Righteous Strife: How Warring Religious Nationalists Forged Lincoln’s Union by Richard Carwardine; Knopf, 624 pp., $35
In the decades between George Washington’s first presidential inauguration and Abraham Lincoln’s, nearly 50,000 church structures sprang up in the young nation, “sacralizing the landscape,” as the Welsh historian Richard Carwardine writes in this deeply researched new study. Religion had played an active role in American life since the Puritans, but its explosive growth in the first half of the 19th century, especially among evangelicals, resulted in most Americans’ believing that divine providence was operating not only in their daily lives but also in the direction of their exceptionalist country. The First Amendment outlawed the establishment of a national religion, but the founders “left room for the civic role of Christian ideas and values,” Carwardine writes. The preachers at the pulpits in those many new houses of worship, as well as existing ones, often entwined religion and the idea of America’s specialness, creating “the substantial and visible building blocks of nationhood.”
But even as this unifying theme was promoted by a broad range of Christian denominations, the differences among these groups hardened in ways that paralleled and reinforced political differences. Carwardine sees two general divides that eventually merge into one. The first was between pious, theocratic New England millennialists who sought to make the United States a moral exemplar for other nations, and the anti-Yankee, anti-authoritarian “upstart churches” that catered with “a plain gospel” to immigrants and settlers in the middle, southern, and western states. These worshippers, many of them uneducated, valued personal and religious freedom. The second divide was over the question of emancipation, which separated the churches along similar lines. Because religionists who were pro-abolition and anti-abolition both found, or thought they did, biblical reinforcement for their positions, the growing political disputes over the future of slavery, both in new states and eventually in the nation at large, led inexorably not to compromise but to war.
Lincoln spoke against slavery in the 1850s, and his 1860 election on the antislavery Republican ticket overjoyed those who believed that enslavement was a stain that must be removed before the nation could deserve the full blessings of Providence. The secessionists of South Carolina read the same Bible and worshipped the same God but drew the tragically different conclusion that slavery and Christianity were compatible, as did many other churchgoers in both the South and the North.
Carwardine, who published a well-received biography of Lincoln in 2003, writes that Lincoln’s “drumbeat insistence during the 1850s that slavery was wrong was couched in the language of moral responsibility but barely of religious, or specifically Christian, faith.” (Earlier in the book, Carwardine writes that Lincoln was “not a declared Christian.”) But after the 1860 election, and especially on his train trip from his home in Springfield to Washington to take up the presidency, he began to declare “his own and the nation’s dependence on God as the moral governor of the world.” Given Lincoln’s understated adeptness as a politician, and thus his sensitivity to the religious beliefs of those in his audiences along the way, it would be reasonable to suspect that he was merely employing the standard political rhetoric of the day. But although Carwardine writes that Lincoln’s “providentialism might have been for show,” he insists that “these words cannot be dismissed as simply formulaic.”
At the heart of Righteous Strife is Lincoln’s deepening belief in the role of Providence in his presidency, and the way this belief steeled him on the difficult path to emancipation. The halls of Lincoln’s White House were famously filled with those seeking something from him, and Carwardine demonstrates in overwhelming detail the number of petitions, resolutions, memorials, and visits from church groups and officials who sought to influence and instruct him. As the Civil War started and things went badly for the Union, an increasing number of these religious contacts blamed the continued existence of slavery for the bloodshed and counseled freeing the enslaved as the way to gain the favor of Providence. Lincoln’s cautious approach to emancipation in the war’s early years, an attempt to hold the border states, “did more than avoid conservatives’ venom: he enjoyed their broad approval.”
War, especially on the losing side, demands mental agility in those who believe Providence is directing human affairs. In his “Meditation on the Divine Will,” thought to have been written in the middle of 1862, Lincoln muses that God “could have either saved or destroyed the Union without a human contest,” and thus “God wills this contest, and wills that it shall not end yet.” At the same time, he concludes that “human instrumentalities” are necessary to enact the plans of Providence, and although, as Carwardine writes, Lincoln was “not a moral narcissist who would claim to know God’s will,” he accepted his role as one of those instrumentalities.
On July 22, 1862, he read to the Cabinet a draft of what would become his Emancipation Proclamation. That the war’s bloodiest battles were yet to come, and peace itself was nearly three years away, would be explained by abolitionists as necessary to securing the ultimate goal of Providence. “God could have settled the war in a single campaign,” Carwardine writes, characterizing this way of thinking, “but He chooses to extend the grueling conflict to raise His people’s antislavery consciousness.” If this growing consciousness did not go so far as to eliminate racism, it did give Lincoln the encouragement he needed to follow through with emancipation and other steps that brought four million Americans closer to the equality proclaimed in the Declaration of Independence. As the tide of the war turned against them, those in the South who believed in God’s providence concluded that, as Carwardine summarizes, they “had not measured up to His test of slaveholding rectitude.” That southerners could believe in a righteous way to own other human beings is appalling, of course, but at least the concept grudgingly acknowledges a creator who deplores rape, physical punishment, the separation of families, and myriad other forms of cruelty.
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