America's Prophet Read online

  But Rice, going second, delivered a more nuanced argument. Sure, some slaveholders might be evil, he said, just as some farmers are cruel to their horses, but the institution itself should not be blamed. “It is not a sin to own a horse,” he said. Plus, he said, Scripture agreed with him. “My position is that God expressly permitted [slavery] in the words of the Jewish law, given from himself to Moses.” What made Rice’s presentation so powerful was that he repeatedly used the Bible as a weapon against Blanchard. In his second speech, Rice declared: “We have heard him, during one hour and a half, labor to prove his proposition, without quoting one passage of Scripture!” In his third speech: “He and I agree that the Bible is the only rule by which any thing can be proved sinful; and during the two and a half hours he has made not one reference to that infallible rule.” In his fourth speech: “We are not about to close a discussion of six hours.…And although this question can be determined only by an appeal to the Bible, the gentleman in the affirmative has not quoted even a solitary passage from that book.”

  Rice’s argument was a bit disingenuous because Blanchard had repeatedly cited biblical principles, but the goading worked, and on day three, Blanchard shot back with a litany of verses that he claimed opposed slavery. Jeremiah 22:13: “Woe unto him that buildeth his house by unrighteousness.” Isaiah 58:6: “Loose the bands of wickedness…and let the oppressed go free.” He attacked what he called the “slave-holders’ texts”: Exodus 21:21, which calls for the avenging of a man who dies striking a slave; and Leviticus 25:45, which says the Israelites can acquire “slaves” from neighboring states. The Bible says “bond-men,” not “slaves,” Blanchard said, and Rice was not qualified to challenge the greatest translators in the world. “His whole vaunted argument is founded in and drawn from a mistake.” The irony of this exchange is that slaveholders were citing Leviticus 25, while a portion of the same verse, molded onto the State House bell in Philadelphia, was being reborn as the cri de coeur of abolitionists.

  And therein lay the painful reality of the Bible in America. On the one hand, the Bible still gripped the heart of political discourse. The Blanchard-Rice debates, when published, ran 482 pages, longer than the Lincoln-Douglas debates thirteen years later. Reading the transcript, I was struck that the Bible was invoked on nearly every page; at least two dozen biblical books were cited; and neither Blanchard nor Rice had to explain the meaning of their quotations. Americans knew the text, and it mattered to them what the Bible said on this issue. Even more, Americans personalized the debate by equating Moses with Scripture. Control him, and you could control the debate. That’s why Blanchard chose the final night to deliver his fiercest attack. My opponent’s doctrine is a “slavery movement,” he said, “and quoting Mosaic practice to support it is a dreadful perversion.” Moses, Blanchard insisted, ended slavery. Rice was an anti-Moses. The comment was one of the few during the entire four days to earn applause.

  Yet for all the importance of the Bible, these debates signaled a coming crisis for America’s sacred text. Both Blanchard and Rice agreed that the Bible was the source of last resort, yet they couldn’t agree on what the Bible said. As a result, Moses could no longer be the argument-ending precedent he had been for centuries. And if you couldn’t wield his story in a dispute, there was only one thing left to wield. As Mark Noll summed up the impasse: “The Book that made the nation was destroying the nation; the nation that had taken to the Book was rescued not by the Book but by the force of arms.”

  CINCINNATI, OHIO, IS not really on the way to Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, unless you’re coming from, say, Springfield, Illinois, the home of Abraham Lincoln. The three cities are virtually in a straight line—call it the Lincoln-Beecher line—and by November 1863 they were bound together by an ever lengthening thread. The “great war” that Lincoln attributed to Harriet Beecher Stowe reached its turning point at the battle of Gettysburg in July 1863. Four months later, the Kentucky-born Lincoln came to help dedicate the National Cemetery and delivered the most famous speech of the nineteenth century, one ripe with echoes of the Exodus.

  Gettysburg on an early winter’s sunny morning is an eerily beautiful, almost spooky place. Streaks of sun press through the peach orchard’s branches near Plum’s Run, and a cool mist hovers around the cannons in the Devil’s Den. The gray granite monuments and somber stelae on Cemetery Ridge are so chilly they could be made from ice. Just across from Seminary Ridge is the Angle, where the Confederate forces taking part in Pickett’s Charge broke through the Union lines before being felled by guns and bayonets. This spot is known as the High-Water Mark of the Confederacy and is memorialized by a giant bronze book listing the names of those who fought here. Up the slope is the summit of Cemetery Hill. It’s here that Lincoln gave the speech that some consider the high-water mark of the Bible in America.

  Compared with the open expanses of the battlefield, Gettysburg National Cemetery is a well-manicured place, with headstones arranged in a semicircle. The focal point is a soaring marble monument to Lady Liberty that resembles Forefathers’ Monument in Plymouth. More than six thousand people, Northerners and Southerners, died in the three-day battle of Gettysburg, along with three thousand horses and mules. Many were hurriedly pushed into shallow graves that were soon opened by heavy rains. A local attorney, David Wills, organized plans for a formal cemetery to honor Union dead. But each state wanted its dead buried at the summit, so Wills arranged the tombs in the shape of a fan with each state side by side, an ironic tribute to the principle they were fighting against: states’ rights. Each soldier was interred with feet facing downhill, so that if the bodies rose from the dead, they would overlook the field where they died. The move was another small gesture to the centrality of faith in the Civil War.

  The showdown over the Bible that marked the lead-up to the war continued headlong into the early days of fighting. And once again, both sides claimed the mantle of Exodus. In the South, the Reverend Benjamin Palmer gave a sermon in 1861 labeling the Confederates God’s chosen people and Lincoln the pharaoh. “Eleven tribes sought to go forth in peace from the house of political bondage,” he said, referring to the eleven states that had seceded from the Union at that time, “but the heart of our modern Pharaoh is hardened, that he will not let Israel go.” In New York, Henry Ward Beecher delivered a sermon based on Exodus 14, when the Israelites, fleeing Egypt, find themselves trapped before the Red Sea. “Why do you cry out to me,” God says to Moses. “Tell the people to go forward.” Beecher delivered a similar message to frightened Northerners. “Right before us lies the Red Sea of war,” he said. “It is red indeed. There is blood in it. We have come to the very edge of it, and the word of God to us today is, ‘Speak unto this people that they go forward.’”

  Bibles and bullets had long gone together, and the Civil War was no exception. Mark Twain is said to have satirized the common claim of soldiers having their lives saved by their pocket Bibles with the story of how he was strolling down a sidewalk near a hotel one day when a Bible came plummeting toward him from an open window above. Fortunately, the Bible hit the “lucky bullet” he always carried in his breast pocket and his life was miraculously spared. On a more serious level, the American Bible Society published three million Bibles during the war, and three hundred thousand were smuggled from the North to the South. IN GOD WE TRUST was first placed on Union coins during this period; Thanksgiving became a recurring national holiday. And with 622,000 dead, heaven became a national obsession. Before the war, most people died at home, surrounded by family members, and heaven was a vague place where the deceased went to be with God. On average, the number of books about heaven published each year was not quite one. But with so many people dying far from home, and many bodies never returned, families became concerned about their loved ones. In the decade after the war, ninety-four books about heaven appeared.

  Abraham Lincoln may have been the person most affected by this change. Certainly prosecuting a long, deadly, and often unpopular war seems to have a
ffected his spiritual beliefs. Like George Washington, Lincoln was a man of no religious affiliation who loved to quote the Bible. He was born into a family of strict Calvinists who placed Scripture at the center of their existence; the Bible was probably the only book the family owned. But by the time Lincoln ventured out on his own in Illinois, he had turned hostile toward organized religion. “He entered with zest into the theological discussions of the community,” a friend recalled. Yet while he enjoyed the mental exercise, “emotionally the bitterness of sectarian prejudice must have been repellant to him, and was probably the cause of his lasting reluctance to affiliate with any sect.”

  Lincoln’s refusal to join a church and his open skepticism toward the Trinity triggered whisper campaigns that he was an “infidel,” a catchall phrase meaning someone who is hostile to religion. In his 1846 race for Congress, Lincoln was forced to issue a handbill. “That I am not a member of any Christian Church, is true; but I have never denied the truth of the Scriptures; and I have never spoken with intentional disrespect of religion.” Lincoln succeeded in American politics because being on good terms with the Good Book was more important than being on good terms with your pastor. And few people in American history knew their Bible better than Abraham Lincoln. He told a friend, “The Bible is the richest source of pertinent quotations.” His debating nemesis, Stephen Douglas, complained of Lincoln’s “proneness for quoting Scripture.” As Lincoln told the country in his first inaugural address, he thought God would ultimately decide whose view of the Bible was correct. “If the Almighty Ruler of nations…be on your side of the North, or on yours of the South, that truth, and that justice, will surely prevail, by the judgment of this great tribunal, the American people.”

  But leading the country through God’s trial was such a monumental chore that Lincoln’s views on religion underwent a shift, captured in his three great expressions of American theology: the Emancipation Proclamation, the Gettysburg Address, and his second inaugural address. To help unpack their meaning, I went to see one of the country’s most astute dissectors of Lincoln.

  Allen Guelzo is the Henry R. Luce Professor of the Civil War Era at Gettysburg College, a member of the National Council on the Humanities, and a two-time winner of the coveted Lincoln Prize. An army brat and high school drum major, he showed up for our meeting with a red letter sweater featuring a giant P for the University of Pennsylvania. Professor Guelzo was so broad-minded and, perhaps because of his outfit, so cheerful that early in our conversation I wanted to curl up on the sofa in his dormer office and say, “Okay, start at the beginning and tell me everything that happened in American history.”

  The heart of Guelzo’s view of Lincoln is that the sixteenth president, though undereducated, was more a man of ideas than generally credited. For Guelzo, the private Lincoln, who struggled with religion his entire life, and the public Lincoln, who practiced a staunch Whig ideology of economic advancement through hard work, self-improvement, and self-control, were intimately related.

  “I think Lincoln’s interest in Whig ideology is a kind of surrogate religion,” Professor Guelzo said. “Whig ideas managed to appeal to both secular people like Lincoln and evangelicals like Lyman Beecher. Why? The connection is the idea of transformation.” The Enlightenment was devoted to transformation, he explained. Command of scientific law gave individuals the power to alter the world. Electricity, for instance, was no longer a mysterious power; it could be named, created, and eventually used to transform life. “Lincoln loves transformation because he grew up in a dirt-poor, subsistence-farmer culture. He couldn’t wait to get out. It’s the American Dream.

  “Now shift the focus,” he continued. “What is evangelical Protestantism all about? It’s about transformation. From sin to grace. From the slavery of selfishness to the freedom of benevolence. For Lincoln, both the scientific revolution and the spiritual conversion promise transformation.”

  Lincoln’s greatest act of transformation was the Emancipation Proclamation, and not surprisingly, it’s the first time Lincoln’s personal relationship with God appears to have crept into his decision making. Initially Lincoln resisted freeing the slaves, deeming such an act unnecessary. But as the war proceeded, Lincoln focused increasingly on the moral dimension of slavery and eventually cast his decision to free the slaves as an outgrowth of his relationship with God. On September 22, 1862, following the battle of Antietam, Lincoln called a special session of his cabinet and announced, “I made a solemn vow before God,” that if the Confederates were driven out of Maryland, “I would crown the result by the declaration of freedom to the slaves.” The head of the navy wrote in his diary that the move was Lincoln’s vow, a “covenant” with God.

  Slavery. Freedom. Covenant.

  Egypt. Red Sea. Sinai.

  Despite his initial resistance, Lincoln had become a Moses, though he got there not by being born a slave who was raised in the pharaoh’s house but by being born in poverty and working his way out.

  “I think Lincoln always related to slaves,” Allen Guelzo said. “He made a comment once: ‘I have seen a great deal of the backside of the world.’ What he’s saying is, ‘I came from dirt.’ And that helps him believe he understands what slavery is. Frederick Douglass makes a comment the first time they met in 1863 that Lincoln was the first white man he ever met who didn’t think about race, ‘who in no single instance reminded me of the difference between himself and myself.’ And Douglass explains why: because of the way they both had risen from humble origins. I read that and I thought, ‘Aha! Abraham Lincoln as a slave.’”

  “Could this be one reason he felt so attached to the Bible?” I asked.

  “Oh, yes. It’s also the reason he had difficulty with it. The Bible offers him hope, and snatches it away. It encourages him in his quest for transformation, and yet it tells him that the ultimate saving transformation he cannot accomplish himself. It must come from God.”

  I asked Professor Guelzo whether Lincoln was more interested in the Old or New Testament.

  “It’s the Old Testament that fascinates him. Constantly. Constantly. It’s a God who’s remote and hands down ways of doing things. It’s a God who promises deliverance. And deliverance, of course, is the message of Gettysburg.”

  Lincoln was an afterthought as a speaker at the dedication of the Soldiers National Cemetery, having been added to the program only a few weeks earlier. Still, late on the morning of November 18, 1863, a dense crowd of thousands gathered on Cemetery Hill, where around thirty-five hundred Union dead were already being reburied. The Confederate dead remained haphazardly interred in the fields. Methodist chaplain Thomas Stockton gave the invocation: “Blessed be God, the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of Moses.” Edward Everett, the most famous orator in the country and a onetime U.S. congressman, senator, and vice-presidential candidate, gave a two-hour recapitulation of the battle. Finally, President Lincoln rose. He was wearing a black suit and white gauntlets and carrying a hat with a mourning band in memory of his son Willie, who had died that February at age eleven. He wore reading glasses and held his speech. He had been invited to give remarks that would console “the many widows and orphans.” His address contained a sparse nine sentences and around 271 words. Counting the five interruptions for applause, it lasted about three minutes (or for all time, depending on how you count).

  Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.

  Lincoln drew on many inspirations for his remarks, including Pericles’ ode to the dead and the Declaration of Independence. And from the opening phrase, he drew deeply from the Bible. “Four score and seven years” echoes the phrase in Psalm 90: “The days of our years are threescore years and ten; and if by reason of strength they be fourscore years…it is soon cut off.” He especially drew from Exodus. The phrase “brought forth” appears throughout the Bible, including a line from Luke that Mary “
brought forth” the baby Jesus. But of the sixty-three times the expression appears in the King James translation, only nine are from the New Testament, compared with fifty-four from the Old Testament. Thirteen times “brought forth” refers to Israel leaving Egypt, including a reference that Moses “brought forth” the people to meet God at Mount Sinai.

  Elsewhere, Lincoln evoked biblical themes. After opening with images of birth—“fathers,” “brought forth,” “a new nation,” “conceived”—he moved on to images of death—“dedicate,” “a final resting place,” “those who here gave their lives.” “In a larger sense,” he said, “we cannot dedicate—we cannot consecrate—we cannot hallow—this ground.” Again, the language is pure Old Testament. Dedicate, consecrate, and hallow appear a collective twenty-six times in the Old Testament and none in the New. Hallow is used in the phrase immediately before the passage of Leviticus 25 that appears on the Liberty Bell: “And ye shall hallow the fiftieth year, and proclaim liberty throughout all the land unto all the inhabitants thereof.” Oh, to have been able to ask Lincoln that morning if he knew the connection to the bell that was widely believed in 1863 to have rung on that fateful July 4, “four score and seven years ago.”

  Finally he came to his conclusion: the rebirth of liberty. “We here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain—that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom.” The phrase “new birth” was first popularized by George Whitefield and was widely used during the Second Great Awakening of Lincoln’s youth. By linking the new birth of the Civil War with the bringing forth of 1776, Lincoln was connecting the current struggle to the moral foundation of the Declaration of Independence. On a deeper level, he was presenting a vision for God’s American Israel that reconnected it to God’s original Israel. In the Creation story, the world begins as a watery chaos, God “divides the waters from the waters,” and “dry land” appears. In the Exodus, the Israelites also face a watery chaos in the Red Sea, God “divides the waters,” and the Israelites cross on “dry ground.” Creation is the Bible’s original birth. The Exodus—from the breaking of the water, to the easing through a narrow passageway, to the deliverance—is the Bible’s rebirth. Lincoln understood this cycle, and the Gettysburg Address forever seared this biblical pattern—the birth, death, and rebirth of a nation—into America’s consciousness. Maybe that’s why one newspaper compared Lincoln that day to Moses on Sinai, saying the ruler of the nation “never stood higher, or grander, or more prophetic.”