Reading With Lincoln

4. Necessity and Invention

140 4. Necessity and Invention There are no accidents in my philosophy. —Abraham Lincoln, in Herndon’s Lincoln In the congressional race of 1846, when partisans of the Democratic candidate and militant Methodist preacher Peter Cartwright accused Abraham Lincoln of “infidelity”—a renewal of whisperings about his New Salem and early Springfield freethinking radicalism—and Democrats pushed him hard on the issue, Lincoln late in the campaign issued a handbill in which he cleverly defused the charges without actually denying them.1 We need here be concerned only with a single phrase from Lincoln’s defense: the “Doctrine of Necessity.” He defined this as the human mind’s being “impelled to action, or held in rest by some power, over which the mind itself has no control.” Because Lincoln went on to associate the Doctrine of Necessity with “several of the Christian denominations” and then declared that he had “left off” holding such a view for “more than five years,” scholars have generally assumed that he was speaking of his boyhood Baptist Calvinism having, as it were, hung over into his mature years.2 And this may very well be true: God’s eternal decrees, the universe’s i’s dotted and its t’s crossed even before Creation. Historian Allen Guelzo argues in “Abraham Lincoln and the Doctrine of Necessity” that the Calvinism of the Lincoln family’s Baptist subdenominations in Kentucky and Indiana was unrelentingly doctrinal about predestination and election.3 As a generalization, this is reasonable, though there is room for some nuance among modes of Baptist theology. While the boy Lincoln did not follow his parents in joining the church, he could not have escaped Calvinism’s midnight moon shadow, further obscuring a temperament already predisposed to melancholy. The Calvinism of frontier Baptist sects—whether “Regular,” “Separate,” or “Primitive” (or “Hard-Shell”)—might be variously %UD\&KLQGG $0 Necessity and Invention 141 mild or severe, depending on the preacher’s and congregation’s attention to the letter of the theological law, yet ever present in one version or another. The Lincolns had come from Kentucky as Separate Baptists (no written creed) but eventually associated with the Regular Baptist (formal creed) Little Pigeon Church in Indiana, after these Separate and Regular branches had declared for union. The Little Pigeon articles of faith unsurprisingly included the key predestinarian tenet: “we believe in Election by grace given in Christ Jesus Before the world began & that God Cawls regenerates & Sanctifies all who are made meat for Glory by his special grace.”4 That Calvinism made bitter-tasting food for thought to the young Lincoln is altogether likely. And for historian Stewart Winger, some variant of theological determinism remained with Lincoln throughout his life, a more profound influence than humanistic or scientific accounts of free will or its absence in human affairs.5 Arguably, however, Calvinism was the beginning rather than the end of his thinking about determinism. Guelzo asserts a later intellectual source in the utilitarianism of Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill, though Lincoln is not known to have read Bentham and seems only to have dabbled in Mill.6 The balance, then, would seem to teeter toward the theological end of the beam. There is, however, another possible source, a philosophical one, for the Doctrine of Necessity : David Hume’s Inquiry concerning Human Understanding (1748). The exact phrase in just the sense Lincoln uses it occurs several times in the Inquiry (and occasionally elsewhere in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century philosophy). Here is the classic Humean formulation of the Doctrine of Necessity: “It is universally allowed, that matter, in all its operations, is actuated by a necessary force, and that every natural effect is so precisely determined by the energy of its cause, that no other effect, in such particular circumstances, could possibly have resulted from it.”7 William Herndon recalled that one day Lincoln had remarked to him, “There are no accidents in my philosophy. Every effect must have its cause. The past is the cause of the present, and the present will be the cause of the future. All these are links in the endless chain stretching from the finite to the infinite.”8 This viewpoint corresponds closely to that of Hume by way of John Locke and Thomas Hobbes. While Lincoln might have come to his deterministic metaphysical view either on his own, or from somewhere else in his desultory reading, it is worth our trouble to propose, hypothetically, the influence of Hume. At a minimum, the...