ABRAHAM LINCOLN: Redeemer President

ABRAHAM LINCOLN: Redeemer President.

By Allen C. Guelzo. Eerdmans. 516 pp. $29

This rich and subtle study of Lincoln’s intellectual life well deserves to have received the prestigious Lincoln Prize; it is superb. Guelzo, a professor of history and dean of the honors program at Eastern College outside Philadelphia, argues that the 16th president was no orthodox Christian and in some sense not even a believer. Though he loved many passages in the Bible and drew great comfort from them, his bereavements, losses, and crushing disappointments had left him inwardly empty. It was next to impossible for him to experience God as Father (or even as Redeemer), given his own tyrannical father. The one thing he knew for certain was the inscrutability of a harsh if somehow just Judge, counseling the utmost humility and forbearance.

Undergirding this belief was the terrifying "doctrine of necessity" that Lincoln’s father dunned into the sensitive youth—as did, it sometimes seemed, Providence itself, through frequent visitations of death and setback. In Guelzo’s telling, this doctrine gave Lincoln unparalleled strength, an iron fatalism that enabled him to endure, and wait, and bear intense suffering, until the outcome manifested itself—as he knew it would, no matter his exertions. Given his fatalism, he learned early to bear inner pain with outward humor, warmth, and wisdom, "with malice toward none." At the same time, by a kind of back door, the doctrine gave him the keenest possible pleasures in whatever liberty daily life afforded, and he learned to love biblical texts such as those instructing the laborer to labor while letting the harvest rest in the hands of a wiser Providence.

One of my favorite passages considers Lincoln’s lifelong dislike for Jefferson, or at least for Jefferson’s agrarian fancies. Lincoln was inured to 14 hours a day of farm labor under his father with nary a penny to show for years of toil. All well and good for the owner of a plantation to praise honest farm labor; he knew little of it. One day, young Abe was asked to row two men out to a riverboat, and they flipped him two silver half-dollars for this brief exertion. "That day," Guelzo writes, Lincoln "met the cash economy." He became a capitalist for life, the very progenitor of land ownership (a renewed Homestead Act), of research and invention (the Morrill Land Grant Act), of "the fuel of interest" as the engine for economic betterment, and of liberty over slavery. Lincoln not only freed the slaves, he freed "white trash," too—indentured labor, quasi-serfs, slumbering rural oafs. His "new birth of freedom" was simultaneously a birth of industry, imagination, and discovery.

Without quibbling over the written record, I find Lincoln a bit more of a Christian than Guelzo does. Had Lincoln professed unmistakable Christian belief but failed, like so many of us, to practice it, what sort of orthodoxy would that be? If we do not find in him a clear profession of faith, we do find its practice. Shouldn’t that count for plenty?

—Michael Novak