Lincoln and Religion

3. Lincoln as the Center of America’s Civil Religion

57 c h a p t e r t h r e e Lincoln as the Center of America’s Civil R eligion Shortly after the assassination of the president, Ralph Waldo Emerson described Lincoln as “the true historian of the American people in his time.” And throughout the saga of the Civil War, some people pondered whether he would serve his country even more by his death than with his life. That, of course, is exactly what occurred, as Abraham Lincoln evolved into a new role, becoming the nation’s civic father. When countries around the world heard the news of Lincoln’s assassination , their people were shocked. Letters of condolences poured in to the nation’s capital. In March 1867, the U.S. Congress passed a resolution to publicly publish this correspondence in a large, sevenhundred -page volume that was then sent to each of the states. The majority of the condolences represent Victorian formality, but they are also very revealing regarding the sentiment of the world in the spring of 1865. Lincoln’s observation that the United States represented “the last best hope of earth” found an echo in the resolutions of the working classes of the United Kingdom that rejoiced at “the complete falsification of the statements that American institutions were a failure.” The Dublin Daily Express said that all Irishmen, regardless of their politics, would regard the assassination as the most horrible catastrophe in history. The consul general at Florence wrote that Lincoln was not just an American, “he was also ours.” The Mexican government ordered all civil employees to wear mourning 58 | Center of America’s Civil Religion for nine days. Still, nothing in the formal condolences matched the Manchester schoolboys’ cheer in the late 1860s. When asked who was the greatest man outside the United Kingdom, the schoolboys shouted loudly, “Abraham Lincoln!” as if he were still alive. The mythological dimension of Lincoln’s life took hold immediately , and, characteristically, the myth has retained its strength through the many generations that have followed. As theologian Reinhold Niebuhr has noted, myth carries far more power than mere facts, for myth touches the transcendent in a way that mere facts cannot reach. According to Lloyd Lewis’s Myths after Lincoln, the farmers in Illinois swore that the brown thrush did not sing for a full year after Lincoln’s assassination. Further, in the 1890s, when Lincoln’s log cabin began to attract interest, drawing on the power of his humble roots, the logs that supposedly composed his family’s Kentucky home went on a popular nationwide tour. On July 21, 1887, Robert T. Lincoln deeded the family house to the state of Illinois. Strangely enough, official celebration of Lincoln’s February 12 birthday proved irregular. Months after his death, Congress passed a joint resolution calling for a speech marking Lincoln’s fifty-seventh birthday on February 12, 1866, but it was not until 1891 that Hannibal Hamlin of Maine (Lincoln’s first vice president) began a campaign to turn February 12 into a national holiday. The movement grew slowly, but by the time of Lincoln’s centenary, many southern states seemed more than ready to join in. In 1909, President Theodore Roosevelt, who as a boy had watched Lincoln’s cortege move through New York City, declared February 12 a legal holiday in the District of Columbia and U.S. territories. By 1938, at least twenty-seven states also officially celebrated the holiday. In 1971, Congress decided to combine Lincoln’s and Washington’s birthdays into one holiday, making the third Monday of February Presidents’ Day. Equally important, and supported by the Lincoln Life Insurance Company of Fort Wayne, Indiana, which guided the restoration of Indiana’s role in shaping Lincoln’s youth, the Boy Scouts began a campaign to march every February 12 to the Abraham Lincoln: The Hoosier Youth statue at Fort Wayne’s Lincoln Museum for an Center of America’s Civil Religion | 59 appropriate ceremony. In 1909, the Lincoln family’s log cabin in Kentucky was enshrined in a Grecian-style temple near Hodgenville. The Civilian Conservation Corps’ superb restoration of the village of New Salem, Illinois, during the 1930s offered yet another shrine for Lincoln, followed by the 1963 consecration of Lincoln’s homestead as Indiana’s first national park and the opening of the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum in Springfield, Illinois, in 2004 and 2005...