Free Lincoln: A Life of Purpose and Power by Richard J. Carwardine

attendance at theirs. Masons, Unitarians, and Universalists have each clasped him to their bosoms. Following the visits of two or three mediums to the wartime White House, the Spiritualists claimed him as one of theirs, though Lincoln himself was facetiously dismissive, remarking that the contradictory voices of the spirits at these séances reminded him of his cabinet meetings. 48
    If such chauvinism befogs rather than illuminates the inner Lincoln, it is equally true that the themes of Lincoln the shrewd pragmatist and political manager have, with a few honorable exceptions, tended to obscure the reflective Lincoln, a politician capable of serious thought about ultimate matters. Yet in the course of his adult life Lincoln faced the traumas of courtship and a broken engagement, embarked on an uncertain marriage, suffered the painful loss of two young sons, and confronted the carnage of a fratricidal war. It would have been strange indeed had a man so given to introspection not added new layers to his understanding of the meaning of life and death. If, as Gillespie judged, he was not given particularly to metaphysical speculation, Lincoln’s old New Salem friend, Isaac Cogdal, was surely right when he asserted that “his mind was full of terrible enquiry—and was skeptical in a good sense.” Speed was certain that over the years Lincoln “was a growing man in religion,” advancing from religious skepticism in the 1830s to serious Christian inquiry in the White House. Though James Matheny, Lincoln’s political associate, suggested that the only change to occur was in his friend’s greater discretion, not his views, which Matheny thought remained skeptical (at least up to 1861), there are reasonable grounds for believing that the mature Lincoln of the 1850s was more receptive to Protestant orthodoxy than he had been twenty years earlier. 49 Then the essential elements of Lincoln’s religious outlook surely contributed to the new tone and substance of his speeches following his return to politics in 1854. For the first time he devoted whole speeches to the question of slavery, including its corrosive effect on individual enterprise and aspiration, and found a moral edge for which political opportunism provides only the shallowest of explanations.
    Lincoln’s earliest experience of religion came, naturally enough, through his parents. As “hard-shell” Baptists, members of the Little Mount Separate Baptist Church, they subscribed to a predestinarian, hyper-Calvinist system of beliefs: these included “election by grace before the world began”; missionary work was an act of presumption against the Almighty, who needed no assistance to achieve his foreordained plan. When Thomas Lincoln moved to Indiana and remarried, he and his wife eventually joined the Pigeon Creek Baptist Church, Thomas becoming a leading man amongst the “Separates” in the new state. It was a milieu of unlettered preachers and few books. Abraham generally attended church meetings but, unlike his sister, who was admitted to membership, he made no profession of faith. “Abe had no particular religion—didnt think of that question at the time, if he ever did,” his stepmother, Sarah Bush Johnston, recalled. “He never talked about it.” 50
    The Kentucky and Indiana years left Lincoln with a mixed legacy of belief. Negatively, he can have found little to celebrate in the particular rigidities and exclusiveness of a strict Baptist creed, nominally Calvinist, but one that Calvin himself would barely have recognized. He had no time for the intersectarian rivalries and theological brawling, especially between Baptists and Methodists, that marked the developing West. It was here that were sown the seeds of his aversion to church creeds and his skepticism about “the possibility, or propriety, of settling the religion of Jesus Christ in the models of man-made creeds and dogmas.” He saw little to admire in the religious “enthusiasm” of