Abraham Lincoln, man of God

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Foreword

Dr. Hill's Abraham Lincoln, Man of God, brings Lincoln before us as a man, splendid in his strength of purpose, unshaken by popular clamour, humane, sympathetic, and far-seeing ; a man who understood and appreciated the problems of life, the passions and the weaknesses of his fellow-men, strong because of his trials and triumphs; a great leader — so great as to be without jealousy; humble, because of his knowledge and experience, forgetful of self in his desire to best serve his country and mankind.

He stands before us a heroic and earnest figure, as one humbly seeking the inspiration, counsel, and help of the Almighty, praying for guidance from above and giving sympathy, assistance, and leadership to all about him, with unshaken faith in the ultimate success of the Right; as a finite mind seeking the guidance of the infinite.

We see in Lincoln's deep religious nature the effect of his early training, and in those direct appeals to and communions with God we see not

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only an abiding faith and trust in God but also something of the spirit of the revival, the intense religious emotionalism of those great meetings of his boyhood out of which came much of definite conviction, of faith and of trust in God.

As one reads one feels that Lincoln was indeed "A Man of God."

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Introduction

No new biography of Lincoln is needed to portray his public life. The standard histories give in all detail the great events of his career. But interpretations of his inner life are still in order. Few great men of the past have suffered as much as Lincoln at the hands of the well-meaning and uncritical, the ill-informed and prejudiced.

Charlemagne and Cromwell, Washington and John Marshall, all were children of their time. Only in the light of circumstances which produced them can they be explained. The interplay of heredity and environment on powerful personalities and the compelling reaction of personalities on their surroundings furnish a task in character analysis beyond the reach of those who lack human understanding and spiritual imagination.

Abraham Lincoln was bom amid a somewhat primitive and tumultuous religious upheaval expressed in the powerful preaching of Peter Cartwright and illustrated in the perennial popularity of the camp-meeting. Brought up by parents

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X INTRODUCTION

whose lives were lived amid such influences, Abraham Lincoln was from his earliest years religious. The Bible was the book of books to him. He prayed so constantly and confidently as to seem a kind of modern Brother Lawrence practising the Presence of God. He worked out a theology in general conformity with the accepted standards of Christianity. In the darkest hour of his White House days when personal bereavement was added to national anxiety, he literally lived on his knees.

Yet even in his lifetime he was often charged with infidelity. Some too near the trees to see the woods even wrote books attributing Lincoln's frequent depression to irreligion. He believed he was defeated for office in 1841 because of the report that he was not a Christian. Many still are blinded by the same delusion.

A book has long been needed to bring discussion to an end, to set at rest much foolish speculation, and to convince the most incredulous that Abraham Lincoln, Man of God, was as sincere in his religious faith as Robert E. Lee or WilUiam E. Gladstone.

This book from the pen of Chancellor John Wesley Hill of Lincoln Memorial University seems likely to perform this purpose. For many

INTRODUCTION xi

years, both in his personal and official capacity, he has been collecting evidence at last massed in this book as challenging as it is interesting. Even the most casual reader will perceive that all of Lincoln's convictions sprang out of his profound belief in God as set forth in the Christian teachings, that his habit of studying both sides of every question and of stating each as strongly as he could was in part responsible for the misapprehensions of some who have held a superficial view of his religious life, and that his intimate friend Noah Brooks writing as early as 1872 a personal letter stated the truth this compelling book illustrates that **any suggestion as to Mr. Lincoln's skepticism is a monstrous fiction, a shocking perversion."

These times as truly try men's souls as Lincoln's times. Problems of today are as grave and complex as the problems to which Lincoln brought as clear a mind and pure a soul as modem times have known. A free people whose freedom has been purchased at a great price must now choose between the merely economic and the spiritually moral, between irresponsible Marxianism so subtle that even the timid who dare not champion it outright are still under its dominion, and Lincolnism calling as loudly today as in the Gettysburg xii INTRODUCTION

address: "This nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom.**

We are at the parting of the ways. Is our thought to function in the lowlands of materialism in the days before us, or in the religious highlands where Lincoln lived and died that we might live? That is the supreme question we have now to answer.

In giving Abraham Lincoln his undisputed place among the men of God who have taught us how to find the proper answer to this question, the author of this volume has rendered a service as opportunely patriotic as it is lastingly religious.

Preface

God's heralds have the right of way. Their thoughts and deeds are the richest legacy of humanity. They are lights kindled upon the dome of the centuries illuminating the mental and the moral atmosphere. History is the story of their epochal deeds. Civilization is the lengthened shadow of their exalted souls. Serving most they are the greatest.

Victor Hugo has said: *'The summit of the human mind is the ideal toward which God descends and man ascends. ' ' From below the world watches them. ''How small they are," says the crowd. Through storm and cloud, by scarped cliff and yawning abyss, they ascend until they reach the summit where they catch great secrets from the lips of God.

The centuries are the solemn priests which anoint and enthrone the prophets of God. A saint is a good man dead one hundred years, cannonaded then but canonized now. **A prophet is not without honour save in his own country."

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This is true of all the prophets. Stones have been their bread and bed.

Abraham Lincoln was no exception. He was cartooned as a gorilla, denounced as a buffoon, hounded by political malcontents, assailed by seditionists and traitors, and finally sacrificed as a vicarious offering upon the altar of freedom.

What was the secret of his incomparable leadership, his exalted personaHty? Whence the inspiration by which he mastered the political and social problems of the antebellum days? Whence the light through which he saw the destiny of the American republic ? Whence the patience, the wisdom by which he was able to guide the ship of state through the raging storm of a rebellion into the haven of a restored and permanent Union? Who doubts that his inspiration was from above, that his marvellous power came not so much from training, environment, and opportunity, as from the spiritual endowment which dominated his will, quickened his sympathies, fired his faith, fused his fortitude, and steadied and directed his unswerving ambition to keep step with the march of the divine purpose as revealed in the great epoch in which Lincoln towered above the men of his time as the Colossus of the desert towers above all the neighbouring gods standing upright upon their pedestals.

PREFACE XV

The cause of human Hberty came to its supreme test when the South seceded from the Union. The destiny of the United States held in solution the hopes of upstruggling humanity. To this country the world was looking for answers to questions involving the capacity of mankind for self-government, the possible elimination of the institution of human slavery from the social order, the effect of freedom on the development of ideal social and industrial conditions, and the triumph of human rights over property rights.

To Abraham Lincoln, the solution of this composite problem of the ages, depended not solely upon the force of arms and magnetism of brilliant leadership, but upon the help of the Almighty. His trust was not in horses and chariots, but in the King Eternal, and according to his own statements, it was under divine guidance that he directed one of the greatest military struggles the world had ever known to the achievement, against tremendous obstacles, of the conclusive victory that preserved the Republic and brought an end to slavery.

Through all these dark and ominous times, Mr. Lincoln's heart, though often bowed with a grief such as only he could know, looked to God, depended upon His guidance, found solace in xvi PREFACE

prayer, and strength and comfort in the Scriptures. Let those who will, oppose the affirmation of Lincoln's Christian character and assert that he was an atheist or sceptic, that he had only a vague conception of God and professed no belief in religion. Let those who will, beHeve that Lincoln owes his leadership to his master intellect alone or that he rode to his place of power and dominion over the hearts of men on the billowing tide of favouring circumstances. Let the eccentric, if they will, attempt to explain away his patience, his judgment, and vision by reference to the * ' conjunction of the planets at his birth , " * ' chance, " * * luck, * ' "genius," or any other empty phrase.

Li the midst of all such vain attempts, the character of the great emancipator stands out in world history as the incarnation of qualities so pure, so spiritual, that the secret is found in but one word — God.

Up to Lincoln's time, history seemed in large part to present but a repetition of political and military short-sightedness, or of crimes perpetrated in the name of religion and justice. For this reason the intellectual world stands confounded before Abraham Lincoln's simplicity. How was it possible for a mind so simple and direct to wield an influence so potent? No one like him had

PREFACE xvii

ever been seen on the public rostrum. Bom and bred in the western wilderness, he had to wrestle with rhetorical gladiators in the greatest political arena of the world, and to face, single-handed, hostile individuals, groups and parties backed by financial privilege and supported by social prestige.

The essential religiousness of Lincoln's life is presented to the Anglo-American people in this critical time, when every thoughtful person knows that the problems now before us are as difficult as those which the martyred President had to solve. We are in the welter of materialism, the chaos of indifference to the best. Plans and panaceas in abundance have failed to allay the world unrest. A new day must dawn or a darker night settle on the world. We must have leaders who will touch those in the dull sleep of materialism with the finger-tip of divine reassurance and bring them to their feet with the glad cry: "Arise, shine, for thy light is come, and the glory of the Lord is risen upon thee."

For the day in which he lived Abraham Lincoln did precisely this. In consequence I would write no biography. This honourable task has been worthily performed by others from Dr. J. G. Holland writing while the guard around the great xviii PREFACE

man's tomb at Springfield was still new at its post, to Lord Chamwood laying on the casket of his memory the other day the noble tribute of an appreciative Englishman.

Phillips Brooks once said that in Lincoln was ''vindicated the greatness of real goodness and the goodness of real greatness." It is my modest aspiration to explain and to confirm this obvious truth in terms as simple as Lincoln himself was accustomed to employ. Abraham Lincoln was a man of God. Recalling his frequent reference to Jesus Christ, it would seem altogether fitting to indicate that he set a high standard of Christian manhood; that he drew his inspiration and his superlative wisdom in state affairs directly from the source of all wisdom ; that in the darkest hours through which he and his cause were called to pass he was sustained by an unfailing faith; and that when he proclaimed to the world that he was actuated "with malice toward none and charity toward all," he was exemplifying the spirit of the Christian religion in which he believed.

A portrayal of the religious life of Lincoln should be of value alike to the professing and the nonprofessing Christian; to the orthodox and to the liberal; to the thoughtful of no faith at all and to those vaguely reHgious who, with Marcus Aurelius,

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believe that from the divine principle all things come, in it all things subsist, and to it all things return. Such a portrayal may vividly illustrate that faith and prayer are for the strong, as well as weak, and that to this mightiest man of the centuries they were avowedly the source of inspiration which enabled him to perform his divinely appointed tasks.

There is a divine Providence beyond human ken which shapes the destinies of men and nations, and Lincoln's faith was builded on the Rock of Ages. He believed Providence was directing the destiny of the American Union and the march everywhere of human freedom. He accepted the triumph of his cause as the fulfilment of a divine plan, inevitable as the whirl of the planets in their appointed orbits. His eyes were fixed on higher and surer things than the tumultuous and changing currents of human thought and action, on the pillar of cloud by day, of fire by night, guiding the nation he was leading toward the fulfilment of its appointed mission. The services of other great civil and military leaders of Lincoln's time are not forgotten; but without Lincoln's profound insight, his unfailing patience, his unshakable firmness, and, above all, his faith and serene reliance upon a Higher Power, their efforts would have been in vain.

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A candid examination of the evidence will show that the religious element in Lincoln's life was its dominant factor; that his character as a politician and as a statesman was determined by his character as a Christian; and that he drew from the story of the ''Man of Sorrows" the conclusion that God rules the world in a personal way.

Abraham Lincoln rose to his position of eminence from beginnings which, to the superficial, gave no promise beyond mediocrity. Born to poverty, nourished on the barest necessities, he obtained the equipment for his life work through heartbreaking self-denials. Julius Caesar boasted that he was descended from Venus and Anchises, through the great JEneas and the royal Lavinia. Lincoln made no claim to descent from any lofty personage. His ancestors were pioneer stock — brave, hardy, adventurous folk, who developed in the discipline of the wilderness those sterling qualities which had nerved their race to maintain their rights against the king and parliament of England, and, in the New World, against the depredations of the painted savage.

Such ancestry was sturdily human and laid the foundation upon which to build manly character and the Christian virtues. Lincoln descended from men and women who, in their daily life,

PREFACE xxi

prayed to God, read His Word, and worshipped Him in devout reverence. From such stock came the typical American whom this book would describe without reserve as a man of God.

J. W. H.

New York City, October, 1920.

Contents

A Tribute — Lloyd George Foreword — Leonard Wood Introduction — Warren G. Harding Preface

CHAPTER

L — The Background IL — Godly Parentage III. — Preparation

Chapter I The Background

The prairies of the Great West were as vast seas in which the groves, God's first temples, were like islands. Their rolling waves of summer verdure, their sombre glow of autumn haze, their angry aspect when swept by raging storms, their billowing drifts of winter snows, impressed the pioneer mind with a sense of the infinite.

The frontier communities were saturated with religious sentiment. Nearness to nature keyed their souls to spiritual influences. They saw God in the clouds, heard Him in the winds, read His providence in the upspringing of verdure, and in the recurrence of the seasons. Their hardships chastened them ; their common dangers drew them closer together; their perils and helplessness taught them reliance upon a Higher Power. They drew their religious faith and fervour from the Puritans of New England, the CavaHers of Maryland, the Scotch Presbyterians of the Carolinas, and from other types of Christians. Central among them was Methodism, which exerted a wide and deep influence in moulding the rugged religion of the pioneer.

Fortunately, in the intimate association of the wilderness, sectarian and denominational differences lost their strong hold, and tolerance was practised from necessity as well as inclination. The people merged into a brotherhood of mutual helpfulness in spiritual as well as in material things. They met and exchanged ideas and experiences as freely as they exchanged the products of the soil and chase.

As their mode of life brought health and strength, their reHgious life lent joyousness, instead of Puritanic gloom. Limited in the number of their ''meeting houses," the rude school houses were often utilized for worship.

The one big event of the year was the camp-meeting. It attracted, from far and near, multitudes of all classes, the pious and impious, the reverent and profane. Believers and unbelievers found in the camp-meeting the only touch of cos-

THE BACKGROUND 5

mopolitan life that modified the loneliness of the frontier.

The people made their way to these camps in vehicles of every description, farm wagons, ox carts, boats; while some went on horseback and hundreds travelled on foot. They talked over neighbourhood affairs, discussed the questions of the day, and gathered from each other the drift of national tendencies, the progress of settlement, and the spread of religious sentiment.

Naturally these exchanges, however, centred in their exuberant religious life. One who passed his youth amidst such scenes wrote:

It was a heterogeneous gathering, — humourists who were unconscious of their humour; mystics who did not understand their strange, far-reaching power; sentimental dreamers who did their best to live down their emotions; old timers and cosmopolitans with a wonderful admixture of sense and sentiment ; political prophets who could foresee events by a sudden, illuminating flash and foretold them in a quick-spoken, pithy sentence; theologians educated on the frontier, — these met and prayed and wrestled in sharp verbal encounters that were as educational in their way as were the discussions in the academic groves of Athens. ^

It was an unusual people, living in a second Canaan, in an age of social change and upheaval, in a period of political and economic strife. There

^ The Valley of the Shadow, Francis Grierson.

was something Biblical in all of this, applied to the circumstances of the day. There was charm in their mode of living, and romance even in the incidents of their surroundings. The religious exercises of the camp-meeting were calculated to quicken the spirit, intensify the faith, and arouse the inward depth of individuals and communities. The meetings were centres for religious fervour. From them radiated spiritual influences which shaped and moulded public sentiment. Under the pointed and fervid preaching, the results were instantaneous and at times astounding. Sinners were ' * convicted ' ' ; skeptics who ' * came to scoff remained to pray " ; unbelievers, convinced of their errors, fell upon their knees, called upon God for mercy, publicly confessed Christ, and touched by missionary zeal, became enthusiastic evangels of the new-found joy.

Their singing was not that of the trained choir. It was the spontaneous outburst of souls attuned to nature and to God. Inspired by love and quickened by a gratitude which overflowed all the ordered laws of song, they poured forth an impetuous Niagara of praise.

Theirs was the music of the heart evoked by the consciousness of "sins forgiven, " sweeping heavenward under the urgency of an unction unearthly and divine.

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Their prayers, often uttered in rude and blundering phrase, perchance by stammering tongues, were yet sustained by a faith that pierced the limits of time and space and found favour with the Most High.

The distinguishing characteristic of preacher and people was the spirit of independence. No creed formulated by church councils could bind them. No edicts of potentates could fetter their speech. No law of established reputation or of place and procedure could prevent their plain speaking. The prophets among them both foretold and forthtold.

Rude, abrupt, strident, and mandatory, they appeared like John the Baptist, crying in the wilderness, ''Repent ye, for the Kingdom of Heaven is at hand."

The preacher of that period was aggressive. His saddlebags were his theological seminary, his Bible and hymn book his library. Like John Wesley, he constructed his sermons as he journeyed, drew his inspiration from nature and nature's God, preached along the bridle paths, in the open fields, on the streets of straggling villages, anywhere he could find a congregation, small or great. The roof of his cathedral was the arching heavens, its walls the forests that fringed the highway.

He was more than a great preacher; he was a political force. Peter Cartwright, for instance, was even nominated against Lincoln for Congress. The preacher was social guide and mentor. He was prodigious in all respects. In many of the frontier communities were groups of rowdies who sometimes varied the monotony of the wilderness by ** licking the preacher." The largest and strongest of one of these groups was selected to "lick" Peter Cartwright on his way to keep a preaching appointment. The bully lay in wait along the roadside. The revivalist rode up, Bible in hand, evolving his sermon as he came. As he neared his destination, the bully stepped out from the shadow of a tree and thus addressed Peter : " I have come out here for to lick ye." "Wait until I get off this horse," Cartwright responded, without the flicker of an eyelash or the tremor of a muscle. He dismounted, laid aside his clerical coat, and said, "Now I am ready." The man of the cloth then whipped the bully until the bully cried, "I have got enough; let me up!" But Cartwright was not through with his antagonist. "No, 111 not let you up until you confess your sins and accept Jesus Christ as your Saviour." And lying prone on the ground, with the clergyman on top of him, the bully was finally converted. It was related that later he

THE BACKGROUND 9

became a genuine convert and was loyal both to Cartwright and the Christian faith. '

Preachers then were militant. They differed in characteristics and in creeds, but they preached the Gospel in a spirit as uncompromising as that of the prophets of old. They were worthy successors of the early disciples of the Master, of whom it was said: ''These are the fellows who are turning the world upside down." They turned the religious and political and social conditions of their time not only upside down, and inside out, but also right side up, until the great religio-political principles which are fundamental to human life and liberty, no less than to Christian civilization, were sounded far and near. It was mostly the inspiration that swept from these prairies, breathed by those pioneer preachers and people, that aroused the slumbering conscience of the nation, and finally kindled the flame of liberty on the altar of democracy.

Lincoln's immediate ancestry was of the generation that was perhaps most powerfully affected by this strong, subtle, permeating, spiritual environment. It was said that his mother's family, the

* Peter Cartwright was in so many essentials a forerunner of Lincoln that a somewhat full discussion of the man is given in the Appendix.

lo ABRAHAM LINCOLN— MAN OF GOD

Hankses, were " Great at camp-meetings." It is signiticant that Hern don, not appreciative of Lincoln's religion, thus accounts in part for Lincoln's mystic temperament. He says that a camp-meeting had been in progress for several days, during which religious fervour ran high. All were there in complete accord, continuing in supplication, awaiting the celestial fire. Suddenly, there was a stir in the camp. Something extraordinary had happened. The multitude who were kneeling sprang to their feet and broke forth into shouts which rang out amid the primeval shades. Presently a young man, who had been absorbed in prayer, began leaping, dancing, and shouting, while to his left a young woman, as though inspired by the example she had witnessed, sprang forward, her hat falHng to the ground, her hair tumbling down in graceful braids, her eyes fixed heavenward, her lips vocal with strange, unearthly song, her rapture overflowing until, grasping the hand of the young man, they both began singing at the top of their voices.

The family tradition identifies the couple as Thomas Lincoln and Nancy Hanks, and reports that they were married the following week in a little cabin in Washington County-, Kentucky, by the Rev. Jesse Head, June 12, 1806.

Chapter II

To come to its best in every way, character must have a sound physical basis. The father of Abraham Lincoln, though not as tall as his tall son, was five feet ten inches high, weighed 195 pounds, and was so compactly built that it was said no point of separation could be found at any place between his ribs. Thomas Lincoln was equal to any call upon his strength. Habitually inoffensive and peace-loving, once aroused he never failed to give of himself a good account. Until Ida Tarbell wrote her painstaking Life of Lincoln, Thomas Lincoln was commonly believed to be shiftless. Now we know that at a time when few indeed made even a tolerable living, Thomas Lincoln at least provided for the bare necessities of his increasing family; and he was a good man, adding to devoutness a jovial and buoyant temperament.

It was a Christian home in which the Christian statesman was brought up. The parents were

II church members, at first affihated with a free-will Baptist Church in Kentucky and later with the Presbyterians in Indiana. The home life was conventionally rehgious. The family altar was set up at the beginning and was never down. No meal began without a blessing even though at times there was little on the table for which to offer thanks. One day when potatoes made up the entire menu, the youthful Abe, with a twinkle in his honest eyes but no irreverence in his heart, remarked to his good father, "Dad, I call these mighty poor blessings."

Good children are apt to have good mothers. Both in his mother, Nancy Hanks, and later in his step-mother, Sally Johnston, Lincoln was unusually fortunate. Both were godly women, and both passed on to Abe their godliness. They laid deep and wide the foundations of a Christian manhood which sustained him amid the changing scenes and vicissitudes of his epochal career. Nancy Hanks 's forebears early hailed from Plymouth, though they were not among Mayflower folk. Then they moved to Virginia whence Nancy's father moved across into Kentucky where on her father's death, when she was barely nine years old, she grew up into a sweet-tempered and fair womanhood, the centre — as tradition has it — both of country merry-making and of industrious housewifery. Three children came the first three years of her happy married Hfe, and she lost a little of her buoyancy and vigour in her conscientious efforts to meet her maternal responsibilities. But though such hard circumstances would have turned ordinary women into slatterns, they simply brought out the heroically adequate in Nancy Hanks and made her worthy to bring up her little children, the second of whom died in early infancy. When in his later years, his mother, who died before he reached the age of ten, was but a tender memory, Lincoln used to say: **A11 that I am or hope to be I owe to my angel mother." Nancy Hanks Lincoln accepted the responsibilities of motherhood amid the rude hardships of a frontier life, with a sense of reverence that lifted her above the dull and deadly routine of the commonplace and impecunious. A shack alone protected the little family from the chilly blasts of winter, and on one side the only doorway was a curtain made of skins. The sack mattress on which the father and the mother slept was filled with husks or leaves, and even into it the little folks from their rude shake-down on the floor, peculiarly accessible to the winds, would often crawl for warmth. The only food they had was sometimes brought down in the forest by the mother's rifle as well as by the father's, and was supplemented by fish caught in the nearest stream, corn raised from the stubborn soil and turned into Johnny-cake before the open fire by the busy hands of the fond mother whose eyes at the same time were ever on her young.

Hers was a busy life under handicaps, yet mother love was never once forgotten or disowned. No matter what demands were made upon her time and strength she always gave first thought to her children. She taught them to read their Bible' and such other books as were available. Abraham Lincoln's earliest recollection of his mother was of sitting at her knee with his sister drinking in the tales and legends that were read or told to them by her. ^