Lincoln confirmed his acceptance of Paine and other deists in conversations with friends in Illinois. James H. Matheny recalled that Lincoln “would talk about Religion—pick up a Bible—read a passage—and then Comment on it—show its falsity and its follies on the ground of Reason—would then show its own self made & self uttered Contradictions and would in the End—finally ridicule it and as it were Scoff at it.”20 Abe did more than just talk. While living in New Salem, he wrote what was called “a little Book on Infidelity”—his own version of The Age of Reason.21 In this unpublished manuscript, he attacked the supernatural underpinnings of the Bible, such as the Virgin Birth, the miracles of Christ, and the Resurrection. In essence, he did what Jefferson had done when he used a sharp blade to remove supernatural references from the Bible, or what Franklin did when he laid out
six simple precepts of a universal religion, which retained God, moral rules, and the afterlife but omitted the Bible.22
Like Franklin, however, Lincoln soon learned that deism, while perhaps true, was not useful. The New Salem store owner Sam Hill, though a disbeliever himself, read Lincoln’s skeptical book and knew at once that it must not be published. Hill “had an eye to Lincoln’s popularity—his present and future success; and believing that, if the book were published, it would kill Lincoln forever, he snatched it from Lincoln’s hand” and tossed it into a stove, where the flames devoured it.23 Nonetheless, Lincoln’s reputation as a deist spread locally, hampering his political ambitions. He ran for the Illinois state legislature four times—in 1832, 1834, 1836, in 1840—and, tellingly, lost the first election to the Democratic preacher Peter Cartwright, who made deism an issue then and raised it again later, when he ran against Lincoln for the US Congress in 1846. Lincoln managed to win the latter election after he published a carefully worded handbill saying that though “I am not a member of any Christian church, . . . I have never denied the truth of the Scriptures: and I’ve never spoken with intentional disrespect of religion in general, or of any denomination of Christian in particular.” He added that he could never support a political candidate who openly criticized religion.24
This denial of religious infidelity reveals the political Lincoln who feared he would lose the religious vote if he openly avowed deism. He was right. For instance, James Matheny’s father, a devout Methodist, loved Lincoln “with all his soul” and yet “hated to vote for him because he heard that Lincoln was an Infidel.” Matheny added, “Many Religious—Christian Whigs hated to vote for Lincoln on that account.”25 With such potential loss of a major voting bloc, Matheny maintained, Lincoln, in the years after his reentry into politics in 1854, “played a sharp game here on the Religious world . . . well Knowing that the old infidel, if not Atheistic charge would be made & proved against him,” and to fend it off, he presented himself as “a seeker after Salvation” in an effort to win Christian voters. For Matheny, Lincoln “often if not whol[l]y was an atheist,” but “as he grew older he grew more discrete—didn’t talk much before Strangers about his religion, but to friends—close and bosom ones he was always open & avowed”—a conclusion shared by William Herndon, who called Lincoln “an Agnostic generally, sometimes an Atheist.”26
It’s more accurate, however, to place emphasis on Matheny’s term “seeker.” If Lincoln was on a quest for the meaning of words, he also sought a higher meaning to life.
A distinction must be made between private and public religion as they relate to Lincoln. Privately, Lincoln’s religion adapted to circumstances and was secret. Several of Lincoln’s closest friends confessed that they knew nothing about his religious views. From the slim evidence we have we can say that while he placed little faith in doctrines or churches, he believed in a powerful, unknowable God, in moral standards, and in the Bible, which he saw as a repository of wisdom, despite what he regarded as its inconsistencies. Although he evidently never experienced a life-altering religious conversion, there were times, as after the death of his son Willie, that he gratefully received the consolation offered by Christian ministers.
He saw clearly the practical uses of religion in the public sphere, not only for politicians but in the American population at large, for whom religion was a source of unity and uplift. But he was loath to identify a particular religion as being worthier than another. Like Emerson and Whitman, he admired a general, nondenominational religious spirit that he hoped as president to disseminate through his religious proclamations.
Personally, Lincoln was in a period of rebellion against organized religion during his early years in Illinois. In 1831, shortly after arriving in New Salem, he discovered what became his all-time favorite poem, “Mortality,” by the Scottish author William Knox. This bleak poem, all fifty-six lines
of which Lincoln committed to memory, delivers, in verse after verse, the point that life is short, happiness is fleeting, and power and glory, no matter how great, are doomed to disappear. Lincoln once said that he would give everything he had to be able to write a poem like “Mortality.” His love of the poem became so well known that it was sometimes mistakenly attributed to Lincoln himself. The poem’s anxious opening line, “O why should the spirit of mortal be proud!,” leads to the repeated message that there is no reason for pride because all human achievements—indeed all humans—are short-lived. In rolling anapests, the poem mentions people of different phases and stations—infants, mothers, fathers, maidens, beggars, priests, kings—all of whom are soon “hidden and lost in the depths of the grave.” And as the last verse reminds us, it all happens quickly:
’Tis the wink of an eye,—’tis the draught of a breath—
From the blossom of health to the paleness of death,
From the gilded saloon to the bier and the shroud—
O why should the spirit of mortal be proud!27
“Mortality” is close in theme to another poem Lincoln memorized, William Cullen Bryant’s “Thanatopsis,” which Lincoln encountered in the 1840s on a visit to his wife’s family. Like Knox’s “Mortality,” Bryant’s poem emphasizes the shortness of life; everyone, Bryant writes, is destined “to be a brother of the insensible rock / And to the sluggish clod,” to be tossed by the worker’s shovel and pierced by tree roots. In picturing the earth as “one mighty sepulchre,” “the great tomb of man,” Bryant underscores the sheer physicality of death.28
In Lincoln’s attraction to such gloomy poems we see a mind stoically confronting the possibility of nothingness after death. In this respect, he was distant not only from the era’s evangelical religion, which centered on one’s eternal prospects, but also from mainstream liberal Protestantism, which increasingly emphasized the so-called Good Death: the assurance of a comfortable passage to heaven and a reunion with loved ones there. The Good Death had many manifestations in nineteenth-century popular culture, including Eva St. Clare’s joyous flight heavenward in Uncle Tom’s Cabin, in efforts to meliorate the deaths of Civil War soldiers, and in bestselling novels about a blissful afterlife, such as Elizabeth Stuart Phelps’s trilogy about heaven, The Gates Ajar, Beyond the Gates, and The Gates Between.29 Lincoln himself was not immune to the appeal of the Good Death, as evidenced by the adornments surrounding Willie’s open coffin during the White House funeral in 1862.30
In reflective moments, however, Lincoln considered honestly the possibility of death succeeded by dissolution. It would seem that in the New Salem years he reached a point where, as Hawthorne reported of Melville, “he had pretty much made up his mind to be annihilated.”31 When a New Salem neighbor, Parthena Hill, asked Lincoln, “Do you really believe there isn’t any future state?” he replied soberly, “Mrs. Hill, I’m afraid there isn’t. It isn’t a pleasant thing to think that when we die that is the last of us.”32
His obsession with death explains his passion for works by the Graveyard Poets, especially Thomas Gray, and the Dark Romantics, Byron in particular. One of his favorite Byron poems, “Darkness,” is a chilling picture of lifelessness. The poem’s speaker reports “a dream, which was not all a dream” about an immense space in which everything is rotting, burning, or bloody—and, finally, empty. In the dream, stars “did wander darkling in the eternal space, / Rayless, and pathless,” while “the icy earth / Swung blind and blackening in the moonless air,”; “The world was void, / . . . Seasonless, herbless, treeless, manless, lifeless”; the ocean was dead, the winds “were wither’d in the stagnant air.” The poem ends in blackness: “Darkness had no need / Of aid from them—She was the universe!”33
To think of Lincoln enjoying such all-nullifying poetry seems, on the surface, at odds with his reputation for humorous storytelling and his alignment with Whig politics, which was dedicated to actively improving society physically and morally. Actually, though, his taste for literature that verged on the nihilistic reveals his impulse to take what neurophilsophers call a ruthlessly reductive approach to the world—that is, he considered its most basic features.34 To strip away all familiar things and gaze into the void, as he did when reading a poem like Byron’s “Darkness,” was to risk losing one’s philosophical bearings and to make one vulnerable to depression. Indeed it would seem that philosophical angst, produced by a perception of life’s meaninglessness in the vast scheme of things, contributed to his repeated spells of melancholy, which he called “the hypo.”35 He was at times akin to Melville, who, in Hawthorne’s words, could “neither believe, nor be comfortable in his unbelief” and was “too honest and too courageous not to try to do one or the other.”36
On the other hand, facing the void had positive effects as well. It generated in Lincoln a cosmic democracy. If all humans were on the same level in the face of death—we all disappear and, probably, resolve into nothingness—then social distinctions, hardened religious views, and the instinct to domineer over or enslave others are in vain. As Knox’s poem insistently declares, “Why should the spirit of mortal be proud!” Universal equality mocks false pride and narrows views. We all end up with the “insensible rock” and the “sluggish clod.” Walt Whitman famously proclaimed this ruthlessly reductive democracy: “For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.”37 In this cosmically egalitarian scheme, we must strive to put aside petty differences that lead to oppression and, in the worst case, war.
Given this outlook, it is understandable that Lincoln during his time in New Salem took a special liking to William Shakespeare and Robert Burns. Lincoln enjoyed reading and reciting these authors in the company of John (Jack) Kelso, who arrived in New Salem in 1831 from Kentucky with his wife and two of her relatives. Reportedly an ex-schoolteacher, Kelso, stout at five feet ten and two hundred pounds, got by on odd jobs in New Salem, preferring fishing and hunting to regular work. Kelso has been harshly treated by some Lincoln biographers. David Donald calls him “fat, lazy,” Carl Sandburg depicts him as a genial drunkard, and Albert Beveridge characterizes him as “utterly worthless.”38 Such dismissals do a disservice to Kelso, who was close to Lincoln and had a notable influence on him. “Kelso and Lincoln were great friends,” recalled the New Salemite Hardin Bale, “always together—always talking and arguing.”39 Lincoln boarded with Kelso and his family for a time. William Greene found that Kelso was “an excellent reliable man.” Other neighbors saw Kelso and Lincoln sitting on the bank of the Sangamon River, Jack casting for fish while both of them were engaged in conversations about Shakespeare and Burns.
Lincoln had encountered snippets of Shakespeare in school anthologies, but under Kelso’s influence he expanded his knowledge, which eventually became quite broad: on the Illinois law circuit, as Henry Whitney testified, “he read Shakespeare through, and much of it over and over again”; John Hay, his White House secretary, said, “He read Shakespeare more than all other writers together.”40 He was especially drawn to Macbeth, Hamlet, and King Lear, but he was familiar with a range of other tragedies, the history plays, and comedies like A Midsummer Night’s Dream and The Merry Wives of Windsor. In light of his temperament and his cultural tastes, we understand why he was drawn to Shakespeare, who takes the wildest, most disruptive aspects of human experience—madness, violence, perversity, malicious jealousy, greed, vindictiveness—and renders them in exquisitely calibrated lines whose rhythms are subtly adapted to human emotion and whose wonderful images turn even horror into a form of beauty. If Lincoln in daily life swung between humorous performance and gloomy meditation, so did Shakespeare in his plays, some comic and others tragic, with constant tonal shifts in individual works, as in his use of the Fool in his tragedies.
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