Nineteenth Century Americans knew the Bible. Unlike late 20th Century American Christians, their knowledge of Scripture was as much Old Testament as New. In Abraham Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Address, for example, he connects Genesis with Matthew and by invoking the divine attributes of God, focuses both on God’s divine love as well as his judgment. Political Science professor Joseph R. Fornieri refers to Lincoln’s “Biblical Republicanism,” a fusion of “the sacred sphere of religion” and republican government. Americans saw no contradictions in this and held them to be compatible.
The Permanence of God in 19th Century American Society
American presidents and political leaders throughout the 19th Century and into the 20th Century understood the Bible and theology. President Teddy Roosevelt not only knew the Bible, but had read John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress, borrowing the term “muckraker” to characterize the sensational exposes of Progressive Era writers like Ida Tarbell and Upton Sinclair. In his November 1863 Gettysburg Address, it was natural for Lincoln to predict that, “this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom…”
Lincoln never deviated from the belief that the fate of the nation paralleled the will and plan of God. In his Second Inaugural Address, he states that God, “gives to both North and South this terrible war as the woe due,” referring to the Gospel of Matthew (18.7ff) and the terrible consequences of stumbling blocks (“offenses” in the KJV of the Bible). But Lincoln, who attended a fundamentalist Presbyterian Church as President in Washington D.C., also knew the Westminster Confession of Faith.
The Westminster Confession not only defined the attributes of God, but concluded that God guided both nations and people toward a moral good. This moral good was akin to Christ’s Sermon on the Mount, which Lincoln referenced in his Second Inaugural (“…let us judge not, that we be not judged.” Matthew 7.1). It was Lincoln’s understanding of ethical living and national righteousness that enabled him to conclude that speech with the often quoted phrase, “With malice toward none, with charity for all…”
Unconditional Love and the “New Birth of Freedom”
Modern understanding of the word “charity” refers to giving. Lincoln and his audience, however, understood the term as St. Paul used it in I Corinthians 13, the “love chapter.” The KJV Bible’s usage of charity refers to the highest form of love – unconditional and selfless. In the Latin, the equivalent term is “caritas.” More directly, the terms derives from the idea of the Christian love of fellow man. As the Civil War ended, Lincoln drew no distinction between “fellow men.” Revenge was not a part of Lincoln’s plan of Reconstruction.
The “new birth of freedom” was the realization of Thomas Jefferson’s much debated phrase in the Declaration of Independence that all men are created equal. Ray Raphael quotes Lincoln as stating that, “Jefferson had…[the] capacity to introduce …an abstract truth…that today and in all coming days, it shall be a rebuke and a stumbling block to the very harbingers of reappearing tyranny and oppression.” Here, again, Lincoln refers to the “stumbling block” of slavery. Raphael concludes that Lincoln interpreted Jefferson’s phrase “as a ‘promise’ for the future.” That came with the Civil War.
Was Lincoln Out of Touch with Americans?
Abraham Lincoln knew that his audience fully understood his many allusions to the Bible. In his Second Inaugural, he stared that, “Both read the same Bible and pray to the same God…” The Bible was used in every American classroom and learned men – including political leaders, quoted it regularly. Invoking the “higher law” or the “will of divine Providence” filled the annals of Congress.
Lincoln acknowledged a God who was there, as did many national leaders of the century. National days of Thanksgiving and prayer were frequently invoked. In his last public address, only days before his assassination, Lincoln called for a “righteous and speedy peace.” (April 11, 1865) The term “righteous” had enormous Biblical implications. Lincoln fully believed, as Professor Fornieri writes, that “political order derives its legitimacy from an ultimate, transcendent order.”
References:
- Abraham Lincoln: Second Inaugural Address; Gettysburg Address
- The Language of Liberty: The Political Speeches and Writings of Abraham Lincoln, Joseph R. Fornieri, editor (Washington, DC: Regnery Publishing Inc., 2003)
- Ray Raphael, Founding Myths: Stories That Hide Our Patriot Past (NY: The New Press, 2004)
- Ronald C. White Jr., Lincoln’s Greatest Speech: The Second Inaugural (NY: Simon & Schuster, 2002)
Join the Conversation