Lincoln: A Life of Purpose and Power

by Richard J. Carwardine

  But Lincoln’s most powerful weapon was the spoken and written word. In speeches designed specifically for religio-philanthropic audiences, as with his addresses to fund-raising sanitary fairs and denominational groups; in proclaiming days for fasting and thanksgiving; in set-piece speeches which, if not usually cast in religious language, appealed to the better side of human nature and called on a deep moral understanding of America’s meaning (as in his salvationist rhetoric of rebirth at Gettysburg)—in all these ways Lincoln spoke a language which persuaded the public that the administration was under the guidance of a man who recognized his dependence on divine favor. It was a common experience for observers to perceive in Lincoln what the Methodist minister George Peck called a capacity for reverence and “deep religious feeling.” “I should be the veriest shallow and self-conceited blockhead upon the footstool,” the pious Noah Brooks reported Lincoln as saying, if “I should hope to get along without the wisdom that comes from God and not from man.” Jonathan B. Turner, a professor at Illinois College, shrewdly commented that both president and people “seem . . . to imagine that he is a sort of half way clergyman.”44 In fact, as Lincoln’s remarkable Second Inaugural address revealed, the president’s understanding of the Almighty’s role in Union affairs was far more subtle than that of many professional theologians. But it revealed a president capable of a meaningful engagement with the nation’s Christian leaders.

  Thus Lincoln went a long way toward satisfying those who cast him as an instrument of the divine will. Well before he had inspired them with his emancipation order, New School Presbyterians told him, “When we look at . . . the wonderful way in which this people have been led under your guidance, we glorify God in you.” Later, as freedom became a reality, African-Americans saw the president-emancipator as an Old Testament prophet. At a fast-day gathering near the White House, an old preacher “with a voice like a gong prayed with hands uplifted ‘O Lord command the sun & moon to stand still while your Joshua Abraham Lincoln fights the battle of freedom.’ ” “Up our way,” a visitor from Buffalo told the president at a White House reception, “we believe in God and Abraham Lincoln.” Hay recorded Congressman William Kelley’s remark that “the Lord has given us this man to keep as long as we can.” And a Chicago Methodist believed he had located “the true theory & solution of this ‘terrible war’ ” in the vivid remark of one of the city’s lawyers: “You may depend upon it, the Lord runs Lincoln.”45

  The administration’s efforts achieved their reward. Cadres of mainstream Protestants in effect acted as ideological shock troops, putting their full-blooded Unionism at the service of patriotic politics and encouraging even some previously apolitical clergy to become an arm of the Republican party. They regarded silent prayers for the president as a necessary duty but one secondary to more vocal support. And, driven as it was by love of country, they saw loyalty to the administration not as grubby politics but as obedience to the claims of Saint Paul on behalf of established government. A Wisconsin loyalist reflected that “God has happily, for us, broken up our whole system of politics, and set us free from the reproach of preaching politics . . . , for politics and the gospel are now one, and what God hath joined together let no man put asunder.” Only cheap, godless partisans felt the lure of the old ways. “What a terrible thing this ‘Party Politics’ must be!” exclaimed another northwesterner. “It seems to me that the Breckinridge prong of the Democracy would sustain its party, and support its measures, if by so doing it set adrift this great Ship of State . . . to the Devil, or to the nearest port of entry.”46

  CHURCH VOICES FOR THE UNION

  Left: Henry Ward Beecher (1813–87), born into a family of evangelical reformers, rose to become one of the most popular preachers and writers of his day. An active antislavery Republican, he traveled widely at home and abroad to sustain the wartime Union, and in the pages of the Congregationalist Independent sought to keep the administration up to the mark.

  Right: Bishop Matthew Simpson (1811–84), a staunchly antislavery Methodist, became an unstinting wartime spokesman for the Union, fusing the nation’s cause and God’s purposes. His patriotic tour de force was a much repeated two-hour address, climaxing with the waving of a battle-torn flag. As leader of the largest Protestant denomination, he was a natural choice to speak at the assassinated president’s interment.

  Church meetings fused the sacred and the secular, the patriotic and the partisan. Congregations sang “America” and “The Star-Spangled Banner” and cheered the sanctified Stars and Stripes that fluttered over their buildings. The most widely circulating Protestant newspapers, including the Independent and the cluster of regional Christian Advocates which gave Methodist editors such a commanding platform, remained staunchly loyal. A network of potent clerical speakers took to the rostrum and pulpit. Bishop Matthew Simpson, who crisscrossed the country as an “evangelist of patriotism,” was unsurpassed in his power to melt an audience to tears or rouse it to the heights of passionate enthusiasm for the war-torn flag. There was nothing coincidental about the president’s engaging Simpson to substitute for him at the Philadelphia Sanitary Fair.47 Lincoln had no need to take the stump himself when he could rely on a ready-made army of speakers willing to act as his proxy.

  Hostile pockets of conservative, even southern-oriented, churches in the lower North launched virulent assaults on the administration’s “puritan meddling,” but more immediately irritating for national authorities was the chorus of dissident radical voices within the Unionist ranks of evangelical Protestantism. Such preachers and religious writers as George B. Cheever, Charles G. Finney, William Goodell, Theodore Tilton, and—intermittently—Henry Ward Beecher acted as the self-appointed conscience of the Union, convinced that, unprompted, Lincoln would fall sadly short of the mark. Even religious editors and spokesmen of a more moderate and forgiving mien had their anxieties over aspects of national policy and practice, but they were generally hesitant about launching direct attacks on the president and his administration, taking to heart the scriptural command to speak well of civil rulers. Thomas Eddy of Chicago, often using his Northwestern Christian Advocate to press for more radical measures, never doubted the honest intentions of government officers and feared the corrosive effect of political criticism on public morale. Eddy came close to real anger only when confronted with news of revelry and dancing in Mrs. Lincoln’s White House in the winter of 1862: he advised Lincoln to read the story of King Belshazzar’s feast, confident his readers needed no reminding of the king’s untimely end. But in the main Eddy and other Protestant leaders remained loyal to the maxim: “It is not wise to destroy confidence in our rulers.”48

  Collectively evangelicals worked to prepare the nation for sacrifice in an extended and gigantic war. Press and pulpit steeled women to the knowledge that victory would cost the lives of thousands of sons, brothers, and husbands; reassured young men that there was a sweetness in dying for their country and its noble, millennial cause; and prepared all for a protracted war that would impose a massive financial burden. They speculated on God’s likely purposes in allowing battlefield defeats. They boosted popular morale during the lowest ebb of Union fortunes, in 1862 and early 1863. They echoed the government’s calls for troops, endorsed the introduction of conscription, and became recruiting agents themselves. Female evangelicals, through Relief Associations, Soldiers’ Aid Societies, and the Sanitary Commission, raised funds, produced uniforms, and prepared quilts and other supplies. Ministers defended the administration’s suspension of habeas corpus, and welcomed strong-arm action against draft resisters and dissenters who overstepped the limits of legitimate opposition. Border evangelicals like Robert J. Breckinridge and William G. Brownlow stiffened the spines of middle-state Unionists. Chaplains and agents of the Christian Commission—as well as of the more secular Sanitary Commission—moved beyond simple benevolence to inspire the serving men of the federal armies with the high purposes of the Union. The Episcopalian bishop Charles P. McIlvaine and th
e Catholic archbishop John Hughes, as well as Henry Ward Beecher, served as administration agents in rallying support in Europe.49

  It is no overstatement, then, to suppose that the combined religious engines of the Union—and the motor of evangelical Protestantism in particular—did more than any other single force to mobilize support for the war. In fusing a defense of lawful government against sinful rebellion with a vision of a new moral order they gave heightened meaning to loyalty. The administration knew their value. Whereas Jefferson Davis and the southern leadership had to break with their section’s conventional political culture when they chose to deploy religion for overtly political ends (which they did, it has to be said, with the zeal of the recent convert), Lincoln had no such intellectual embarrassment. He simply rejoiced in what he described to a group of Baptists in the spring of 1864 as “the effective and almost unanamous support which the Christian communities are so zealously giving to the country.”50

  THE UNION ARMY AS A MORAL FORCE

  Paradoxical as it may seem, the North’s most potent physical force, the federal army, also acted as a moral or noncoercive force, energizing Unionism and rallying support for the administration. The senior Francis P. Blair, father of Frank and Montgomery, was quite right in telling Lincoln, “We must look to the Army as a great political, as well as war machine.”51 Northern soldiers constituted a mighty weapon whose informal operations on the home front were less easily measured than the battlefield impact of their bullets, shells, and bayonets but which in their own way worked to stiffen patriotism. They were mostly volunteers, even after the introduction of conscription: of the total of some two million who served in Union colors fewer than fifty thousand were draftees. Most either were or came to be staunch Republicans loyal, even devoted, to Lincoln and dedicated to the political and moral values symbolized by the flag under which they served; they generally voted the Union ticket at elections and exercised a pervasive influence over their families and home communities.

  Lincoln himself needed no instruction in the army’s moral authority, and he knew the political damage that would follow if the loyal public thought the administration was not the truest friend of its fighting men. Thus he persisted with McClellan, Frémont, and other generals for longer than was militarily wise out of a concern, he explained, not to “shake the faith of the people in the final success of the war.”52 Likewise, he saw the importance of forging the strongest of bonds between himself and his common soldiers, not simply because it was the commander-in-chief’s duty to sustain their morale as a fighting force, but because he knew that through them he would exercise an influence over the confidence of the broader public.

  Lincoln’s words circulated in the army camps at least as freely as they did amongst the civilian population, especially through newspapers and pamphlets aimed specifically at soldiers. But as their commander and president, Lincoln was determined to be seen as well as heard, despite his having mostly to be stationed in Washington. Unlike Jefferson Davis, who was rarely glimpsed in person by his own troops, Lincoln made himself remarkably visible to his. He acknowledged new regiments as they marched past the White House on their way to serve. He took part in several great reviews of McClellan’s massed forces in 1861 and 1862, watching their embarkation for the Peninsula venture and meeting them at Harrison’s Landing after the campaign’s ignominious collapse. In the spring of 1863 he made a morale-boosting visit of several days to Hooker’s Army of the Potomac, accompanied by his family (with the editor Brooks in tow), and reviewed sixty thousand men. With Grant headquartered at City Point in the summer of 1864, Lincoln made an unannounced two-day visit, riding through the ranks and talking at length with the men. He visited hospitals (as did Mary Lincoln), both in the field and in Washington, shaking hands with the wounded and thanking them for their patriotic sacrifice. This could be a grim duty, though it filled Lincoln’s undoubted psychological need to do something to mitigate the bloodbath of war. The president’s hospital visits also provided some unexpected moments of emotional release through moments of dark humor—as when he encountered a legless soldier laughing at a pious visitor who had just given him a tract on the iniquity of dancing.53

  Additionally, Lincoln had close-quarter meetings with his men serving in Washington. Quite apart from his offering impromptu remarks to particular units passing by the executive mansion, he met very many Union volunteers individually. Early in the war he earnestly promised his troops that he would take care of them, urging even the lowliest privates to bring their problems and grievances to him. He and his secretaries found themselves bombarded by letters and speculative visitors, as soldiers and their families sought help in cases that most often related to sickness, pay, furlough, or military punishment. Lincoln held perhaps two thousand or more private interviews with Union soldiers.54 This was a tiny proportion of the enlisted men, but it did not take long for the impressions of those who had seen or met the president to be broadcast throughout the close-knit regimental communities that made up the federal army.

  By these means Lincoln became a powerful virtual presence amongst his men. What they saw and generally admired was the common touch of a president who lacked airs and graces, who remained accessible, approachable, and amiable, and who mixed charm with good humor, joke-telling, and easy familiarity. He “aint proud,” thought one; “he belongs to the common people,” judged another. His quaint, awkward, even ugly physical appearance and manner generally served to reinforce the sense of his ordinariness and lack of affectation. Some found him comical—on horseback in coattails and stovepipe hat he cut a ludicrously elongated figure—but his ungainliness only increased the affection. “His riding I can compare to nothing else than a pair of tongs on a chair back,” reported a Pennsylvanian, “but notwithstanding his grotesque appearance, he has the respect of the army.”55

  Even more important in cementing the soldiers’ trust was their widespread belief that Lincoln made their well-being his chief concern. Firsthand reports of the president’s sympathy crackled swiftly through the mass medium of the army’s ranks. They told of his concern for the wounded, his provision of field and hospital chaplains, his finding government jobs for disabled veterans and amputees, and his support for the work of the soldiers’ aid organizations (though he had initially shared the War Department’s skepticism over the value of these civilian bodies). His reputation for kindliness burgeoned as he agonized over the hundreds of court-martial cases that ended up on his desk. Having ordered that no soldier should be executed for any crime without his first reviewing it, Lincoln sought to avoid the “butchery” of capital sentences whenever possible and early in 1864 commuted all such sentences in cases of desertion (what he called his “leg-cases”) to imprisonment for the war’s duration. That his troops saw a president ever more physically ravaged by the grind of office naturally sharpened their sense of a leader who shared their trials, anxieties, and sorrows. Watching him in the biting wind during the review days of April 1863, men recognized a fellow casualty of the war, “thin and in bad health.” As one soldier put it, in terms widely echoed, “He is to all outward appearances, much careworn, and anxiety is fast wearing him out, poor man.”56

  Lincoln thus came to be personally loved and admired, as Jefferson Davis never was. Understandably cautious as he was about dismissing McClellan, when the time came to do so in the fall of 1862 he was confident that he enjoyed the trust of the rank and file, even if his stock was low amongst the Democrats in the general’s officer corps. Whatever the “headquarters bluster”—as Schurz called it—and the indignation of some volunteers, few blamed Lincoln personally for the change of command.57 Thereafter the president became the unchallenged recipient of most soldiers’ loyalty. To the common terms of endearment—“Old Abe,” “Uncle Abe”—a new one was added. The commander-in-chief who referred to the Union troops as “my boys” and whose paternalistic devotion inspired such confidence came increasingly to be called “Father Abraham.”

  The soldiers to
whom Lincoln became a father figure had grown to young manhood in highly politicized and democratic local communities whose inhabitants were instilled with an active sense of civic duty. The historians James McPherson and Joseph Allan Frank have justly described the Union’s volunteers as “citizen-soldiers.” However much human feelings—loyalty to comrades-in-arms, a generalized sense of duty and honor, a concern to carry on the fight on behalf of their slain fellows, and a desire to punish the enemy—helped carry soldiers through their bloody ordeal, the Union’s troops were no less energized by the political meanings they attached to the struggle. Soldiers read newspapers, set up debating societies that mirrored the lyceums of their home communities, and discussed the larger issues at play in the war. The camps, according to an Illinoisan, were “filled with grave reasoners”; after the war Ulysses S. Grant was quite clear that the Union had benefited from having armies “composed of men who were able to read, men who knew what they were fighting for.”58 African-American troops naturally brought their own ideological fervor to a struggle for universal emancipation and black rights. But white troops, too, shared a firm grasp of the political significance of the conflict.