exposures and dangers” and “a pious heroine” whose heart was filled “with thoughts of Him who watched over them by night and day.”51
Because no American president used religion to unify the nation as effectively as Lincoln, it’s important to recognize his mother’s role in establishing his religious frame of mind. Although Lincoln never joined a church and rejected creeds, he was clearly influenced by the nondogmatic faith of his parents. His mother in particular served as his main instructor in what became one of his early texts, the Bible, which he once called “the best gift God has given to man.”52 Abe in his youth was not a constant Bible reader. Dennis Hanks said, “Lincoln didn’t read the Bible half as much as [is] said”—testimony confirmed by Abe’s stepmother, who remarked, “Abe read the Bible some, though not as much as is said.”53 But he read it enough to learn a technique he regularly used in his own expression: adding resonance and suggestiveness to his stories and speeches. He seems to have learned the technique especially from hearing his mother read the Scriptures aloud. A relative commented that his mother taught him “to read the Bible—study it & the stories in it and all that was moraly [sic] & affectionate in it. . . . Lincoln was often and much moved by the stories.”54 As this comment suggests, it was specifically the imaginative narratives and the moral themes of the Bible that struck home with Lincoln. The Bible for him was both entertaining and instructive.
He also found this combination of diversion and instruction in the Baptist preachers he witnessed. The remarkable variety of religious expression in pre–Civil War America is a testament to what was a distinguishing feature of American religion: radical creativity fostered by religious freedom. Emerson caught the free religious spirit of America when he wrote: “The Protestant has his pew, which of course is only the first step to a church for every individual citizen—a church apiece.”55 The famous British tourist Frances Trollope wrote of Americans: “The whole people appear to be divided into an almost endless variety of religion factions. . . . Besides the broad and well-known distinctions . . . there are innumerable others springing out of these.”56 Religion, in short, hit the fan.
The Baptist faith of Lincoln’s parents was, among all American religions, the most varied in its manifestations. No other religious body yielded so many different branches as the Baptists. There were Primitive Baptists, Free-Will Baptists, Hard- and Soft-Shell Baptists, Particular Baptists, General Baptists, Six-Principle Baptists, Anti-Mission Baptists, Two-Seed-in-the-Spirit Baptists, German Seventh-Day Baptists, Close-Communion, General, Sabbatarian, and Foot-Washing Baptists—all with different emphases in doctrine: so many, in fact, that a nineteenth-century historian of the religion remarked, “The term ‘Baptist’ has ceased to become a distinguishing name if used without a prefix.”57
One Baptist offshoot was the Little Mount Church, the small church in Hardin County, Kentucky, whose members included Thomas and Nancy Hanks Lincoln.
This was a very special offshoot. The fifteen people who in 1809, the year of Lincoln’s birth, broke off from the regular Baptists to form the Little Mount Church, believed that the Bible stood opposed to slavery—a highly unusual view for that day, especially in Hardin County, where in an adult population of some 2,600, nearly half were enslaved persons.
The Little Mount Church’s minister, William Downs, whom Louis Warren calls “the first preacher whom Abraham Lincoln heard, and the preacher he heard most often in his childhood,”58 was an ardent emancipationist, as was the church’s other minister, David Elkin. Lincoln would later declare that he could not remember a time when he did not loathe slavery. Today such religious opposition to slavery may seem natural, but in the early nineteenth century it was not, except among Quakers. Southern ministers were confident that the Bible supported slavery, and even in the North, outspokenly abolitionist clergymen were sparse before 1820. For a Kentucky church in a slaveholding area to organize so early on an antislavery basis was extremely uncommon—a chance mutation, indeed. Lincoln’s ethically based hatred of the South’s peculiar institution, then, was nurtured by a rare, fortunate development in the rapidly dividing Baptist Church.
If Lincoln’s Baptist background opened the way to his antislavery convictions, it also cultivated creativity in religious matters. The splintering of the Baptists immersed him in an environment that was constantly yielding fresh faiths. A relative heard Lincoln say “that if he could take the best parts from all the churches, he could make a new church better than any of them.”59 During his childhood and teenage years, Lincoln was so taken by colorful sermons he heard that he became an expert in imitating them. The Baptists were the most influential denominations in popularizing what I elsewhere identify as the new religious style: a sermon style based not on the bygone Puritan formula of Text, Exposition, and Proof (or Application) but rather on free-flowing, usually extemporaneous strings of inspirational passages, vernacular speech, anecdotes, and sometimes humor.60
A historian of the Baptist church in Kentucky explained that “the advantage possessed by the Baptists, was the greater popularity of their preaching compared with that of their rival sects.” Unlearned but powerful, the preachers “mingled constantly with the masses of the people,” “understood the force of their local dialect,” and delivered “literally extemporaneous” sermons in which “they drew their illustrations from the daily habits of their hearers.”61 The Baptists’ vivid sermons strongly affected Lincoln. John Locke Scripps, Lincoln’s earliest authorized biographer, wrote in 1860 that Lincoln as a boy had been strongly shaped by “the early backwoods preachers.” Scripps wrote, “Many of these early pioneer preachers . . . [were] freed from conventional restraint” and “were gifted with a rare eloquence” that “wrought upon the imagination of their hearers.”62 As Lincoln later told a friend, “I don’t like to hear cut-and-dried sermons. No—when I hear a man preach, I like to see him act as if he were fighting bees!”63
The young Lincoln was so attracted to the new religious style that he imitated it whenever he could. Endowed with a wonderful memory, he would attend a service, go home, and regale friends and neighbors by repeating the sermon. Dennis Hanks recalled that Lincoln would stand “on a stump or log, . . . mimacing the Style & tone of the old Baptist preachers.”64 Hanks said Lincoln would “repeat the sermint [sic] clean through from text to doxology. . . . I heerd him do it many a time.”65 Another relative reported that not only would Lincoln “repeat almost word for word the sermon he had heard the Sunday before,” but if he didn’t attend church, “Abe would take down the bible, read a verse—give out a hymn—and we would sing—we were good singers . . .—he would preach & we would do the Crying—sometimes he would join the Chorus of Tears.”66
Lincoln’s sermonizing signified his penchant for performance. The religion of his youth and young manhood was, above everything, performative. So was virtually everything else he participated in. Many neighbors later recalled his attending political speeches or trials and returning home, mounting a stump, and repeating what he had heard. The same applied to stories he read or jokes he heard or songs he learned: he loved to perform them in front of an audience. To call such behavior impersonation is not strong enough. It was rather a Whitman-esque, omnivorous absorption and recycling of cultural materials. Sermons, speeches, courtroom arguments, hymns, popular jokes, stories, and poems: Lincoln appreciated all of them for their performative value.
Lincoln’s proclivity toward mimicry extended even to the Bible. At twenty, he wrote the “Chronicles of Reuben” (1829), a secular variation on an Old Testament story that was part of the cultural trend toward fictionalizing the Bible, a trend that eventually produced religious bestsellers like The Prince of the House of David, Ben-Hur, and The Robe. But whereas these inspirational
novels were intended to buttress Christianity, Lincoln’s biblical poem was a jeu d’esprit that pointed a Bible story toward the sensual and the bawdy.
Lincoln allegedly wrote the “Chronicles of Reuben” after he learned that he was not invited to a wedding party celebrating the dual marriages of the Grigsby brothers Reuben Jr. and Charles, Indiana neighbors. Written in a faux-biblical style, the poem describes a sexual mishap that occurs after the party, when the two grooms are led in the dark to the wrong rooms; each brother finds himself in bed with the other’s wife. Based on the Bible story of the prophet Reuben, repudiated by his family for having slept with his father’s concubine, Lincoln’s coarse poem titillated some and outraged others, including a woman who called the poem “Smutty” and a twentieth-century Christian biographer of Lincoln who dismissed it as “a rude backwoods joke, written . . . in full accord with the standards of humor current in the time and general environment.”67
Today what seems unorthodox about the poem is not its lewdness but its startling secularity. The poem shows that the young Lincoln was thoroughly at ease in adapting the Bible for personal use—in this case to pillory an unfriendly neighbor. In doing so, he aped the cadences and imagery of the Bible, as indicated by some of the poem’s opening lines:
It came to pass when the sons of Reuben grew up that they were desirous of taking to themselves wives, and, being too well known as to honor in their own country, they took a journey into a far country and there procured for themselves wives.
It came to pass also that when they were about to make the return home they sent a messenger before them to bear the tidings to their parents. . . .68
Behind Lincoln’s youthful gamboling with sermons and the Bible lay a suspicion of organized religion, which over time came through in his jokes and stories, a good number of which were about religion or preachers. He loved telling one about a Millerite couple who agree to share their secrets with each other in advance of ascending to heaven. The wife confesses that their son was sired by a one-eyed shoemaker in town. The husband, though outraged, says that at least their other children are his. The wife replies, “No, they belong to the neighborhood.” The husband shouts, “I am ready to leave. Gabriel, blow your horn!”69 Another Lincoln story involved a Baptist preacher who announces to his congregation, “I am the Christ whom I shall represent today.” As he gives his sermon, a lizard runs up his pants, across his back, and to his neck, causing the preacher to flail wildly and disrobe, impelling a woman to stand up in her pew and cry, “Well, if you represent Christ, I am done believing in the Bible.”70 Lincoln also told of an African American boy he once met who was using street mud to build a miniature church, with steeple, pews, pulpit, and so on. When Lincoln asked the boy where the preacher was, the boy grinned and said, “Laws, I hain’t got mud enough!”71
Lincoln’s humorous and performative treatments of religion cloaked a struggle with doubt. His questioning of faith was darkened by his lifelong preoccupation with the brevity of life. He was obsessed by the impermanence of earthly things, and in his writings there are few references to an afterlife.
Abe’s heaviest early loss was the death in 1818 of his mother, when he was nine. His grief over his mother’s death evidently instilled in him a sense of transience that would disturb him throughout his life and that he tried to leaven with poetry and humor. We see his mournful, poetic, and puckish sides in the earliest extant writing in his hand, lines he jotted in a copybook in the early 1820s:
Abraham Lincoln his hand and pen he will be good
but god knows When Time What an em[p]ty vaper
tis and days how swift they are swift as an indian arr[ow]
Mete[o]r
fly on like a shooting star the presant moment Just [is here]
then slides away in h[as]te that we [can] never say they[’re ours]
but [only say] th[ey]’re past
Abraham Lincoln is my nam[e]
And with my pen I wrote the same
I wrote in both hast and speed
and left it here for fools to read.72
Grammatically flawed like much schoolboy scribbling, these lines are nonetheless suggestive, even in their disorder, rather like free verse. The passage begins and ends with short poems about “Abraham Lincoln,” the first one telling us that he will be good “when god knows when,” the last one saying he has hastily penned words “for fools to read.” While writing his full name twice suggests self-assertion, the playful naughtiness of the closing couplet of each poem radiates self-deprecation and fun, exhibiting Lincoln’s trademark humility and humor.
The lines connecting the opening and closing poems are in a completely different mood. Copied from an Isaac Watts hymn, they deliver a powerful message about time and mortality. Here are Watts’s opening stanzas:
Time, what an empty vapor ’tis!
And days, how swift they are!
Swift as an Indian arrow flies,
Or like a shooting star.
The present moments just appear,
Then slide away in haste;
That we can never say, they’re here,
But only say, they’re past.
It is telling that the adolescent Abe copied verses from Isaac Watts, whose resonant rhythms influenced a number of nineteenth-century American poets. Significantly, Abe included only the hymn’s doleful opening verses, omitting its joyful second half, which pictures the bliss of heaven. The dark verses he selected typified many of the songs and poems that stirred him for the rest of his life. Transience, the disappearance of the present moment, the impermanence of all earthly things—these themes haunted Lincoln, so much so that he eventually settled on a favorite song (the wistful ballad “Twenty Years Ago”) and a favorite poem (William Knox’s “Mortality”) that are about loss and death.
Lincoln seemed here to be on the cusp of a discovery about language. Poetry became his favorite genre; he memorized poetic lyrics and recited them often. For him, poetry organized and crystalized experience as no other type of language did. “To President Lincoln poetry was the fairest side of
