Saving the Union: Solomon Schechter and Abraham Lincoln

“From roof tops and windows throughout the city flags waved in the breeze yesterday in honor of Lincoln’s memory,” the New York Times wrote on February 13, 1909. “At night,” the story continued, “when darkness shut out the sight of the flag display, electric signs on a few of the ‘skyscrapers’ told those in the streets that Lincoln’s memory was still being honored. On the top of Times Building the name ‘Lincoln’ in electric letters shone out conspicuously and could be seen for many miles. Just below, and on the top of the extention were two crossed flags in electric lights. These too, could be seen for miles.”²

Scenes like that played out all over the city, the entire United States, even throughout the world, honoring Lincoln for his character and for his vocation, for his wisdom and kindness, for his saving the Union and emancipating the slaves, above all for his sacrificing his life for the nation. Everyone, from soon to be outgoing President Theodore Roosevelt to Leo Tolstoy, eulogized the martyred hero of the republic. Roosevelt drew on his own memories, that of a six-year old boy in Manhattan who watched the funeral cortege process down Broadway, and who as an adult wore a ring bearing a few strands of Lincoln’s hair. He placed Lincoln in that most select of company, that of George Washington, as one of the two greatest Americans. The patrician lauded the humble hero of modest background “power was his, but not pleasure … [he] never faltered as he bore for a burden the destinies of his people.”³ Tolstoy painted Lincoln on an even larger canvas, that of world history, amidst the pantheon of giants like Alexander and Caesar, Frederick the Great, and Napoleon. They all lagged behind Lincoln in moral power, advanced the novelist, “in depth of feeling and in a certain moral power … he was a Christ in miniature, a saint of humanity.”⁴

These and the countless other recollections and appreciations of Lincoln testify to his cultural power, a power that in our own time arguably continues, at least for figures like the current president of the United States. In the words of an Englishwoman, Barbara Ward, “he is one of the very few of the world’s leaders who stay alive.” Numerous historians have written on the role Lincoln played in American history and the role his image played in our history. It then comes as no surprise that American Jews, like everyone else, invoked Lincoln. As for all Americans their communication with his image flowed two ways: Lincoln inspired them, led them, brought them closer to America’s story, and in return they mapped themselves on to Lincoln, so that when we hear or read them on Lincoln, we gain access to the process by which they fashioned themselves, or at least their image of themselves. In the words of David Donald, they aim at “getting right with Lincoln.”⁵

Solomon Schechter ranked as one of the more prominent Jews trying to get right with Lincoln. President of the Jewish Theological Seminary, eminent scholar, and a communal leader, Schechter loomed famous and important enough that on Sabbath eve, Friday night the 11th of February, he delivered an address on Lincoln at the Seminary in New York City, and the Times prominently featured the event in its centennial coverage of the next day, though not famous enough to prevent the paper’s misspelling of his name in its article entitled “New Analysis of Lincoln and Tributes in Poem and Prose” with the subtitle “An Intimate Study of His Character and Career by the Rev. Mr. Schlechter.”⁶

My essay takes on his essay, and what it can tell us about Schechter, American Jewry, and some of the religious currents in America at the time. And of course it adds a bit to the literature on Lincoln and the history of Lincolnalia, a subject field that in sheer number of publications Professor James McPherson told us fifteen years ago, ranked a solid third, trailing behind only Jesus and Shakespeare.⁷

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