Lincoln's God by Joshua Zeitz

Author:Joshua Zeitz [Zeitz, Joshua]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2023-05-16T00:00:00+00:00

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As he grew more religious, Lincoln did not share in his countrymen’s conviction that a more personal God would reward the Union and punish the Confederacy. God remained, for him, a more abstract and unknowable force. That did not make him any less a believer. Try as he might over his lifetime to snap free of his father’s faith and fatalism, during the war, Lincoln traveled a road back to a subtle form of predestinarianism, even as most evangelical Protestants continued to walk away from it. He likely did not believe that people were born among the elect or not, but he believed God had a plan that men and women were powerless to alter. “I am of the opinion that there was a slight tinge of fatalism in Mr. Lincoln’s composition which would or might have led him to believe somewhat in destiny,” a friend, Joseph Gillespie, later wrote. “Mr. Lincoln once told me that he could not avoid believing in predestination although he considered it a very unprofitable field of speculation because it was hard to reconcile that belief with responsibility for one’s act.” Lincoln was “a fatalist,” offered one of his former law clerks, Henry Clay Whitney, who remained close to him during his presidency. He was fond of quoting Shakespeare’s Hamlet, in which the title character tells Horatio, “There’s a divinity that shapes our ends, / Rough-hew them how we will.”

Mary Todd Lincoln, who migrated from the Episcopalian to the Presbyterian church during her days in Springfield and Washington, DC, would later observe that her husband believed that “what is to be will be, and no cares of ours can arrest nor reverse the decree.” It was perhaps one of the only subjects on which she and William Herndon agreed. His former law partner, he remembered, had long felt that “things were to be, and they came, irresistibly came, doomed to come; men were made as they are made by superior conditions over which they had no control; the fates settled things as by the doom of the powers, and laws, universal, absolute, and eternal, ruled the universe of matter and mind. . . . [Man] is simply a simple tool, a mere cog in the wheel, a part, a small part, of this vast iron machine, that strikes and cuts, grinds and mashes, all things, including man, that resist it.”

In a letter to Eliza Gurney, a Quaker activist whom he came to know during the war, the president offered that the “purposes of the Almighty are perfect, and must prevail, though we erring mortals may fail to accurately perceive them in advance.” Lincoln never shared the personal relationship with God in Christ that most of his coreligionists felt. His was a distant and unknowable God whose will was imperceptible to men and women. “We hoped for a happy termination of this terrible war long before this,” he continued, “but God knows best, and has ruled otherwise. We shall yet acknowledge His wisdom and our own error therein.

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