David Herbert Donald, in his fascinating and highly competent 1995 biography simply entitled Lincoln, tells about the April 4, 1865 presidential visit to Richmond, Virginia, the Confederate capitol which the government of Jefferson Davis had just fled.
Landing without notice or fanfare, the President was first recognized by some black workmen. Their leader, a man about sixty, dropped his spade and rushed forward, exclaiming, “Bless the Lord, there is the great Messiah!… Glory, Hallelujah!” He and the others fell on their knees, trying to kiss the president’s feet. “Don’t kneel to me,” Lincoln told them,embarrassed. “That’s not right. You must kneel to God only, and thank him for the liberty you will hereafter enjoy.” Quickly word of the President’s arrival spread, and he was soon surrounded by throngs of blacks, who shouted, “Bless the Lord, Father Abrahams Come.” (p. 576)
Blacks in Richmond at the very end of the war (Lincoln was assassinated, remember, on April 14, only ten days later) were not the only Americans who saw Abraham Lincoln as the new Father Abraham. Back in July 1862, at one of the darker times for the Union, Lincoln issued a call for three hundred thousand men to take up arms against the insurrection. In response, James S. Gibbon wrote this poem which appeared on July 16 in the New York Evening Post.
We are coming Father Abraham, three hundred thousand more,
From Mississippi’s winding stream and from New England’s shore,
We leave our plows and workshops, our wives and children dear,
With hearts too full for utterance, with but a silent tear,
We dare not look behind us, but steadfastly before,
We are coming, Father Abraham, three hundred thousand more.
(William C. Davis, Lincoln’s Men, p. 73)
In 1832 when Lincoln was only 20, he ran for a seat in the Illinois legislature. One of his opponents was the famed Methodist circuit rider Peter Cartwright who spread the word that his young opponent was “an infidel.” As a young man Lincoln described himself as “a piece of floating driftwood,” unmoored between the claims of various backcountry preachers. That Lincoln never did join a church has led many to believe he was a man without faith. Donald, his recent excellent biographer, substitutes for a more theological faith Lincoln’s self-defined “‘Doctrine of Necessity’ – this is, that the human mind is impelled to action, or held in rest by some power, over which the mind has no control.”
However, Martin Marty, probably America’s best known historian of religion (as least its Protestant side), acknowledges Lincoln’s lack of church credentials but pushes the question of his faith and spirituality to a far deeper point.
Though Lincoln frequently attended New York Avenue Presbyterian Church while in the White House, and while he was respectful of the churches and shaped by the biblical message they transmitted, he kept some distance from their doings. He was the only president known never to have joined the church. Through much of his life, he therefore was haunted by charges of the pious…that the Illinoisan was really an infidel. Whatever his stance toward church religion, Lincoln stands at the spiritual center of American history and increasingly is seen as the theological thinker whose reflections are most apt and most profound. (Marty, Pilgrims In Their Own Land, p. 220)
How can an infidel, or at least one who never had a formal connection with institutional religion ever be considered the one person who “stands at the spiritual center of American history?” The New York Times Book Review for February 10th, reviewed Robert C. White, Jr’s. new book Lincoln’s Greatest Speech: The Second Inaugural. Max Byrd in his article wrote, “Carl Sandburg described Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Address as ‘the great American poem.’ Yet as must have been evident almost at once to the president’s audience, it was not a poem but a sermon.” How can an infidel, or at least one who never had a formal connection with institutional religion be the author of “the Great American Sermon”?
Let us let Lincoln preach directly to us as he did on that January day in 1865 when the gray Washington skies suddenly turned bright. As you hear a small portion of his sermon, listen for his spirituality and his faith as they speak to you, listen to this son of a hard-shell Baptist who never lost hold of the proposition that nations and people are instruments of the Almighty.
Both parties deprecated war; but one of them would make war rather than let the nation survive; and the other would accept war rather than let it perish. And the war came….
Both read the same Bible, and pray to the same God; and each invokes His aid against the other. It may seem strange that any man should dare to ask a just God’s assistance in wringing their bread from the sweat of other men’s faces; but let us judge not that we be not judged. The prayers of both could not be answered; that of neither has been fully answered. The Almighty has His own purposes…. Fondly do we hope – fervently do we pray – that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. Yet, if God wills that it continue, until all the wealth piled by the bond-man’s two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, until every drop of blood drawn with the lash, shall be paid with another drawn by the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said “the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.”
…With malice toward none; with charity for all; with firmness in the right, as God gives us to see the right, let us strive to finish the work we are in; to bind up the nation’s wounds; to care for him who shall have borne the battle, and for his widow, and his orphan – to do all which may achieve and cherish a just, and a lasting, peace, among ourselves, and with all nations.
Notice “the Great American Sermon’s” theme that our human causes, as great as they may be, are not necessarily the causes of God. There is spiritual truth and integrity here for us to take to ourselves! We are NOT GOD; only God is God. This is what Martin Marty meant when he said that Lincoln “sometimes looked like the only Protestant on the scene.” Marty adds, “Lincoln could not prove that his cause was God’s. He wanted (himself and others) to try to conform to what they knew of God’s will rather than claim God.” Lincoln’s spirituality was deep enough and focused on God’s will enough (rather than his own dreams and ambitions and certainties) that he sought to apply God’s judgment to his own cause. Pray that we in our own spirituality may seek to do the same.
While Lincoln was campaigning for president in 1860 in Trenton, as Marty tells us, “he marvelously qualified the old notion (extending back to the mission of the Puritans at Boston) that Americans were a chosen people with his hope that he might become the humble instrument of the Almighty and of “his almost chosen people.” The idea of chosenness, Marty notes, endowed the people with a sense of worth, while the notion of being “almost” chosen took some of the fun out of being chauvinist and exclusive.” Again a model for spirituality and faith for us and for our time.
Notice “the Great American Sermon’s” theme “with malice toward none.” In March 1865, President and Mrs. Lincoln visited the Union troops who had finally cleared the Confederates out of the Shenandoah Valley and had come to assist Grant in the final campaign against Richmond. One day Lincoln visited the army field hospital at City Point, where for more than five hours he moved from tent to tent, greeting each patient, pausing at the bedside of the seriously ill or wounded, and making a point of shaking hands with the hospitalized Confederates. Lincoln’s spirituality, one of forgiveness and reconciliation, is a model for us (and all people of faith) all these years later.
After Lincoln’s reelection in 1864 (which, by the way, was no foregone conclusion), Lincoln was careful not to seek personal advantage from his victory. When an advisor pointed out to him that two of his most vehement Radical Republican critics had been defeated and crowed that “retribution has come upon them both,” Lincoln remarked, “You have more of that feeling of personal resentment than I. Perhaps I may have too little of it, but I never thought it paid.” (Donald, p. 546)
We who often turn spirituality into an exercise of superiority, who talk as if faith is a competitive sports in which there must be winners and there must be losers, and for whom religion is a matter of exclusion rather than inclusion of others do well all these 140 years later to learn a better spirituality from Father Abraham (Lincoln). Amen.
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