After his death, even his erstwhile abolitionist critics came. Capitulation would have either preserved slavery in the United States for decades, or created a new and aggressive slaveholding empire in the Americas. In the end, Meacham makes a good case for Lincoln’s calculus of noble compromise. It’s fair to say that it offers Meacham the same. At the very least, faith offered Lincoln a language for communicating seriousness of purpose. Meacham’s contention nonetheless is that in the right dose, and with the appropriately humble human agents, faith supplies a moral framework adequate to our gravest moments. The conceit of “manifest destiny” helped produce an American empire whose structure remains today at odds with basic ideals of liberty and equality.
The Old Testament’s genocides illustrate the point, as do those of the New World (in which Lincoln himself played a modest part), not to mention the many religiously inflected crises of violence around the world today. The belief that God has chosen a nation to carry forward the plan of history has been a dangerous tenet for millennia. “To Lincoln,” he writes, “God whispered His will through conscience, calling humankind to live in accord with the laws of love.” There is no endnote for this, no bibliographical support, because how could there be? Meacham offers us a Lincoln who is a modern Moses, a prophet carrying out in mysterious ways the inscrutable will of God and leading a New Testament Israel through the wilderness to rescue an “experiment in liberty under law.” Meacham is a man of faith as much as his subject. His Emancipation Proclamation, issued five days later, decisively turned the war for the Union into a war against slavery.īut Meacham is not content to rest at a description of Lincoln’s psychology. Lee’s invasion of the North, in a battle that killed or wounded 23,000 men in a single day, Lincoln read the grim victory as a sign. The president, recalled Secretary of the Navy Gideon Welles, “made a vow - a covenant - that if God gave us the victory in the approaching battle, he would consider it an indication of Divine will.” When Union forces repelled Robert E. Ultimately, Lincoln found worldly evidence of God’s plan on the battlefield at Antietam in Maryland. Others cited the Bible’s story of original sin and observed that Christianity had coexisted with slavery for 2,000 years. Some insisted that Christianity’s ethic of love required the immediate abolition of slavery. Religious leaders, he pointed out, urged him down divergent paths. Deciding on emancipation in the summer of 1862, Lincoln resolved that he would do “whatever shall appear to be God’s will.” But how to discern the will of God? “These are not … the days of miracles,” he told two pastors from Chicago. Meacham’s lucid account nicely captures the religious framework with which Lincoln approached the most difficult decisions of his presidency.
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