A Man of Nineteenth-Century Ideas

Allen C. Guelzo. Abraham Lincoln: Redeemer President. Grand Rapids, Mich.: William B. Eerdmans Publ. Co., 1999. 516pp. Notes and index. $29.00

He is the president whom George W. Bush would most like to meet. Several major biographies have appeared in the last decade with reviews using words like "magisterial" and "definitive." A scholar in American Studies has written "A Novel of Young Lincoln." David Donald has offered two brief but warm "glimpses of Abraham Lincoln's family life." Mary Todd has had biographies both pro and con. And, presumably, Lincoln's Doctor's Dog would still qualify for the bestseller lists.

Why, then, another work, dedicated to Jack Kemp, based not on new information or sources but on a new reading of the old sources? Even more necessary a question, why write a biography of a man's struggle with religion and philosophy when the man himself did not know what he thought? A man who, we are told, began as a close reader of Jefferson but eventually became "an adversary" of most of Jefferson's worldview, who changed and shifted his politics, using religious themes addressing "a mysterious providence whose inscrutable and irresistible workings both baffled and comforted him."

Allen Guelzo's reason for writing this volume is to portray Lincoln as a person steeped in the contradictions, changes, and cross-currents of nineteenth-century intellectual life. Lincoln is reconsidered as a "man of ideas" rather than as a pragmatic politician or practical reformer. Raised a Calvinist, Lincoln abandoned those harsh tenets for Lockean Enlightenment, but found his loss of faith did not liberate him but was instead a constant source of unhappiness and isolation, requiring submission to "impersonal and unrecompensing law." His acceptance of classical liberalism was in the context of achieving the highest goals of progress only by appealing to "a set of ethical, even theological, principles" beyond the stated definition of liberalism. This "intellectual biography" or, more accurately perhaps, theological or philosophical biography, is meant to be of the nineteenth century itself as much or more than to be of the sixteenth president.

Ambitious for his nation, his party, and most particularly for himself, Lincoln developed not only a Northern and a Southern set of speeches, but an equally two-sided version of his own beliefs. However he may have struggled internally, he invoked the deity whenever it seemed wise to do so and had an equal number of irreverent jokes and comments. His contemporaries insisted after his death that he had really been a deist, or a secret convert to organized religion, or a confirmed skeptic, before settling on the appellation of "Christian Martyr" as the most useful if not the most accurate nomenclature.

Guelzo discusses the well-known melancholy, the "deep streak of despair, disappointment, and worthlessness," which overlay Lincoln's apparent content with domestic life and his public "Highlarity." Without (mercifully) putting the unhappy man on the couch or subjecting him to analysis, he suggests that the president's refusal to confront or understand his wife's "manic frenzies" was part of a large pattern of determinism and pessimism. Much is made of Lincoln's fondness for the poem "Mortality" by William Knox, which "oozed" futility and enforced his acceptance of the "Doctrine of Necessity," a belief that humans possessed neither free will nor moral responsibility for foreordained actions. Rudderless ships, the less-than-free humans can respond only to "motives," and the motive with the greatest power was "self." Echoing the correspondence of Jefferson and Adams in their last years, Lincoln tried to fit this diminished man into a politics that was still capable of occasional greatness. All men were slaves, to their lack of real freedom of will. The solution lay for Lincoln, as for many of his generation, in the "transformative power" of the market economy, which alone could succeed in effecting meaningful change. While the extension of this metaphysical enslavement to the actual enslaved African-American was long in coming...