The aristocrat of old Virginia may have been a muscleman, in the view of biographers, but he was also the model of evenhandedness—an attribute Lincoln aspired to. Another bestselling biography of Washington that Lincoln read was the 1807 book by David Ramsay, who portrayed the Founder as the epitome of equanimity. “He had religion without austerity,” Ramsay wrote, “dignity without pride, modesty without diffidence, courage without rashness, politeness without affectation, affability without familiarity. . . . [He was] a lover of order, systematical and methodical.”21 Another bonus of Ramsay’s biography was the inclusion of Washington’s will, in which he manumitted his enslaved workers on the decease of his wife—an antislavery gesture on the part of the First American that fed into Lincoln’s view that the Founders desired the eventual extinction of the South’s peculiar institution.
Washington’s Farewell Address was also included in Ramsay’s book. In his speech, Washington emphasized the paramount importance of preserving the American union, which, he saw, was threatened by warring factions and party divisions. A unifying force that Washington appealed to was religion. “This unity of government which constitutes you one people,” he declared, must be anchored in religion. Otherwise, he asked, how could oaths taken in courts or public hearings have credence? How could checks and balances work if amorality reigned? “Of all the dispositions and habits which lead to political prosperity,” he said, “religion and morality are indispensable supports.”
The Washington that Lincoln and his contemporaries read about did not only promote religion publicly; he observed it privately as well. Ramsay writes of the first president: “The friend of morality and religion, he steadily attended on public worship; encouraged and strengthened the hands of the clergy; and in all his public acts made the most respectful mention of Providence. In a word, he carried from private life into his public administration the spirit of piety, a dependence upon the supreme governor of the universe.”
Weems’s Washington is even more pious than Ramsay’s. In Weems’s biography, the young George is taught to believe in God by his father, who in a crucial scene teaches him that all the beautiful and useful things in the world did not come by chance but were of divine origin. It was “at that moment that the good Spirit of God ingrafted upon [George’s] heart that germ of piety, which filled his after life with so many of the precious fruits of morality.”22 As president, Weems’s Washington never misses church, no matter how pressing the national business is. As for the Farewell Address, that, Weems writes, was “about the length of an ordinary sermon” and “may do as much good to the people of America as any sermon ever preached, that DIVINE ONE on the mount excepted.” Washington’s death elicits from Weems a gush of piety even more rapturous than Harriet Beecher Stowe’s description of the death of the young Eva St. Clare in Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Washington is escorted heavenward: “Swift on angels’ wings the brightening saint ascended; while voices more than human were heard (in fancy’s ear), warbling through the happy regions, hymning the great procession, towards the gates of heaven.”
Weems’s and Ramsay’s readers could not know what historians have discovered: Washington was not nearly as devout as many Americans of that time wanted to believe. Although he was an Episcopalian, his church attendance was irregular, and he rarely, if ever, took communion. He was extremely private about his religious views, which seem to have been closer to deism than to Christianity. On his deathbed, he did not call for a member of the clergy. It is unclear if he believed in an afterlife.23
But he did believe in the utility of religion as a means of fostering morality and unity in America. He saw the need of the religious spirit for supporting democratic institutions, and he did not privilege one religion or denomination over another.
In this regard, he was like another Founder with whom Lincoln was deeply familiar, Benjamin Franklin. In Indiana, the twelve-year-old Lincoln, at his father’s request, reportedly read aloud to the family sections of The Life of Dr. Benjamin Franklin, Written by Himself, a 1793 version of Franklin’s classic autobiography, which appeared in 1818 in a longer form as the multivolume Memoirs of the Life and Writings of Benjamin Franklin, which Lincoln also apparently read. Franklin, raised a Calvinistic Congregationalist, as a young man became a thoroughgoing deist—that is, one who puts Christianity on the same level as Islam, Judaism, and all other religions. Dismissing established churches as oppressive human inventions, deists believed in God’s laws—scientific principles controlling the physical universe—as written in the Book of Nature. Reason apprehends these laws, and conscience leads humans to choose between right and wrong and follow the path of virtue. Franklin wrote a deistic pamphlet and won over two close friends to his newfound philosophy. However, he soon discovered that deism opened him up to sharp criticism, and he decided that, as he put it, “this doctrine, though it might be true, was not very useful.”24 After giving out some copies of his freethinking pamphlet, he destroyed the remaining ones and said little overtly about deism for the rest of his life.
Although Lincoln, like the Founders, was a rationalist who viewed church religion skeptically, he could look to them for moral and spiritual guidance. After all, Franklin, Jefferson, and Thomas Paine had performed good works and had founded a mighty nation. And they were religious, in their own way. Although Jefferson as president carefully respected the separation of church and state, even he invoked “a benign religion, . . . acknowledging and adoring an overruling providence” in his 1801 inaugural address, which was included in an anthology that the young Lincoln read, The Kentucky Preceptor.25 And Washington, despite his guardedness about his own faith, nonetheless insisted on religion as a necessary support for democratic institutions. Lincoln, in this respect, was like Washington—secretive about his own religion, but innovative and insistent on the uses of religion in American public life. Like a deist, he rarely took sides among religions, and his tolerance of many faiths was remarkable. For him, as for Washington, the religious spirit held the potential of stabilizing and unifying a fragmented nation.
Lincoln also resembled Franklin, who rejected the Calvinistic faith of his childhood, turned for a time to deism, and then espoused a pragmatic religion based on good deeds. In one of the rare moments that he discussed his private beliefs, Lincoln declared he would join a church if he found one whose only requirement was to follow the Golden Rule.26 This was essentially the view of Franklin and the other Founders, who escaped the confines of a single church without abandoning religion altogether.
SELF-MAKING AND VIRTUE
Franklin, who had risen from humble beginnings to the highest realms of achievement, established in his autobiography the self-made man stereotype that by Lincoln’s time had become part of the nation’s cultural fabric. Franklin’s autobiography stood as a how-to guide for Americans who wanted to advance, including the young Lincoln, who must have taken notice of the famous list of thirteen virtues that Franklin observed. How did Lincoln measure up to these virtues? Six of them—Moderation, Temperance, Tranquility, Humility, Sincerity, and Justice—were ones for which Lincoln undeniably deserved high marks. Franklin’s statement about Moderation, “Avoid extremes,” defined Lincoln more clearly than any other conceivable phrase.27 As a Northerner from a Southern background who could claim both Puritan and, in his mind, Cavalier roots, Lincoln was by nature prepared to take a middling course that, in the end, proved to be the salvation of the nation. He could take his place securely in the center because he had a genuine understanding of both antislavery and proslavery extremists that led him to see that radical militancy could, if carried through, destroy the Union.
Industry, another of Franklin’s virtues, was demonstrated in Lincoln’s youth. Lincoln once said that his father taught him how to work but not how to enjoy it. The work he referred to here was manual labor—the kind of work frontiersmen and farmers did. But felling and mauling trees had a positive impact on Lincoln’s career, for these frontier jobs fed the popular image of Lincoln as the Illinois Rail-splitter, which helped get him elected president. Even when he shirked manual labor in his youth, Lincoln was preparing for the future. Dennis Hanks declared, “Lincoln was lazy—a very lazy man—he was always reading—scribbling—writing—ciphering—writing poetry &., &.”28 In his account of Industry, Franklin advises, “[B]e always employed in something useful: cut off all unnecessary actions.” But the activities that Hanks saw as signs of laziness were actually very useful to Lincoln in the Franklinian sense. Just as learning to read was Frederick Douglass’s path to freedom and influence, so the young Lincoln’s pursuit of reading, ciphering, and writing poetry lay behind his later success in redefining the nation through eloquent, well-reasoned language.29
His reading spurred his precocious ambitiousness. In Dilworth’s Spelling-Book he would have read, “He that will not help himself, shall have help from nobody.”30 In Scott’s Lessons in Elocution, he received similar counsel: “Whatever you pursue, be emulous to excel.” Lincoln took such advice to heart. When he was a teenager in Indiana, a neighbor, Elizabeth Crawford, scolded him for teasing girls and asked, “What do you Expect will become of you?” She recalled his confident reply: “‘Be Presdt of the US,’ promptly responded Abe . . . He said that he would be Presdt of the US told my
husband so often—Said it jokingly—yet with a Smack of deep Earnestness in his Eye & tone.”31 William Herndon confirmed, “He was always calculating, and always planning ahead. His ambition was a little engine that knew no rest.”32
Lincoln’s record on Franklin’s virtue of Tranquility was mixed. Periodically, Lincoln erupted in anger—as a lawyer against churlish or ungrateful clients, as president against visitors who pressured him too hard for favors, and so on. What was most remarkable, however, was how he kept calm in situations that would have traumatized the average person. “Through all his life, and through all the unexpected and stirring events of the rebellion,” his private secretaries Hay and Nicolay noted, “his personal manner was one of steadiness of word and act.”33 Had Lincoln been emotionally unstable, Herndon added, he “would have lost—lost, all, all.”34 Fortunately for the nation, he was practical, patient, and cool.
Humility, another of Franklin’s virtues, became one of Lincoln’s signature qualities. In his first speech as a fledgling Illinois politician, as a friend recalled, the ungainly, simply attired Lincoln announced, “Gentlemen and citizens. I assume you know who I am. I am humble Abraham Lincoln.”35 Like Franklin’s self-effacing Poor Richard, the roughhewn Lincoln appealed to the American masses because he seemed to be on their level.
Lincoln was also honest in the sense of Franklin, who wrote of Sincerity: “Use no hurtful deceit.” Lincoln’s sincerity, in a pragmatic Franklinian sense, cannot be denied. Lincoln seemed like an anomaly: a frontiersman, lawyer, and politician with an indisputable air of honesty. The Illinois attorney Samuel C. Parks, identifying as Lincoln’s major trait “integrity in the longest sense of that term,” noted, “I have often said that for a man who was for a quarter of a century both a lawyer & a politician he was the most honest man I ever knew.”36 And he was honest from an early age, as was testified by his stepmother, who recalled, “He never told me a lie in his life—never Evaded—never Equivocated never dodged.”37 It was no surprise that the masses came to know him as Honest Abe.
In heeding justice whenever he could, Lincoln revealed his debt to the Scottish Common Sense philosophy to which he was exposed in his youth. Having emerged from Edinburgh in the early eighteenth century and having spread to England, the Continent, and America, Scottish Common Sense taught that every person is born with a conscience—a knowledge of the distinction between right and wrong—and that through reason and the exercise of virtue one could follow that conscience. The young Lincoln got a heavy infusion of Common Sense philosophy from his early reading, not only from Franklin but also from William Scott’s Lessons in Elocution and Lindley Murray’s Reader, which contain pieces by the Edinburgh thinker Hugh Blair (1718–1800) and others of the Common Sense school. A typical passage in Scott’s book reads: “Let fame be regarded, but conscience much more. It is an empty joy to appear better than you are; but a great blessing to be what you ought to be.”38 Murray’s book is equally insistent on the moral sense, as in this statement: “Listen with reverence to every reprehension of conscience; and preserve the most quick and accurate sensibility to right and wrong.”
What was truly unusual about Lincoln was that he firmly distinguished between right and wrong without maintaining that he was following direct commands from God. He realized that the idea that God takes sides leads to narrowness and, at worst, bloodshed. It was important, in his view, for humans to believe in a Divine Being but equally important for them not to pretend to understand God’s purposes.
Lincoln has often been called a fatalist—an accurate assessment, as long as we understand that he was not a pessimistic one. His was not the fatalism of, say, Jonathan Edwards, who insisted that most humans were predestined to hell—a notion Lincoln found repulsive—nor was it the gloomy determinism of later American authors, such as Frank Norris or Theodore Dreiser, who saw humans as pawns amid material forces.
Lincoln’s view was more in line with the optimistic fatalism he found in Alexander Pope’s “An Essay on Man,” a poem that was included in his childhood anthologies and that long remained a touchstone for him. As president, Lincoln once told a British visitor that he thought “An Essay on Man” “contained all the religious instruction which it was necessary for a man to know.” The president asked the visitor if they knew any wiser lines than the concluding ones of the poem’s First Epistle, which Lincoln recited from memory:
All Nature is but art, unknown to thee;
All chance, direction, which thou canst not see;
All discord, harmony not understood;
All partial evil, universal good:
And, spite of pride in erring reason’s spite,
One truth is clear, whatever is, is right.
When the visitor praised the beauty of the passage, Lincoln smiled and said, “Yes, that’s a convenient line, too, that last one. You see, a man may turn it, and say, ‘Well if whatever is is right, why then, whatever isn’t must be Wrong.” Lincoln laughed heartily, and his visitor joined in.39
Beneath the humor lay Lincoln’s sober recognition that right and wrong were, after all, relative. The best one could do, he realized, was to attempt to align good works with one’s sense of justice, without ever being assured that one knew God’s plan. In Pope’s terms, that plan was “unknown to thee,” “not understood,” something “thou canst not see.” Nonetheless, in Pope’s view, “direction,” “harmony,” and “universal good” were there, even though they were hidden from “erring reason.”
Charity and benevolence were also well instilled in him in his youthful reading. The famous last paragraph of the Second Inaugural Address, which extends charity to all—including the widow, the orphan, and all nations—echoes the all-compassing benevolence recommended in Lindley Murray’s Reader (“We should cherish sentiments of charity towards all men”) and in William Scott’s Lessons in Elocution: “From charitable and benevolent thoughts, the transition is unavoidable to charitable actions . . . toward nations, communities of men, and individuals,” including “the dying parent and the weeping orphan.”40
The compassion promoted in these books extended to animals as well. Scott includes a piece in which Hugh Blair writes, “Never sport with pain and distress in any of your amusements, nor treat even the meanest insect with wanton cruelty”—a sentiment Lincoln also found in Noah Webster’s Spelling Book, which advises: “It is wrong to give needless pain even to a beast. Cruelty to the brutes shows a man has a hard heart, and if a man is unfeeling to a beast, he will not have much feeling for men.”41
Whether from the influence of such passages or from the promptings of his own nature, Lincoln from a young age took a stand against cruelty to animals. Like most Americans of the time, he considered eating meat necessary, but he treated the animals he encountered with respect and avoided killing them for sport. His attitude toward animals—and toward nature generally—merits discussion on its own, for it powerfully influenced his politics, his language, and his philosophy
