Lincoln and the American Manifesto (review)

Lincoln and the American Manifesto provides a probing and present-minded account of the political and religious thinking of America's most famous wartime president. In so doing, it also offers a provocative, if oversimplified and often redundant, intellectual biography of the nation.

Not one to shy away from a fight, Allen Jayne challenges the scholarship on multiple fronts. He begins by taking on recent historians who have "engaged in an ascending order of criticism of the American Revolution" and "condemned the Founders' prudential compromise with slavery" (13). Building on his earlier work on Thomas Jefferson and the Enlightenment, Jayne praises the Declaration of Independence's "all-inclusive" "deistic idealism," demonstrating how it established a moral standard—a manifesto based on natural laws—around which democracy could eventually be fulfilled (14–15). From here, the author draws a mostly direct line from Jefferson and his intellectual brother Thomas Paine through the Unitarian Transcendentalist Theodore Parker and ultimately to Abraham Lincoln. Jayne thus challenges numerous historians (Garry Wills, Alan Guelzo, John Diggins to name a few) who have suggested that later in life Romanticism or personal conversion led Lincoln back toward orthodox Christianity. Instead, in this very readable and highly sympathetic account, Jayne attempts to show that heterodox religion (defined as a rejection of original sin) and the Declaration of Independence remained Lincoln's "ancient faiths" from youth to death. The book ends with a lawyerly dissection of the Gettysburg Address and Lincoln's Second Inaugural, suggesting that even these public invocations of a providential God were mere political pandering or even subtle digs at mainstream Christianity.

Jayne's lack of cynicism allows him to explore the enduring nature of ideas and belief systems, underpinning them in refreshing, at times even informative, ways. Unfortunately for him and other scholars, however, Lincoln left no diary or long exposés to provide access to his personal confession or broader political thought. Consequently, the book's case is, at best, circumstantial, often based on hearsay or a highly subjective parsing of text. The author's unabashed skepticism and ironically Manichean worldview also obscures the subject more than it illuminates it. À la Peter Gay, Jayne sees the Enlightenment and Christian belief as almost always at odds with one another, the former always right, the latter generally wrong. Doing so rejects a significant amount of recent scholarship showing that Christian theologians—especially in Anglo-American circles—were quite comfortable with Enlightenment ideas and particularly with the concept of natural law. It also neglects the fact that secular worldviews could be, as Jefferson previewed and later Social Darwinists evidenced, at least as exclusive as religiously inspired ones.

More problematic, an overly reified understanding of nineteenth-century religious culture undermines some of the book's central contentions. In Jayne's text, Catholicism and all Protestant denominations are pretty much the same, both hopelessly wed to Augustine's concept of original sin and thus incapable of accepting the idea of human-led moral improvement. Such a theology might have informed the faith of Lincoln's ancestors; it did not, however, dominate the religious culture of Lincoln's America. In the wake of the Revolution and early-nineteenth-century Awakenings, most northern mainstream theologians and practitioners had moved away from Jayne's archetypal Christian, a Calvinist consumed by predestination. Instead, Methodists, Baptists, and even many Presbyterians offered millennial-inspired visions that urged individuals and communities towards God-guided but human-driven moral improvement and social uplift. Contrary to Jayne's view, human progress was a mantra shared by all. At best, Jayne demonstrates that Lincoln was not an orthodox Calvinist, but then again, by midcentury few American Christians were. Judged by this standard, Lincoln's political and religious thought may not have been nearly as countercultural as Jayne would have us believe. Indeed Lincoln's eventual greatness as a political leader and orator might derive from not just his commitment to Jeffersonian natural rights but his ability to transcend and translate them to...