it.”
(A sense of the other side's view of the same issue, expressed with considerable asperity and irony, comes from General Edward Porter Alexander, the Confederate chief of ordnance at the Seven Days. Lincoln, he tells us, was right; the South did think that God was on its side. “It is customary to say that ‘Providence did not intend that we should win,’ … [but] Providence did not care a row of pins about it… it was a serious incubus upon us that during the whole war [Jefferson Davis] & many of our generals really & actually believed that there was this mysterious Providence always hovering over the field.”)
The second inaugural is the most famous instance, and the key statement of Lincoln's mature vision and of the style he had invented to articulate it. Crowded by his own conditionals— his great speech at Gettysburg and the second inaugural are sequences of if clauses: “if one accepts the proposition that …”— in the second inaugural, too, he begins, as he had done so often as a younger man, with dry polite talk—“The progress of our arms, upon which all else chiefly depends, is as well known to the public as to myself and it is, I trust, reasonably satisfactory and encouraging to all. With high hope for the future, no prediction in regard to it is ventured”—only to turn to monosyllables as he explains his history of what has happened in the past four years: “But one of them would make war rather than let the nation survive and the other would accept war rather than let it perish. And the war came.”
And the war came. It's a sentence that Harold Ross would not have allowed in the old New Yorker (because it isn't exactly a sentence and begins with and, a false connective). But it is as precise a gesture as you could ever have, with a biblical inflection, and does the work of making the war's arrival seem providential, natural, rather than causal—with the effect of deflecting responsibility from one side or another while making it a great catastrophe from which all sides must recover together. (Maddeningly so, for both the Southern slavery nuts like Booth who were listening and the Northern abolitionists, who knew that the war hadn't come but was made.) It is a lot of work for four monosyllables, but it did the job.
He then enters into an argument essentially legal in its form— as he had at Gettysburg and as he always had since 1838—not an exhortation of principle but a close- made argument of conditionals. If this is so, then this must be so; stipulate this premise, and this conclusion follows. The argument of the second inaugural— which, like the
argument at Gettysburg, feels so familiar that it is hard for us to grasp how complicated it is—is that if we accept what God knew to be the evil of slavery into the world, and into America, for some mysterious purpose but with a definite lease, intending to end it, and if God made the war so horrible in order to punish those who brought the evil into the country (notwithstanding that God deliberately failed to prevent them from doing it in the first place), then does this strange equation make us believe less in a God capable of acting so bizarrely? Well, no, Lincoln says, even if that were so, “still it must be said ‘the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.’ ” This is Job's language, the language of mystical resignation: it makes no sense; it has happened; there must be a purpose for it because without it all would be senseless slaughter—so there must be a God. It is not the neat argument that God balances all but that nothing is balanced and yet God, somehow, remains. Lincoln isn't simply saying that the war is the national payment for the sin of slavery, which will end as slavery ends. He is saying that the war is willed by fate for reasons that we cannot fully know but that must have something to do with the balancing scales of long historical time.
For atheists, like the young Lincoln, this was not a challenge; necessity moved all. For the older Lincoln, overwhelmed by the core experience of grief, of death in the family, and the common experience of so much death in war, the idea of a universe moved only by necessity was too painful—the absence of a God had become so intolerable that one had to be evoked even as his purposes were seen as enigmatic. That is why we find the insistence that “if God wills that … [the war] 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.’