And There Was Light: Abraham Lincoln and the American Struggle

“The short and simple annals of the poor. That’s my life, and that’s all you or anyone else can make out of it.”

This short passage is Lincoln’s pithy, disinterested reflection on his own childhood. Lincoln, Meacham frequently reminds us, was not particularly interested in his past. He did not self-consciously seek the portrayal of himself as the mythical “self-made man,” a legend of American industriousness. Though Lincoln’s story is now often employed to show the possibility of the American Dream (he rose from a log cabin to become the president), Lincoln, in fact, seems to generally dismiss engagement with his own past and a painful childhood.

“The fate of mortals was to marshal reason, experience, and faith in order to realize the ideal of loving one’s neighbor as oneself. ‘When I do good I feel good, when I do bad I feel bad, and that’s my religion,’ an old man in Indiana had once said in Lincoln’s hearing. Lincoln quoted these words to describe his own religious views.”

One of the core themes of Meacham’s biography deals with Lincoln’s views on religion, how these views evolved, and how they influenced his politics. In essence, Lincoln’s deepest religious convictions were based on the appeals of conscience. Lincoln’s religion, though studied in the Christian tradition, boils down to the moral conviction expressed in the Golden Rule. This simplicity in view is encapsulated here by associating Lincoln’s views—as president of the United States and moral icon of American history—with an unnamed old Midwesterner from whom Lincoln borrows a first principle on religion and morality.

“In Vandalia, the governor referred the issue to the legislature, where Lincoln was serving his second term. The lawmakers passed resolutions to reassure their slaveholding brethren in other states by condemning abolitionists, expressing support for colonization, and defending slavery in the District of Columbia. The vote in the House was 77-6. Abraham Lincoln was one of the few dissenters.”

Though Lincoln’s rhetorical and voting record on issues of slavery are somewhat mixed, and he is often depicted as only concerned with the issue when it is politically viable, Meacham points to this clear instance in which he voted against a very popular resolution. This is evidence that from the very beginning of his political career, while still serving in the state legislature in Illinois, Lincoln was willing to risk reelection for this cause. This foreshadows his resolve during the reelection campaign of 1864.

“‘Lincoln was talking, and men were standing up around him listening to the conversation,’ a friend recalled. ‘One of them asked him if he was an abolitionist. Mr. Lincoln in reply, reached over and laid his hand on the shoulder of Mr. [Thomas] Alsopp who was a strong abolitionist and said, ‘I am mighty near one.’”

In this anecdote, Lincoln’s personality radiates. Known for his wit and good humor (even during highly contentious political disputes) Lincoln is routinely depicted as able to dissipate hostilities through charm. In this scenario, he also accurately acknowledges his real political views: While not an abolitionist, Lincoln opposed the spread of slavery to any region where it was not previously instituted and hoped for the eventual dismantling of the slave system.

“Vulnerable to depression and a striver for an elusive sense of legitimacy, Lincoln may have feared that no external glory could ever fill the inner needs he felt. That was the tragedy of the driven man: To seek vindication in the world but to suspect that no trumpets could totally drown out the uncertain notes of the boy who doubted his place in the world.”

This passage is indicative of Meacham’s general understanding of Lincoln’s character as a man driven by ambition but with a fundamental sense of his own illegitimacy. Meacham often speculates that this may be because, as a child, the local community often gossiped about whether Lincoln was the legitimate child of his father. Whatever the reason, Meacham, generally importing onto Lincoln feelings of insecurity and illegitimacy, uses these claims about Lincoln’s personality to give meaning and explanation to his political aspirations.

“‘The true rule, in determining to embrace, or reject anything, is not whether it have any evil in it; but whether it have more of evil, than of good,’ Lincoln had told the House. ‘There are few things wholly evil, or wholly good. Almost everything, especially of governmental policy, is an inseparable compound of the two; so that our best judgement of the preponderance between them is continually demanded.’”

This is a quote of Lincoln’s which expresses that he saw his role as a legislator and executive explicitly in moral terms. Despite this, he was no moral absolutist, at least when it comes to real-world policy decision. The wisdom of a leader, to Lincoln’s mind, is based in the ability to use good judgment for the propagation of the good and the limitation of the bad. Involved in this view of the world is the tragic sense that a leader cannot help but be culpable for some degree of evil despite all intentions.

“In the eleven years between his service in Congress and his bid for the presidency in 1860, Lincoln considered the works of Theodore Parker and Ralph Waldo Emerson, engaged with the words of the Founders, and absorbed Euclidean geometry. He combined the pursuits in applying Euclid’s notion of the existence of ‘axioms,’ or propositions that are self-evidently true, to the American promise of liberty. For Lincoln, the path to power in the present lay in mastering—and reinterpreting—the past as he explored ideas about power, faith, equality, and slavery.”

Lincoln spent over a decade between his time as a representative and his time as president working as a lawyer, raising a family, and studying the history of moral thought. Meacham frames this era as a time for the gestation of Lincoln’s rich understanding of history, morality, and religion. The appeal to Euclidean geometry is meant to indicate Lincoln’s view that, at root, an individual most act from and be morally motivated by first principles. For Lincoln, so Meacham believes, this first principle as expressed in the Declaration of Independence, is that all men are created equal.

“There were, rather, principles of justice and of good, of divine origin, that could guide human conduct. People could discern those principles through reason and interpret them through conscience. History was the story of the degree to which mortals might close the gap between the ideal and the real, between the transcendent and the actual. And politics was a central arena in which that gap was either narrowed or widened.”

Here, Meacham expresses the thought of Theodore Parker, an American intellectual for whom Lincoln had great admiration. Parker’s ideals represent a strain of Enlightenment era rationality that focuses on the accessibility of moral truths through the faculty of reason. In Parker’s estimation, conscience is the arbiter of this truth. Lincoln agreed and used his conscience as a guide to move toward the ideal, diminishing the gap between the ideal and the real in the process.

“Senator Douglas had entered Peoria with all the panoply of state; reporters noted his arrival in a carriage ‘drawn by fur beautiful white palfreys’ as a band played and cannons boomed. Lincoln arrived alone, in darkness, about two o’clock in the morning, and checked in to room 84 of the Peoria House hotel.”

In a failed senatorial campaign against the Democrat Stephen Douglas, Lincoln staked out his positions on slavery. In this passage, Meacham seeks to contrast the tenor of Lincoln’s campaign with Douglas’s. In fact, throughout Lincoln’s political career there is a noticeable lack of pomp and circumstance. He did very little active campaigning outside and never sought to bring undo attention to himself.

“It is hardly fair for you to assume that I have no interest in a thing which has, and continually exercises, the power of making me miserable. You ought rather to appreciate how much the great body of the Northern people do crucify their feelings, in order to maintain their loyalty to the constitution and the Union.”

In this letter to a friend, who happens to be a slaveowner, Lincoln responds to the claim that slavery is none of his business and therefore should not interest him. Here we see how clearly Lincoln is led by his conscience in political matters. Though he may have no direct connect to slavery, the institution is viscerally disturbing to him. This selection also reveals the depth of Lincoln’s feelings for the maintenance of the Union and its democratic establishment. As comes up many times, though Lincoln seems to have been staunchly anti-slavery, he was an even more staunch supporter of democracy.

“The facts of the case did not matter in the aftermath; ideology did. Antislavery members supported Sumner; proslavery members stood by Brooks.”

Meacham uses the incident in which Senator Charles Sumner is viciously beaten on the Senate floor by Representative Preston Brooks to show the stark political divides that had formed by 1856. Facts were no longer relevant. What mattered was one’s political ideology. The beating of Sumner prefigures the Civil War and reflects the deep animosity between many members of the North and South at the time.

“Wrong as we think slavery is, we can yet afford to let it alone where it is…but can we, while our votes will prevent it, allow it to spread into the National territories, and to overrun us here in these Free States? If our sense of duty forbids this, then let us stand by our duty, fearlessly and effectively….LET US HAVE FAITH THAT RIGHT MAKES MIGHT, AND IN THAT FAITH, LET US, TO THE END, DARE TO DO OUR DUTY AS WE UNDERSTAND IT.”

In this speech, Lincoln makes clear his most consistent pre-war political opinion on slavery in the United States. Though Lincoln believed slavery was a moral outrage, he did not seek to abolish it in the south. However, despite his proclivity to compromise, he believed the propagation of slavery to the free states or to the western territories was utterly unacceptable. The last portion of this speech, stylized in all capital letters, reflects Lincoln’s dedication to conscience, which is the guide of our understanding of duty.

“The rebels longed to be seen as legitimate, justified, even noble. After South Carolina’s withdrawal from the Union, the secessionist Robert Barnwell Rhett imagined how a historian, writing in the new millennium, might describe the South: ‘Extending their empire across this continent to the Pacific, and down through Mexico to the other side of the great gulf, and over the isles of the sea, they established an empire and wrought out a civilization which has never been equaled or surpassed.’”

Meacham includes many references to, and passages from, Confederate works that reveal how they thought of themselves and their place in the future American government. One consistent theme is the Confederate outrage at the North’s sense of moral superiority. The Confederates did not see themselves as self-conscious villains upholding evil social systems but rather as the true inheritors of the Constitution and the American empire. They demanded acceptance, recognition, and approval of their right to exist as a slaveholding society and potential economic empire.

“‘We don’t want to fight side and side with the n----r,’ wrote a young solider from New York. ‘We think we are a too superior race for that.’ It was, it was widely said, ‘a white man’s war.’”

In this brief statement from an unnamed Union soldier, Meacham quickly encapsulates the racist hostility that many Northerners felt toward Black Americans. Meacham wants his readers to be aware that white supremacy was an overarching norm in the culture of the United States across all regions of the nation. It is a common misconception that the North fought the Civil War out of altruistic and moral passion for the plight of the enslaved. While this was the case for some individuals, it was not the case for most, and many Union soldiers, politicians, and citizens, were deeply racist.

“An important impetus behind Lincoln’s decisions: keeping the border states in the Union. Delaware, Kentucky, Maryland, and Missouri had not seceded, but the president was always worried about losing them to the Confederacy: ‘Lincoln would like to have God on his side,’ it was said, ‘but he must have Kentucky.’”

Lincoln was aware of the immense political and military importance of the border states throughout the Civil War. These border states were all slave-owning states, and Lincoln’s fears of alienating the local populations may have been an influence on his slowness to issue the Emancipation Proclamation. This passage shows that regardless of how much Lincoln hoped to appeal to moral and religious truth—and how frequently he invoked God—political realities were always just as, if not more, important determining factors. Wise strategy would require careful reform, not abrupt systemic overhaul.

“For Lincoln, the Lord was now an engaged force in history—a God whose will prevailed. The death of his child—the second the Lincolns had lost—had presented the president with a choice. He could collapse in grief and in cynicism, howling against an indifferent universe. Or he could follow Gurley’s counsel and see a world informed by providence—that even the horrifying loss of a child was part of a plan devised by an all-powerful and all-loving God.”

Meacham presents the death of Lincoln’s son as an event in his life that led to a fundamental existential choice. Whether or not Lincoln actually thought of the event in these terms is a question that Meacham may not be equipped to answer, but it does serve a useful narrative role in developing Lincoln’s legend. It reiterates a constant metaphysical battle in Lincoln’s heart, as well: Are we the playthings of an indifferent universe or is there an overarching providence that provides meaning and structure to the tragedy of life? The latter option, Meacham implies, is strongly correlated with more resolute moral action.

“If there be those who would not save the Union, unless they could at the same time save slavery, I do not agree with them. If there be those who would not save the Union unless they could at the same time destroy slavery, I do not agree with them. My paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union, and is not either to save or to destroy slavery. If I could save the Union without freeing any slave, I would do it, and if I could save it by freeing all the slaves I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing some and leaving others alone I would also do that.”

In this reply to an editorial condemning Lincoln’s political strategy during the war, Lincoln provides a very straightforward account of his priorities and values. His absolutely highest priority was the maintenance of the Union. The abolition of slavery was secondary to this and could not interfere with this primary goal. As both the president of the United States and a fervent supporter of democratic principle, Lincoln believed it was both his occupational duty and his moral imperative to save the Union before all else.

“The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us—that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion—that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain—that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom—and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”

In this exceptionally famous passage from Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, Lincoln reiterates the fundamental northern cause during the war: the maintenance of the Union, which is, in his estimation, the greatest bastion of freedom on Earth. The purpose of the speech was not simply to lament the dead from the Battle of Gettysburg but rather to motivate the cause for which those soldiers fought. Lincoln’s speech, though now widely revered for its rhetorical power, was divisive at the time. It was also extremely short.

“‘Mr. Lincoln and my sister met me with the warmest affection, we were all too grief-stricken at first for speech,’ Mrs. Helm recalled. ‘I have lost my husband, they have lost their fine little son Willie. Mary and I have lost three brothers in the Confederate service. We could only embrace each other in silene and tears.…Our tears gathered silently and fell unheeded as with choking voices we tried to talk of immaterial things.’”

In this passage, Meacham highlights how divisive the war was. It often cuts between family lines, and the first family was not immune to this. Mary Todd Lincoln had family who fought and died for the Confederacy even as she was First Lady of the United States. At the same time, though, these divisions were overcome by shared grief. Meacham shows the tragic power of grief to bring estranged parties together if but for a moment.

“‘The passage of this amendment will clinch the whole subject,’ Lincoln said; ‘it will bring the war, I have no doubt, rapidly to a close.’ Federal appointments, legislative favors, even bribes were rumored to be on offer. ‘Money will certainly do it, if patriotism fails,’ one of Seward’s agents said. ‘The greatest measure of the nineteenth century,’ Thaddeus Stevens remarked, ‘was passed by corruption, aided and abetted by the purest man in America’—Lincoln himself.”

In 1865, the House approved the 13th Amendment to the Constitution, which abolished slavery. Although this amendment may have had the purest intentions of moral conscience as a strong motivating factor, Lincoln and company are depicted as using whatever means necessary to achieve this end, even if those means were not themselves strictly moral. The insinuation is that pure dedication to a fundamental principle, like the equality of all men, may lead (perhaps justifiably) to unsavory and problematic corruption.

“Lincoln did not assume himself or his allies to be morally superior. He had tried to build his house, and the house of the Union, upon a rock, but that did not mean that he took any pleasure in watching the collapse of his neighbor’s house, which had been built on sand.”

For Lincoln, as Meacham often expresses, the conclusion of the war may have been a relief, but there was no pleasure in the downfall of the Confederacy, nor was there any sense that the end of struggles had been reached. Lincoln viewed the Confederates as his countrymen and he wanted to bring them back into the fold of the Union with as little animosity as possible. If Lincoln’s house was built upon a “rock,” as Meacham suggests, that rock is the foundational moral belief in equality amongst men and its democratic expression, not some kind of political institution or agency.

“That the defeat of a cause designed to perpetuate the enslavement of others could not be the triumph of the right but a harbinger of Armageddon illustrates the depth of the white South’s ambitions, self-regard, and self-certitude. Such delusions about its own virtue would fuel the rise of the Lost Cause in the postwar world. Where Lincoln had seen the pain of the war as a national Good Friday leading to an Easter of emancipation and of union, the rebels chose to view their loss as a sustained Passion—a theological worldview that precluded their conversion from enslavers to fellow citizens.”

Meacham uses Christian religious imagery to note the sustained post-war animosity between the North and the South. Meacham often shows how religion was frequently a buttress for, and reflection of, political and cultural sentiment in the nation. In this case, according to Meacham, the South takes on a sort of victim status akin to the suffering of Jesus Christ. This egotistical self-apotheosis is tied to a Southern cultural narrative regarding the ambitions the South had for conquest and empire.

“The news was refracted through the nation’s religious prism. Some went to church on Easter Sunday 1865 and heard Lincoln portrayed as a martyr and messiah. Others, especially in the white South, interpreted the assassination as divine retribution for defeating the Confederacy and for freeing the enslaved. ‘Lincoln was not a martyr for, as much as we may object to and condemn assassination, he committed a monstrous crime in making war upon us,’ a solider in the Savannah, Georgia, Volunteer Guards said.”

Lincoln’s assassination was another cultural moment that received “refraction” in the religious life of the country. Time and again in the civil war, religious and political leaders, including Lincoln, invoke God’s justice in defense of their cause. God, as the ultimate source of authority and truth, can be used as a rhetorical tool to incite passion, outrage, reverence, etc. Lincoln’s status, whether it be as martyr or minion of evil, reflects this kind of rhetoric. Though Meacham is highly self-conscious of the rhetorical role of religion, he still uses it frequently, and his implicit endorsement of the messiah-like depictions of Lincoln from Northern sources is discordant with his supposed attempt to characterize Lincoln as a conflicted, imperfect moral agent.