Richard Carwardine - Lincoln: A Life of Purpose and Power

ALSO BY RICHARD CARWARDINE

Evangelicals and Politics in Antebellum America

Transatlantic Revivalism: Popular Evangelicalismin Britain and America, 17901865

AFTERWORD

He is one of those giant figures, of whom there are very few in history, who lose their nationality in death.

DAVID LLOYD GEORGE ON ABRAHAM LINCOLN

When this book was honored with the Lincoln Prize in 2004, it served as a reminder that Americans are not alone in their fascination with a president who stakes a compelling claim to being the greatest of the nations leaders. Indeed, one of the best and most durable of all the scholarly lives of Abraham Lincoln, as well as the earliest, was written by the British peer Godfrey Rathbone Benson, Lord Charnwood. In that study, published in 1916, the Oxford-educated Charnwood brought a sympathetic transatlantic eye to bear on Lincolns moral purpose, while avoiding the hagiography that had marked so many earlier biographies of the Great Emancipator. Charnwood encouraged his contemporaries to admire Lincolns single-minded defense of the American Union and, more important still, the presidents role in showing that democracy was a political philosophy that could work. Although the authors English bearings prompted the occasional local allusion (he described Bull Run as a stream about as broad as the Thames at Oxford but fordable), his essential vision was not provincial, but panoramic, even universal: the Liberal peer attributed to Lincoln a main role in what he called the wider cause of human good.1

During the era of the Great War and its aftermath there developed in Britain, particularly amongst liberals, what George Bernard Shaw called a cult of Lincoln. A copy of Augustus Saint-Gaudenss statue of a deeply contemplative Civil War president was erected in 1920 in Londons Parliament Square. At about the same time, a replica of George Barnards Cincinnati statue was placed in Manchester: known as the stomachache statue, since Lincolns hands unfortunately suggest a man troubled with colic, it commemorates the presidents tribute to suffering Lancashire mill operatives during the wartime cotton famine. Even before the war ended, the poet John Drinkwater had published a celebratory play, Abraham Lincoln. (Another writer, R. F. Delderfield, born in 1912, would have been christened Abraham Lincoln Delderfield had his Tory mother not overruled the wishes of his Liberal father.) David Lloyd George, by then an exprime minister, made a triumphal tour of North America in 1923. Feted as a wartime statesman of almost superhuman character (as the New York Times put it), he spent what he called the most memorable day of his life visiting the Kentucky birthplace of his lifelong hero; a little later, like other British pilgrims, he journeyed to Lincolns tomb at Springfield, Illinois. If the underlying reason for this devotion to Lincoln was the shared self-understanding of Britons and Americans as joint defenders of progressive government, dedicated to making the world safe for democracy, it was Charnwood in particular who had encouraged them to seize on Lincoln as an example of what wise, determined, and noble leadership might achieve.2

Charnwoods biography remained deservedly influential for many years, until well after the Second World War, when the opening to the public of the Lincoln Papers at the Library of Congress spurred a new generation of historians to rethink the Lincoln story. Mostly these were the works of American scholarsnotably, Benjamin P. Thomas, Reinhard H. Luthin, Don E. Fehrenbacher, and Richard N. Currentthough distinguished British students of the United States, including J. R. Pole, wrote brief assessments of Lincoln. Then came, in the 1960s and 1970s, the turn in historical writing which encouraged on both sides of the Atlantic a powerful interest in social and cultural history, ideological tides, and popular movements: bottom-up, not top-down, approaches became the vogue, pushing traditional political history to the margins. The academic historians disdain for biography meant that the scholarly study of great men was rarely attempted. With the exception of Stephen Oatess With Malice Toward None (1977), no biography of Lincoln worthy of note appeared in either Britain or America during the 1970s and 1980s. Equally, works such as Gabor Boritts on Lincolns economic beliefs, LaWanda Coxs on Lincoln and black freedom, and Charles Stroziers psychological pre-presidential portrait were noteworthy for being oases of imaginative Lincoln-focused scholarship during a time of relative drought.

In recent years, however, in both Britain and the United States, there has been something of a return to political history and biographical studyin many cases resulting in work that, thanks to the broadening of historical writing more generally since the 1960s, is even richer and more solidly contextualized than that which preceded it. Symptomatically, several justly acclaimed lives of Lincoln have appeared during the past decade, part of a remarkable renaissance in American Civil War studies. This book, begun during the mid-1990s, may be seen in that context. For British historians of the United States are far less foreign observers than they were in Charnwoods day; rather, they see themselves as part of an Atlantic community of historians engaged in a common scholarly debate largely blind to their particular nationality. Indeed, my own intellectual debts include those to many American scholarsparticularly Michael Burlingame, David H. Donald, Don E. Fehrenbacher, Eric Foner, William H. Freehling, William E. Gienapp, Allen C. Guelzo, Michael F. Holt, James M. McPherson, Mark E. Neely, Mark Noll, Phillip S. Paludan, Joel H. Silbey, and Douglas L. Wilsonwho have lately enhanced our understanding of Lincoln and the Union during the Civil War era with studies as distinguished as they are substantial.

Still, as well as serving to connect, the Atlantic may also provide the cultural distance that permits a degree of detachment. This study of Lincoln aspires, naturally, to just such an emotional neutrality, though some may judge that the milieu in which I grew up, that of Welsh political Liberalism and the Nonconformist religious conscience, has inflected my approach. Certainly I take very seriously Lincolns moral relationship to power, and in this I differ from Charnwood only in emphasis, not in general interpretation. What strikes the neutral reader is the tenacity of Lincolns ethical convictions: his faith in meritocracy; his belief that no ones opportunities for self-improvement should be limited by class, religious beliefs, or ethnicity; his repugnance for slavery as a system that denied people their chance of moral and economic self-fashioning; his unwavering commitment to a Union freighted with moral value, as a democratic model; and his refusal to be complicit in the destruction of the Union. Lincolns moral understanding of the demands of power was not founded on a conventional Christian faith. But the evolution of his religious thought, his quest to understand divine purposes during the war, his Calvinistic frame of reference, and the ease with which he rooted his arguments in Scripture, make it essential to take his religion seriously.

I am acutely conscious of the extraordinary honor of the Lincoln Prize, just as I am of the generosity of its founders, Richard Gilder and Lewis Lehrman. It is a pleasure formally to record here my heartfelt thanks to them, as well as to the Board of Trustees and its chairman, Gabor Boritt; to the Prize Jury; and to the Lincoln and Soldiers Institute at Gettysburg College.

I have used the opportunity of this enhanced edition of the book to make a few, minor changes to the text, and to add a glossary, maps, and illustrations. In this enterprise I have been blessed with the energetic support of James G. Basker, the president of the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History; David Godwin and Sarah Savitt, of David Godwin Associates; my editor, Carol Janeway, and Lauren LeBlanc, at Knopf; Sara Dunn and Jody Cary of the Gilder Lehrman Collection at the New-York Historical Society; John Marruffo at the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum; Jill Reichenbach at the New-York Historical Society; Holly Snyder at the John Hay Library, Brown University; and Louise Taper. Jenny Weber also gave me help, as gracious as it was timely. These are not my only debts, gratefully acknowledged. I take pleasure here in thanking, equally warmly, Andrea Bevan, for providing a rare blend of historical grasp and skillful indexing; John Page, for his bravura performance as Intelligent General Reader; and Daniel W. Howe, for his kind response to this book and for his broader encouragement to me, his successor at Oxford.