Lincoln uses religion to advance war aims

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The British series "Profiles in Power" has given readers a truly extraordinary collection of biographies, and "Lincoln," by Oxford University professor Richard Carwardine, surely is one of its capstones. It already has been awarded this year's Lincoln Prize for the best Civil War work of the year, and it displays a remarkable command of 19th-century American history.

In the author's view, the often-analyzed Civil War can be seen as a titanic battle between and among various factions of American Protestantism. Mr. Carwardine carefully outlines the growing alliance embracing New England-based Calvinist sentiment and Northern fundamentalism and the new Republican Party. It is ironic that Abraham Lincoln, often criticized as having been a religious skeptic and nonbeliever in his youth, should recognize that development so early and then exploit it so effectively.

Drawing on the concerns of their Know-Nothing Party allies, the Republicans often turned to a virulent anti-Catholicism to help discredit the Democrats, especially Stephen A. Douglas, although Lincoln and Sen. William Seward of New York did not engage in such distractions.

As their party developed, slavery became for the Republicans not just a political or economic issue, but a moral one. Protestantism provided the theology, the rhetoric and, most important, some of the organizational strength necessary to bring victory to the newly organized political coalition. Lincoln achieved national recognition because he moved cautiously at first and then boldly in denouncing the immorality of human bondage. Because he was so personally sincere and so logically persuasive, he was a force to be reckoned with as the crises of the 1850s intensified.

Lincoln, a self-made man, could speak eloquently on the right of all people to earn their bread and to keep the fruits of their labor. Also, in his personal life, he did not smoke, drink, curse or even hunt animals. He came to epitomize the personal restraints of old-line Calvinists. He was called "Honest Abe" by the people who knew him best -- his neighbors.

But religions in America were linked to ethnic groups and to a lesser extent to age. The Protestant abolitionists often came from New England roots; the Republicans gave up on the Catholic Irish, but they courted assiduously the Germans, especially in the Midwest. In fact, Mr. Carwardine asserts that Lincoln quietly purchased a German newspaper to keep it in the Republican fold. Quakers, Congregationalists and liberty-minded Methodists, among others, also were important in Lincoln's political coalition. In addition, it has been said that the Republican Party was the party of young men on the way up in the world.

Lincoln in his early years avoided organized religion and probably respected only a vague sense of Providence or something called "Necessity." He did not believe that Christ was God and probably did not ever accept the notion of the immortality of the soul. He even had to deny in one election that he was a scoffer at other people's religious beliefs. As he matured, however, he came to recognize the powerful links between evangelical Protestantism and the American anti-slavery impulse. Then, in the furnace of the war and with the death of his sons, Lincoln seemed not just to talk religion, but also to probe more deeply religious and philosophical questions. Still, he honestly lamented once that he wished at times he were more orthodox.

He came to see himself, though, as God's instrument in the awful carnage of the Civil War, and he truly felt that he was guided by a sense of God's intention when he issued the Emancipation Proclamation. Mr. Carwardine argues that Lincoln had an unerring sense of public opinion and timing, but it surely was not true in terms of the proclamation. The Republican Party suffered electoral losses in part as a reaction to that statement, but Lincoln never wavered on the decision. His sense of surety was far greater than his political caution, at least on that political controversy.

Lincoln not only dealt with the moral issues of the war, slavery and reconstruction, but was an incredibly able political manager and an architect of his political party's rising fortunes. The author outlines the president's meticulous care in creating the party's apparatus and in turning out the vote, especially in 1864. He left little to chance. We tend to forget that Lincoln was a lawyer by training, but a politician by profession from the time he was in his mid-20s. He was wise enough to see in the long run "the power of a righteous party."

Much of the book plows familiar ground: the humble origins of Lincoln, his family's early opposition to slavery, his climb from obscurity to high position in state politics, his commitment to the Whig party and the Whig philosophy, especially as articulated by Henry Clay, and his intense personal hatred of slavery.