-
Historiography on Lincoln and Religion by Richard W. Etulain
- Southern Illinois University Press
- Chapter
- Additional Information
73 Historiogr aphy on Lincoln and R eligion Richard W. Etulain In the nearly sixteen thousand books written about Abraham Lincoln , a handful of subjects have captured major attention. Lincoln as a politician active in party politics has undoubtedly gained the most space, but studies of Lincoln and race have become particularly popular since the 1960s. In another area, examinations of Lincoln’s attitudes about slavery and his role in the Emancipation Proclamation overlap his political activities and his statements about race. Historians and biographers have also focused on the subject of Abraham Lincoln and religion. Indeed, the increasing interest in this topic in the past half century makes it one of the half dozen or so most emphasized Lincoln subjects. The interpretations of Lincoln and religion divide into three rather well defined periods. In the first half century after Lincoln’s death, stories of Lincoln as a devout Christian or as a rational nonbeliever competed for dominance. In the next fifty years, up to the mid-1960s, interest in Lincoln as a religious thinker or participant plummeted, nearly disappearing from the historiographical scene. But in the two generations and more since the 1960s, Lincoln and religion has returned as a popular subject among Lincoln scholars and biographers. In fact, in the last twenty years, Lincoln’s religious ideas and their influences on his political choices have become a major subject of discussion. In the foregoing pages, Ferenc M. Szasz illustrates well this recent trend in linking Lincoln’s religious ideas to his political decisions. This essay attempts, very briefly, to trace these historiographical currents. Books and essays mentioned here in abbreviated form are fully cited in the volume’s appended bibliography. By the early years of the twentieth century, two conflicting views of Abraham Lincoln and religion were in place. They had evolved from early interpretations appearing soon after Lincoln’s assassination 74 | Historiography on Lincoln and Religion in April 1865. At one end of the spectrum were writers like Josiah Holland , whose best-selling Life of Abraham Lincoln (1866) portrayed the sixteenth president as “eminently a Christian.” A strongly committed Christian himself, Holland had little trouble portraying Lincoln as a devoutly religious man who knew the Bible and became more faithful as a horrendous war pressed in on him. Isaac N. Arnold, a long-time congressman from Illinois and Lincoln’s friend, turned the president into a virtual saint in a summing-up chapter (674–90) in his The History of Abraham Lincoln and the Overthrow of Slavery (1866). In similar fashion, in his book The Life and Public Services of Abraham Lincoln (1865), newspaperman Henry J. Raymond, drawing on the remembrances of portrait artist “Frank” Carpenter, asserted of Lincoln “a sincerer Christian I believe never lived,” although he admitted Lincoln “could scarcely be called a religious man, in the common acceptation of the term” (731). At the other end of the spectrum, far from those who portrayed Lincoln as an orthodox Christian, was William Herndon, Lincoln’s third law partner. Convinced that Holland and others portraying Lincoln as a man of faith were producing “all bosh,” Herndon asserted that reason, not blind devotion, guided Lincoln. Herndon never completed his own full biography of his law partner, but he gave public lecturers that included descriptions of Lincoln as a skeptic or nonbeliever. Herndon also funneled off his research, particularly his invaluable interviews and oral histories, to other writers who wrote books about Lincoln as a religious doubter. The earliest of these book-length studies was The Life of Abraham Lincoln (1872), said to be authored by Ward H. Lamon, Lincoln’s acquaintance and bodyguard, but actually ghostwritten by Chauncey F. Black. The volume included little about religion but did state that “perhaps no phase of his [Lincoln’s] character has been more persistently misrepresented and variously misunderstood, than this of his religious belief” (486). Lamon and Black incorporated quotes from several of Lincoln’s intimate acquaintances to substantiate their view that Lincoln was an unorthodox Christian, primarily a freethinker who did not accept the divinity of Christ or the inspiration of the Bible. When Herndon finally found a willing collaborator in Jesse W. Weik, [34.228.43.90] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 10:56 GMT) Historiography on Lincoln and Religion | 75 they coauthored Herndon’s Lincoln: The True Story of a Great Life (1889) in three volumes. The authors were straightforward in their conclusions: “Lincoln was enthusiastic in his infidelity” (Wilson and Davis, Herndon’s Lincoln, 266...