Exploring religious faith in 19th century America

Lincoln's God, by Joshua Zeitz  (from my TBR stacks)

I am always looking for book discussions and book recommendations. For the past several years, I have found podcasts to be a rich source of both, particularly the history-related ones like the "BBC History Extra Podcast" (I also subscribe to their print magazine, which is a delight), the "Historic Royal Palaces Podcast," and lately "The Rest is History Podcast." All three are British, though the BBC and "The Rest is History" regularly cover world history topics. (I am currently listening to "The Rest is History" series on the outbreak of the Great War.) If I am listening while walking, I frequently hit pause so that I can check the library catalogue for a book that is mentioned. Sometimes I just can't wait for a library copy.

Lincoln's God came via the only U.S. history podcast I follow. "With the Bark Off," produced by the Lyndon Baines Johnson Foundation. I was familiar with Joshua Zeitz from his book Lincoln's Boys, about the presidential secretaries who became his biographers and the guardians of his legacy. In reading many books about Lincoln, I have learned something about his personal religious beliefs (or lack of them). I have also studied the role of religion in US history, especially in the 19th century. So I had some background in reading this book, which as the subtitle says explores "How faith transformed a President and a nation."

The author says in his Preface,

"What follows is the story of Abraham Lincoln's religious transformation, set against the backdrop of a nation's spiritual awakening and transformation. . .This is not a comprehensive biography of Lincoln or a broad account of the Civil War. Instead, it is a story of how religion and, more specifically, the rise of evangelical Protestantism, influenced the familiar political, economic, and military narrative. . . Abraham Lincoln's own spiritual journey was distinct from that of most Americans, but he understood better than most the organizing and galvanizing power of evangelical Christianity. His faith, and his appeal to the faith of others, in no small way determined the outcome of the war."

That lays out three main themes woven through his book. First, he charts Lincoln's religious beliefs through his lifetime, arguing that Lincoln was never a conventional Christian. By the end of his life, he might have identified as a Unitarian. Second, he tracks the rise of evangelical Protestantism and the growth of new churches and religious movements, particularly the revivals that swept through America. Church members became involved in campaigns such as temperance and most crucially, abolition of slavery (while holding racist attitudes toward Black Americans). This would split some of the mainline churches into northern and southern branches, as with the Southern and American Baptists. Zeitz also explores the role that Black churches played, particularly in the North, where they argued against slavery and for emancipation long before many white Christians. (Zeitz also acknowledges the presence of Roman Catholics and Jews in America in these years, but his focus is on Protestant Christians.)

The third theme details how northern Evangelical Christians came to ally themselves with Lincoln and with the Republican party in ways that broke down the familiar separation of church and state. Most northern Protestant churches came to embrace abolition of slavery as a war aim but also as a moral good. Like Lincoln himself, many came to view the war as a divine punishment on the United State for the sins of slavery - in which the North had been complicit. Recognizing the power of the churches, Lincoln courted their support, both financial and political. He also began to see himself as an instrument in a divine plan to eliminate slavery. I had not understood just how deeply the Protestant churches cooperated with and identified with Lincoln's administration and with the Republican party. It is easy to see parallels in our political situation today.

I have a lot of books about Lincoln and about the Civil War on the TBR stacks. I am determined not to buy more until I read some of those already on my shelves. We'll see how that book resolution goes.

Stanton, by Walter Stahr

The cover of this book caught my eye in Barnes and Noble. Any cover with Lincoln on it will get my attention.

Then I realized the book was by Walter Stahr, who wrote an outstanding biography of Lincoln's Secretary of State William Henry Seward. And just like that, I had found another Christmas present for myself!

Edwin Stanton was like Lincoln himself a lawyer. He was a much more prominent and better-paid lawyer, in fact. He was also a Democrat, but he strongly supported the Union, particularly after Lincoln's election brought Southern states to secession. In December of 1860, Stanton accepted the office of Attorney General in the cabinet of outgoing president James Buchanan. In those last months of his administration, Buchanan waffled over how to respond to secession, allowing Southern states to take over government property, including arsenals and weapons. (Until this year, Buchanan was often rated the worst president in American history.) In the cabinet, Stanton was among those pushing the president to protect and preserve the Union. One year later, when Lincoln's Secretary of War had proven himself incompetent and (some said) corrupt, he offered the position to Stanton. Stanton had no military experience, but he was hard-working, a very skilled organizer and executive, and incorruptible. He was committed to Lincoln, to preserving the Union, to winning the war. He became equally committed to the African American soldiers that he welcomed to the army, and to the former slaves emancipated by Lincoln's proclamation and Union victory. Stahr argues that "Lincoln deserves his reputation as the 'Great Emancipator,' but Stanton should perhaps be known as the 'Implementer of Emancipation.'" It was his commitment to the freed people that led him into conflict with Lincoln's successor, Andrew Johnson. Johnson wanted political and social control of the Southern states returned to whites. Johnson's attempts to remove Stanton from his cabinet led to his impeachment, the first in U.S. history.

Walter Stahr has written another excellent biography. I knew something of Stanton from all that I have read about Abraham Lincoln and the Civil War. They had a close partnership in the war, and they genuinely loved and respected each other. I did not know much about Stanton's early life, which was not an easy one. After his father's death left the family in poverty, he was apprenticed at age 13 to a bookseller. "A friend remembered that Edwin was 'just high enough to get his chin above the counter...'" I was fascinated by his later work for the government, investigating land claims in California. Stanton traveled out to California and spent months in archival research, collecting boxes of documents that eventually helped prove the deeds presented in court were forgeries. It was also fascinating to see the Civil War from a different perspective, through the work of the War Department. Stahr highlights the ways that Stanton used the power of his office to silence dissent, through arrests and trials before military commissions, which denied the accused their rights. He also used that power to help Republicans win elections, playing a key role in Lincoln's 1864 re-election. And he took control of the investigation into Lincoln's assassination and the trial of the accused conspirators.

Stahr recognizes and pays tribute to Stanton's gifts, to the immense contributions that he made to winning the Civil War and to helping the freed people. But he doesn't gloss over his many faults. He quotes frequently from my favorite diary-keeper of the period, George Templeton Strong.  As an officer of the Sanitary Commission, helping to care for Union soldiers in the field and hospital,  Strong had to work with Stanton. He wrote of Stanton after his death,

Good and evil were strangely blended in the character of this great War Minister. He was honest, patriotic, able, indefatigable, warm-hearted, unselfish, incorruptible, arbitrary, capricious, tyrannical, vindictive, hateful, and cruel. Robespierre had certain traits in common with Stanton. I mean no disrespect to Stanton, who was infinitely bigger and better than that miserable Frenchman - but their several failings were not unlike.

In the end, Stahr argues that "Stanton was not a good man, but he was a great man."

He played a central role in winning the central war in American history. He lived and worked with great men, Lincoln and Grant and Sherman. He was one of them. For all his faults, he deserves our praise.

I agree, and I think this biography does him full justice.

I don't know what Walter Stahr will write next, but I will read it. I'd love to see him tackle the other members of Lincoln's cabinet. I nominate the Secretary of the Navy, Gideon Welles, who was a difficult character in his own right. He left behind a wonderfully snarky diary covering the war years (Stahr quotes his unkind comments on Stanton). It was recently published in a new edition that I have so far resisted buying.

New books: Behind the Scenes, by Elizabeth Keckley

In addition to writing about books that I'm reading (books in progress), I thought I might also write sometimes about new books (new to me anyway) as they arrive.

When I was at the Barnes & Noble site the other day, ordering a copy of Catherine Clinton's Harriet Tubman, another book that popped up on the screen caught my eye.

I knew Elizabeth Keckley's name from reading about Abraham and Mary Lincoln. She was an African American dressmaker who became Mary Lincoln's friend and emotional support during her troubled years in the White House and after. According to some historians, Keckley played a part in educating Lincoln on the realities of race and slavery, helping move him toward emancipation. I had no idea though that Keckley wrote an autobiography. The subtitle of her book, "Thirty Years a Slave, and Four Years in the White House," intrigued me so much that I immediately added it to my order.

The blurb on the back of this neat Penguin edition intrigues me even more:

The remarkable - and, in its time, fiercely controversial - memoir of the former slave who became an intimate witness to the Lincoln presidency.

Born a slave in Virginia, Elizabeth Keckley bought her freedom at the age of thirty-seven and set up a dressmaking business in Washington, D.C. One of her clients was Mary Todd Lincoln, whose husband had recently been inaugurated President of the United Sates. In time they became close friends. Their intimacy informs this extraordinary book, which is at once a slave narrative, a candid private view of the Lincoln White House during a violent turning point in American history, and the story of a friendship that continued after Lincoln's assassination. Condemned at its publication as an "indecent book" authored by a "traitorous eavesdropper," Behind the Scenes remains a poignant, revelatory work that belong on any shelf of Civil War or African American literature.

This book ticks so many boxes for me: a slave narrative by a woman, who emancipated herself, and then made her way to the center of political Washington, and into the heart of the Lincoln family, during the Civil War. Plus dressmaking! And apparently it was the publication of letters from Mary Todd Lincoln that made the book so "indecent" and "traitorous." (It's a safe assumption that a good part of the outrage over the book was because its author, the friend and confidant of Mary Lincoln, was African American.)

This is next on my reading list, despite the tall stack of library books due tomorrow - hopefully I can renew most of them.

Lincoln's secretaries & defenders

Lincoln's Boys, Joshua Zeitz

I came across this book in Barnes & Noble, and the cover immediately caught my eye:

I know something of John G. Nicolay and John Hay, Lincoln's two presidential secretaries, from reading about his administration.  I even have a book about the diary that Hay kept during his White House years, on the TBR stacks.  It was the subtitle of this book that made me pick this up, "...the War for Lincoln's Image," and the inside cover blurb that sold me:

John Hay and John Nicolay, Abraham Lincoln's presidential secretaries, were his close confidants in the darkest and loneliest days of the war.  They enjoyed more access, witnessed more history, and knew Lincoln better than anyone else outside the President's immediate family . . . But when Lincoln died, their task shifted as they became key players in the struggle over his legacy . . . They became, in effect, America's first modern presidential historians and biographers, the originators of the image of Lincoln that subsequent generations would internalize - a humble man with uncommon intellect and talent, A Great Liberator who rose from obscure origins on the prairie . . . 

In this book, Joshua Zeitz weaves together four themes: biographies of John Hay and John G. Nicolay; a history of the Lincoln administration (from the secretaries' points of view); and an account of their efforts to define and protect Lincoln's legacy, culminating in a 10-volume biography of him, published in 1890.

Hay and Nicolay (known as George, his middle name) came from origins as obscure as Lincoln's.  Both were from Illinois, already close friends when they met Abraham Lincoln and came east with him after his election to the presidency.  They were young men, Nicolay 29 and Hay only 23, but they wielded considerable power under Lincoln, to the disgust and jealousy of many in Washington.  As the presidential secretaries, they controlled access to the president, and he sent them out as emissaries and spokesmen.  They lived in the White House, just down the hall from the family's quarters.  In hourly contact with Lincoln, watching his administration of the government and the war, they developed a great admiration and love for him, and an enduring loyalty.  They also became close to his oldest son Robert, a young man their age, in a friendship that lasted their whole lives.

I enjoyed the first half of the book, learning more about Nicolay and Hay, and their experiences in the war.  I found the second half of the book was even more interesting.  After Lincoln's assassination, both entered the diplomatic service, with postings to France and Germany.  Both married and had children.  Hay's wife was the daughter of a railroad magnate, from whom she and her husband inherited millions.  That fortune freed Hay from any need to work, though late in life he returned to the diplomatic service, first as Ambassador to Great Britain and then as Secretary of State, under President William McKinley.  I was charmed to read that Hay charmed Queen Victoria, who supposedly said that he was her favorite American ambassador.  Hay was also a well-known author of poetry and short stories, many of which were set in the rural Illinois where he had grown up.  Mark Twain was among those who admired his work.

But both Hay and Nicolay would become much better known for a work of history, their monumental biography of Abraham Lincoln and a collection of his papers, published in 1890.  From the moment of Lincoln's death, people began to write biographies, in the early years portraying him as a martyr to the Union cause.  His former law partner William Herndon was determined to write about the "real" Lincoln, digging up lots of juicy stories in the process, but he was frustrated by Robert Todd Lincoln's refusal to allow access to his father's papers.  These had been removed from the White House shortly after the President's death, and they remained closed to outsiders until 1947.  At the same time, Joshua Zeitz argues, the history of the Civil War was being re-written as the country turned away from the turbulence of the Reconstruction era.  The focus became reconciliation, and the bravery of both Federals and Confederates in the war.  The role of slavery in the war itself was downplayed, emphasizing instead the romance and nobility of the Southern Cause (sometimes dubbed the "Moonlight and Magnolia" version of history, or the "Gone With the Wind" version).  In this process, Lincoln was often portrayed as a weak president, controlled by radical anti-slavery forces, lacking the capacity or the intellect for the presidency.

Hay and Nicolay wanted to correct what they saw as the false versions both of the war and of Abraham Lincoln.  Crucially for their work, they were given access to the Lincoln papers.  Robert Todd Lincoln trusted them with his father's legacy, but he also demanded editorial control.  This exclusive access, combined with their personal knowledge of Lincoln and his administration, and their own archives, made their work ground-breaking, and central to Lincoln scholarship even today.  Amazingly, this massive work was serialized in a magazine, over four years.  It's impossible to imagine a modern audience patiently reading monthly installments of a serious work of history, for so long.

I found this book very interesting and informative.  Joshua Zeitz balances the different elements well.  He focuses more on John Hay than on John Nicolay, perhaps because Hay was more prominent.  As a long-time student of Lincoln, and a reader of biographies, I especially enjoyed the discussion of how biography is written, and how the understanding of Lincoln's in particular has changed over the years, as well as how we as Americans remember the Civil War.  I don't think that I will tackle the ten volumes of Hay and Nicolay's work, but I see that there are abridged editions, and I'm curious now to read some of their own writing on my favorite President.

One crucial year in the Civil War

Rise to Greatness, David Von Drehle

Over the past couple of weeks, I've read two very different books about the Civil War, and started a third.  I'm not sure what sparked this little read-athon.  I've all had these books on the TBR shelves for a while; maybe it was just their time. Or maybe reading about the First World War sent me back to a more familiar conflict.

The first, Rise of Greatness, is subtitled "Abraham Lincoln and America's Most Perilous Year."  That year is 1862, which was indeed a momentous year in the Civil War.  This is a general overview, a month by month account, "as much as possible from Lincoln's point of view."  When 1862 began, the Union war effort was stalled, and Confederate hopes of European recognition and intervention were high.  The Secretary of War, Simon Cameron, was a political appointment whose department was notorious for its corruption and incompetence.  In the east, Federal General George B. McClellan, the "Little Napoleon," openly snubbed Lincoln and refused to share military information with him.  The rise to greatness that David Von Drehle charts is Lincoln's own, as he grew into the unprecedented challenges of a presidency amidst civil war.

That war was not just between north and south, Federal and Confederate.  Lincoln faced divisions within the North, as radical Republicans pushed him to abolish slavery while Unionists in the critical slave-owning border states like Kentucky warned that would push them into the Confederacy.  There were no guarantees that the armies in the field, who enlisted to preserve the Union, would fight to free the slaves.  Northern society remained deeply divided over slavery, with many blaming abolitionists for the conflicts that led to the war in the first place.  Lincoln's Cabinet mirrored these divisions, and he also had to deal with a Secretary of the Treasury, Salmon P. Chase, who was already angling for the Republican presidential nomination in 1864.

One of Lincoln's first steps was to educate himself more deeply in military matters.  He was always a master of self-study, a true autodidact, though also willing to learn from others with more knowledge or greater experience.  What he learned over the next few months, primarily from books on military strategy borrowed form the Library of Congress, enabled him to assert his constitutional authority as Commander in Chief.  With a new Secretary of War, Edwin Stanton, he began to set policies and strategy, and to find generals who would carry them out.  Some of the war's worst fighting came in that year's battles, at Shiloh, Second Bull Run, Antietam, and especially Fredericksburg.  General after general came and went, and one stayed: Ulysses Grant.  "I can't spare this man," Lincoln once said. "He fights."

Over the course of the year, Lincoln also came to recognize the role that slavery played in sustaining the Confederate war effort.  As Eric Foner argued in The Fiery Trial, Lincoln believed with many of his fellow Republicans (and most Democrats) that since slavery was protected by the Constitution, he could not interfere with it where it already existed.  However, he came to believe with many others that he could use his wartime powers to abolish slavery as a military necessity.  That step might also influence Britain at least against intervention or assistance (France meanwhile was playing a dangerous game in Mexico, where Napoleon III had put the Austrian archduke Maximilian on a puppet throne).  Lincoln first discussed emancipation with members of his cabinet in July.  He issued a preliminary Emancipation Proclamation on September 23rd, and he signed the final formal document on January 1, 1863.

All of this took place against a background of personal tragedy for the Lincoln family.  On February 20th, their third son Willie died of typhoid fever.  He was Lincoln's favorite, many said the most like him.  Lincoln's own deep grief, mostly silent, was made even more difficult by his wife Mary.  Already extravagant, she was determined to make her mark as First Lady, and she seems to have crossed over the line into compulsive or addictive behavior.  One friend of the family remembered a bill for three hundred pairs of kid gloves.  To finance her extravagance, there were rumors that the president's wife was forging bills and taking kickbacks.  She also became obsessed with spiritualism, trying to contact Willie's spirit, falling victim to more than one charlatan.  The séances that she held at the White House made the President a target of ridicule from all sides.  It's impossible not to feel sympathy for Mary Lincoln in the loss of her son, while at the same time wishing someone could have sat her down for a serious talk and some professional help.

David Von Drehle is an editor at Time magazine who has written several other books, including a history of the Triangle fire (now on my library list).  This book is a good introduction to a very complicated year.  He puts the events, political and military, in context without overwhelming the reader, and he also manages a large cast of characters, deftly keeping them distinct.  He has an eye ear for the telling anecdotes, much like Lincoln himself.  His narration is brisk and even a bit breezy at times, which it makes for a lively story.

Initially I was going to write briefly about both books, but I had more to say about this book than I expected, so I'll put my thoughts about the second in another post.

Politician and statesman

Seward, Lincoln's Indispensable Man, Walter Stahr

Half-way through a review of this book in The New Yorker, I went looking for a copy.  William Henry Seward was the most prominent and influential Republican in the United States in the 1850s, a former governor and now a senator from New York, and many expected him to easily win the nomination and then the presidency in 1860.  In a stunning upset, the national convention in Chicago nominated Abraham Lincoln instead, an Illinois lawyer still unknown to many Americans.  Seward overcame his natural chagrin and disappointment, and he went on to campaign vigorously for Lincoln, helping to ensure his election.  He accepted an appointment to the new president's cabinet as Secretary of State, where he would play a crucial role throughout the Civil War and into the administration of Lincoln's successor, Andrew Johnson.

Seward's role in the Civil War and Reconstruction is second only to Lincoln's, and he has a conspicuous part in most histories of the war and in Lincoln biographies.  I learned something of his life from Doris Kearns Goodwin's account of Lincoln's fractured and fractious cabinet, Team of Rivals, but there he is part of a group portrait.  Seward of course had a prominent place in Amanda Foreman's A World on Fire, about Anglo-American relations in the Civil War, and also in the diaries of George Templeton Strong, a fellow New Yorker who considered "Billy Seward" the consummate politician (if not always the most honest).  I thought it would be interesting to focus on this brilliant if divisive figure, and to see the events of the antebellum period, the Civil War, and Reconstruction through his life and work.

Walter Stahr has written a marvelous biography that brings this complicated character to life, one I fully expect to see on the prize lists next year.  This is an account not just of the man but also of his times, the years between his birth in 1801, in the early days of the Republic, and his death in 1872.  Seward was born in a small town 60 miles from New York City.  His parents owned slaves, which came as a surprise to me - a good reminder of America's complicated racial history.  The slaves were apparently not treated harshly, and the children even attended the village school.  Stahr does not mention what happened to the slaves; did the family free them before 1827, when by law most slaves in the state were emancipated?  Seward was never an abolitionist, unlike his wife Frances, though he thought slavery wrong and their house was a stop on the Underground Railroad.  He believed that each state must deal with slavery in its own way, as New York had done, but throughout his political life he staunchly opposed the expansion of slavery into the unsettled areas of the United States.  Their differences over slavery complicated the Sewards' marriage, as did Frances' health.  She spent much of their married life at their home in Auburn, while his career took him away from home for months at a time.

Seward was one of five children, the middle child, and the only one to attend college.  After graduation, he became a lawyer, developing an expertise in patent law that brought him cases across the United States, and convinced him of the importance of American industry.  But his real vocation would be politics.  He first joined the anti-Mason party in New York, which gathered strength in the 1820s (I had no idea this was such a force in American politics).  There he met Thurlow Weed, who would become his manager, his confidant, and some said his devil's familiar and his bagman.  Stahr suggests that in the rough and tumble of 19th century politics, Weed did the dirty work, including bribery at times, giving Seward deniability and at least nominally clean hands.  With Weed's help, Seward was first elected to the state senate, and then to the governorship of New York when he was only 37.

It is no exaggeration to say that Seward's four years as governor shaped his political future, in ways that he could not have anticipated.  Believing he was of Irish descent, though this was apparently family lore rather than fact, Seward welcomed immigrants to the United States, seeing them as crucial to the country's future growth and development.  He opposed attempts to deny voting rights to immigrants.  Even more controversially, he also supported separate schools for Catholics, many of them Irish immigrants, when public schools were dominated by Protestants who tried to evangelize the Catholic children.  This brought him into conflict with the nativist movement, whose strong anti-immigrant and anti-Catholic fervor coalesced into the American Party.  One reason that Seward lost the 1860 presidential nomination was lingering resentment, years later, over his pro-immigrant policies, which he continued in the U.S. Senate and as Secretary of State.

Elected to the Senate in 1848, Seward became the leader of the movement to restrict slavery to the states where it already existed, first as a Whig and later as a member of the new Republican party.  He was already seen as a dangerous radical even before his famous 1858 speech, which declared an "irrepressible conflict" between slavery and freedom, which must end in the country becoming "entirely either a slave-holding nation, or entirely a free-labor nation."  Seward was forever after associated with that phrase, which with his reputation as a radical were also factors in 1860. Though Lincoln opposed the spread of slavery, and had made similar statements about the conflicts between slavery and freedom, Seward's prominence cost him.

As the most prominent Republican in the country, one with far more experience than the newly-elected president, Seward thought that he would be the power in the Lincoln administration.  He soon realized his mistake, as well as the high qualities that the unknown Lincoln brought to his office, and the two would work together closely throughout the war.  Many feared Seward's influence over Lincoln, and there were constant efforts to force Lincoln to remove him from office, which Lincoln neatly countered.  This was a familiar story to me.  What I did not know was the role that Seward played in Andrew Johnson's administration, when he became president following Lincoln's assassination.  In both administrations, Seward's focus was on bringing the southern states back into the Union as quickly as possible.  Like Lincoln, he was willing to let the states themselves deal with the newly-freed slaves.  As long as the former Confederates accepted the emancipation of the slaves, they could even impose "black laws" that restricted where African Americans could live or what jobs they could hold (northern states had similar laws).  Many Republicans in Congress believed it was the federal government's responsibility to assist and protect the freed people, and they instead wanted the rights of former rebels and slave owners restricted.  Seward supported Johnson in his conflicts with Republicans over Reconstruction, even as the House moved to impeach the president.  He seems to have been as indispensable to Johnson as to Lincoln.  For this, Seward was accused to betraying his party, his country, and the freed people for whom so many Union soldiers and Lincoln himself had died, but he remained firm in his priority: restoring the Union.

As Secretary of State, Seward also worked to expand America's territory, laying the foundation for what would later be called the "American Empire."  He is best remembered of course for the purchase of Alaska from Russia in 1868 (later derided as "Seward's Folly").  He was one of the most active Secretaries in American history, signing treaties to encourage trade and immigration with Japan and China, negotiating for naval bases in the Caribbean, and working to build a canal across Panama, then part of Colombia.  For his diplomatic work, his support of immigration and industry, and his role in the Senate and the Cabinet, Stahr argues that while William Henry Seward "was far from perfect, his talents and accomplishments" make him "other than presidents . . . the foremost American statesman of the nineteenth century."  This wonderful biography, thoroughly researched and very well-written, makes a compelling case.  It also succeeds in what Paul Murray Kendall defines as the mission of biography: "to elicit, from the coldness of paper, the warmth of a life being lived."

"With malice toward none; with charity for all; with firmness in the right"

Lincoln's Greatest Speech, Ronald C. White, Jr.

I spent much of the past week reading Tom Jones.  I have found it really captivating, very funny in places and touching in others, and I can't imagine where Tom's adventures are going to take him next (except into more trouble).  But somewhere around p.460, my interest started to flag.  I realized that I was counting the pages rather than following the story (my Penguin edition has 851 pages of fairly small print), and I decided it was time to take a break.

This past week I also had the opportunity to see an exhibit on the Civil War at the Houston Museum of Natural Science.  It consists primarily of material from the collections of the National Archives, and the main draw for visitors last week was the addition of the Emancipation Proclamation, on display for only a few days.  As thrilled as I was to see that, the highlight for me was something that many visitors may have missed.  In a case with several small photos of soldiers, both individuals and groups, was one of a woman soldier who enlisted in disguise as a male, in order to serve with her husband.  The label referred to the more than 400 women who have been identified as serving, a topic that I've become very interested in after reading DeAnne Blanton and Lauren Cook's book They Fought Like Demons. 

Seeing the exhibit led me back to the Civil War section of the TBR stack, and to Ronald C. White's book on Lincoln's Second Inaugural Address.  As the title states, White considers this the greatest of Lincoln's speeches.  Like the Gettysburg Address it is short, but it conveys profound and powerful ideas in its 703 words (you can find a text of it here). The epigraph of the book is Frederick Douglass's statement to Lincoln: "The address sounded more like a sermon than a state paper."

 White, a professor of history at UCLA, has written several books on American religious and intellectual history.  In this book, he analyzes the Second Inaugural as both a state paper and a sermon.  The first chapter, "Inauguration Day," sets the stage in March, 1865.  Though the war has not yet ended, victory seemed near, with Grant's campaign against Lee in its final stages, and Sherman marching through South Carolina.  At the same time, though, Americans had suffered through four years of a brutal civil war with appalling casualties and destruction on a scale never seen before.  As people flooded into Washington to celebrate, they faced questions about how the war would end, how the rebel states would be brought back into the Union, and the fate not just of the soldiers who fought the war but also of millions of former slaves.  Many expected Lincoln to address these questions, to lay out his plans for what was already called "reconstruction," or to trumpet the victories of the Republican party and the Federal armies.

What Lincoln did instead was to trace the history of the conflict, to indict both the North and the South for the sin of slavery, and then to call the country to repentance, to reconciliation, and to care for those most affected by the war, the soldiers, their families, and the freed people.  White devotes a chapter to each section of the speech, to analyze its historical context, how it fits it with Lincoln's other writings, and its careful grammatical structure.  He pays particular attention to the religious context of Lincoln's words, including his background in the "Old School" wing of the Presbyterian Church.  White argues that Lincoln affirmed in this speech his belief in a providential God who was present even in the terrible events of the war, and that the address follows the familiar structure of a 19th century sermon, with indictment followed by imperative: we have gone astray and sinned, we must make amends.

In addition to the speech itself, White's analysis incorporates many other interesting elements, including the reaction to Lincoln's words, in Europe as well as America.  I had not realized that, according the political calendar of the time, Congress would not come back into session until December 1865, which meant that Lincoln would have had a free hand for months in "reconstruction."  Unfortunately for the country, among those in the audience at the Inauguration was John Wilkes Booth, clearly visible in photographs, who would assassinate Lincoln 41 days later.  White also looks at the place of the Bible in Civil War America, and the work of Bible societies (north and south, Protestant and Catholic) who distributed copies to the soldiers.  There are many accounts of soldiers' lives saved by their pocket Bibles, which deflected or stopped a bullet.  The exhibit here in Houston includes one of those Bibles, gouged with the track of a bullet.

I see from Dr. White's website that he has written a full-scale biography of Lincoln and is currently working on one of Ulysses Grant.  I look forward to reading both.

Lincoln's soldiers

Lincoln's Men, William C. Davis

Reading about the experiences of one (albeit unique) soldier in An Uncommon Soldier reminded me of this book.  Its subtitle really sums it up: "How President Lincoln Became Father to an Army and a Nation."  I was also reminded of my own personal challenge, to read all the Civil War-related books on my TBR pile before the 150th anniversary of the war ends in 2015.  If I can keep from adding too many more to it, I might just win that battle.

In the first chapters of Lincoln's Men, William Davis explores the place that George Washington and his soldiers of the American Revolution had in forming the United States' identity in the 19th century, taking on almost mythic proportions.  Americans saw themselves as a family, formed by "the Father of his Country," in a patriarchal society that looked to political leaders to guide and protect the family as Washington had.  Davis also looks at Abraham Lincoln's sole military experience, when at age 22 he he volunteered to fight in a conflict with Native Americans in 1831 that came to be called the Black Hawk War.  Though he served for only a matter of weeks, the experience was formative.  He was elected captain of his company, the first office he ever held.  With his men he suffered the hardships of life on campaign, including shortages of supplies.  And he saw the aftermath of war for the first time, with dead bodies left on the field.  From this brief experience, Lincoln gained an insight into soldiering, particularly with volunteers, as well as a firm commitment to meeting the needs of both soldiers and veterans.

Thirty years later he would bring that understanding, and commitment, to his role as Commander in Chief of the largest military force ever raised in North America.  In the first years of the Civil War, it was a volunteer force, later supplemented by military drafts.  Lincoln always understood that it was the soldiers who were bearing the burden of the war, its risks and hardships.  He made himself more accessible to his soldiers than any president in American history, welcoming them to the White House, reviewing them in Washington, traveling to visit them in camp, and touring the hospitals where so many ended up.  He paid constant tribute to them in his writings and speeches. He told them more than once that they could come to him in trouble; many took him up on that offer, as did their families.  Lincoln was famously unable to resist the pleas of mothers and wives, and his reviews of court-martial cases were notorious for their leniency.  He agonized over sending tens of thousands of these soldiers to their deaths in battle, particularly under the ineffective leaders that plagued the Army of the Potomac in the Virginia theater.

Davis draws on hundreds of soldiers' letters and diaries to analyze their relationship with their Commander in Chief.  As he shows through copious quotations, the soldiers, at least the rank and file, felt a strong connection to Lincoln, based in large part on his obvious concern and care for them.  From the beginning of the war they referred to him constantly and familiarly as "Old Abe," a nickname that later morphed into "Father Abraham."  They compared him with Washington, in his role of holding the Union together.  Their confidence in him carried them through the military disasters in the Eastern theater, through the Emancipation Proclamation that turned the struggle into war on slavery, and through the 1864 presidential election, which pitted Lincoln against the popular General George McClellan, the former commander of the Army of the Potomac.  Not all of the soldiers supported Lincoln, of course, and Davis gives voice to his opponents as well.

For those who might wonder if we really needed another book about Lincoln, Davis writes in his Acknowledgements,

"Lincoln's life has been plumbed to almost every depth, from his taste in music to his feelings on religion, yet this vital relationship between him and the soldiers who fought in, supported, and in the end died in his war, remains unpenetrated beyond a few paragraphs here and there . . ."

In this book, by focusing on that "vital relationship," he gives us new insights into Lincoln and his soldiers, as well an interesting overview of the Civil War through their eyes, in their voices.

Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery

The Fiery Trial, Eric Foner

I had almost finished reading The Fiery Trial when I learned it has won the Pulitzer Prize, and I thought, how right. I was not in the least surprised that it won as history, not as biography, despite the subtitle, "Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery." 

Eric Foner clearly states his thesis at the start of the book:

"My intent is to return Lincoln to his historical setting, tracing the evolution of his ideas in the context of the broad antislavery impulse and the unprecedented crisis the United States confronted during his adult life . . .  My aim then is to take Lincoln whole, incorporating his strengths and shortcomings, his insights and misjudgments. I want to show Lincoln in motion, tracking the development of his ideas and beliefs, his political abilities and strategies, as they engaged the issues of slavery and emancipation, the most critical in our nation's history"  (pp xxvii, xxi). 

This, then, would be no hagiography of Lincoln, not just the story of the Great Emancipator.

Reading this book made me realize that I have fallen a bit into hagiography myself (I do have a statue of Lincoln in my home, as well as a picture of him on display, above the shelves of Lincoln books).  It was a salutary shock to be reminded that while Lincoln spoke against slavery from the earliest days of his polical career, he promoted the removal of freed slaves to Africa or Central America (colonization) from those same early days, continuing to do so until well into the Civil War; he did not advocate social or full political equality for African Americans until almost the end of his life; he used racist language and humor; and he once represented a slaveowner trying to force a mother and her four children back into slavery.  Lincoln personally knew very few African Americans before he became president, so his knowledge of African Americans and of slavery was abstract.  It was only as president that he came in contact with people like Frederick Douglass, Martin Delaney, and Elizabeth Keckley, and then his views began to change.

One of the keys to Lincoln's greatness is that he could change, change his mind, his position, his policies.  Foner charts these changes, from the 1830s on, as the slavery issue came to dominate American politics, and as many Americans, including Lincoln, moved from a dislike of abolitionists as social and political nuisances to share their convinction of the wrongs of slavery.  Though Lincoln believed that the Constitution protected slavery where it existed, like most Republicans he came to believe it could and must be kept from spreading into the territories. "Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men" became their rallying cry (and the title of Foner's influential first book).  When the war broke out, Lincoln believed that he had to placate loyalists in the upper south and the border states, so he resisted the calls of more Radical Republicans for action against slavery, until the necessities of war led him to the Emancipation Proclamation. He believed that African Americans could never find a home in America, until the bravery and patriotism of black soldiers convinced him otherwise.

I learned so much from this book, not just about Lincoln, but about the abolition and anti-slavery movements, about the rise of the Republican Party and the Radical wing of it.  For much of the past week I was absorbed in 19th century America, and it was disorienting at times to return to 2011.

Abraham Lincoln's mail bag

Dear Mr. Lincoln, Harold Holzer, editor

I found this book back in January at Half-Price Books.  In any bookstore, I always check the Civil War and Lincoln sections, and this one caught my eye.  Its subtitle is "Letters to the President," and as an archivist I find collections of letters irresistible - it's what I do all day anyway, read other's people's letters and documents, so it's sort of a busman's honeymoon.  Lincoln is also a hero of mine, the greatest president the United States has had in its history, in no small part because he was president during the defining event in our history.

I had previously read Holzer's Lincoln at Cooper Union, which is a fascinating analysis of a key but little understood speech that was crucial to Lincoln's successful bid for nomination and then election to the presidency.  I also have Holzer's Lincoln President-Elect in the TBR pile.

Dear Mr. Lincoln is an earlier book.  It's an exploration of the mail Lincoln received over the course of his administration, with a focus on letters from ordinary people.  Much of the official correspondence of the administration has of course been studied, as have the military communications. But Holzer discovered that (in 1993 at least) no one had looked at the thousands of letters coming into the White House, at an unprecedented time of crisis that impelled people to reach out to their president.  Additionally, much as Lincoln's White House was crammed with visitors of all kinds, arriving without appointments and admitted with no screening or security, people who couldn't travel to Washington or gain actual access to Lincoln wrote letters.

As an introduction to the letters, Holzer looks at the men who handled Lincoln's mail, his secretaries.  I was familiar with John Nicolay, John Hay, and William Stoddard, though not with the literary career Stoddard later built on his association with Lincoln.  I didn't know about his other secretaries, nor how mail was handled on its arrival in their office, nor how Robert Lincoln prevented access to his father's papers for so many years. To maintain absolute control over them, he kept them packed in trunks that traveled with him between his summer and winter homes (an archivist's nightmare).  As with Cassandra Austen, we will never know how much was discarded by Robert Lincoln.  In fairness to him, though, Holzer points out that much of the weeding of Lincoln's correspondence was done as it arrived, by his secretaries.  Stoddard sat six days a week at a table with a paper-cutter and two wastebaskets, and much of the incoming letters went straight to the trash.

In selecting letters for his book, Holzer chose broad categories, such as "Advice and Instruction," "Gifts and Honors," and the chilling "Threats and Warnings."  He also chose to focus on letters from ordinary individuals for the most part, though he included some famous ones such as Horace Greeley's hectoring "The Prayer of Twenty Millions," and Edward Everett's complimentary letter on the Gettysburg Address.  Holzer also includes some of Lincoln's responses, ranging from humorous to wry to impatient.  One of my favorites is his best-known riposte to Gen. George McClellan: "Will you pardon me for asking what the horses of your army have done since the battle of Antietam that fatigue anything?"

The most poignant letter to my mind is from the Episcopal bishop of New Hampshire, dated March 16, 1865,  He asks Lincoln to declare Good Friday, April 14th that year, a national day of fasting and prayer.  No record of a response from Lincoln has been found, but he didn't issue that declaration.  If he had, he wouldn't have been at Ford's Theatre that night.  Maybe John Wilkes Booth would have found another occasion to attack Lincoln.  But it has to be one of the greatest "what ifs" in American history: what would our country look like now, where would our racial relations stand, if Abraham Lincoln had guided America through Reconstruction, rather than the disaster that was Andrew Johnson.  If only.