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FUSION

In the Shadow of Lincoln’s Nationalism

July 23, 2024

Miles Smith IV

 

In his 1939 review of Carl Sandburg’s venerable biography of Abraham Lincoln, Max Lerner wrote in The New Republic that “Sandburg has the reporter’s passion for concreteness. We always learn the exact numbers of everything, the exact look of everyone who enters the story. There is something even a bit frightening about the detail.” Lerner nonetheless gave Sandburg the benefit of a doubt as a biographer. “I think I can understand Sandburg’s intent: the Lincoln literature has grown so vast that a definitive factual work was needed to gather together everything available and valid.” The one great flaw in Sandburg’s Lincoln: “the sense one gets of a curious one-dimensional plane, in which the detail gets the same loving attention as the big event, at a considerable sacrifice of perspective. Sandburg is a little like a painter in the primitive style.” Nonetheless, this made Sandburg a “true democratic historian,” a historian for whom “all facts, once they have been validated, are free and equal.” Sandburg’s Lincoln, according to Lerner, would “become an inexhaustible storehouse from which will be drawn a myriad of other Lincolns.”

Throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries there were, in fact, a multitude of Lincolns. John Hay and John Nicolay’s ten volume Lincoln biography showed readers the human side of their former employer. William Herndon gave readers a world man and liberator, a figure of such macrohistorical significance that he deserved a place beside Washington as the Father of the American nation. Lincoln was not only great when measured against his own time—Herndon said Lincoln stood out as a self-made great man in an era of self-made great men—he was great when compared to humanity throughout its recorded history. In 1917, the heights of the first World War prompted Lord Charnwood to give the world a biography of Lincoln the champion of liberal democracy. Thirty years and another world war later, JG Randall offered the world a vision of Lincoln as the ideal American and Christian liberal. Sandberg’s Lincoln was a pastoral hero, a sort of militarist Johnny Appleseed who sprang from the soil of the Nineteenth Century Midwestern prairies. Even Sandburg’s military leader Lincoln was in many ways a pastoralist who had “The War Years” foisted on him by circumstance. Doris Kearns Goodwin showed Lincoln as a master of political consensus who adroitly maneuvered Democrats and Republicans throughout his presidency, beginning with his assembling of an 1861 American ministry of all talents that brought together the brightest political lights of the Republican Party. This was the Lincoln that Steen Spielberg made in to his 2012 film. Richard Cawardine’s Lincoln was a culturally Calvinist man who never escaped his childhood religious concern with foreordained purpose. Allen C. Guelzo’s Redeemer President was the beaux ideal of liberal capitalism. Even Lincoln’s haters had a variety of Lincolns to choose from. From Edgar Lee Masters to Edmund Wilson, to modern libertarian writers like Thomas DiLorenzo, there have been, as John McKee Barr notes, a variety of Lincolns to Loathe.

The sheer ubiquity of Lincoln’s place in the American historical and political pantheon makes his relative absence in today’s political discourse more apparent. George W. Bush invoked the sixteenth president regularly—he chose to give his now infamous “Mission Accomplished” speech on the nuclear aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln—and gave a wide-ranging interview on the Civil War president to Harvard history professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. Barack Obama kicked off is presidential campaign in Lincoln’s hometown of Springfield. He regularly invoked his fellow Illinoisan often in policy debates and sprinkled Lincoln quotes in his public addresses. Donald Trump seemed less interested in Lincoln as a politician and a thinker than Obama. The forty-fifth president got into a squabble with his successor over a comparison he made with Lincoln. Trump claimed he had been treated as bad as Lincoln by the press, and that he had done more for African Americans than any president except Lincoln..

Given the more openly nationalist turn in the Republican Party since 2015, it is perhaps surprising that Lincoln is not used more often as a historical mascot. Given Trump’s relative success in the Midwest and Rustbelt, it would make sense for Republicans to appeal to a politician who, as Mark Neely notes was undeniably a nationalists in his politics. Lincoln’s nationalism presents a problem for the modern Trumpist coalition because that coalition is a product of the aftermath of the economic and political order Lincoln and the Civil War brought about. For nearly one hundred years between 1865 and 1965 the United States enjoyed the fruits of a coercively assimilationist approach to immigration that yielded economic growth particularly in the eastern cities and throughout the Midwest. The United States’ industrial capacity grew exponentially during the last four decades of the nineteenth century, largely because of the political milieu created and sustained by Lincolnian nationalism. Neely’s Lincoln and the Triumph of the Nation unambiguously posited the United States greatness in nationalistic terms, and Neely was unfazed by the proposition that Lincoln’s policies that delight moderns in the twenty-first century—crushing secession, emancipation, and a robust role for the federal government in the national economy—were driven by nationalistic rather than by humanitarian impulses.

Lincoln’s nationalism also helped birth the age of American imperialism. It is unsurprising that one of Lincoln’s major biographers in the 1920s was Indiana senator Albert Beveridge, who wedded the Protestant and Puritan nationalism of New England with a teleologically Lincolnian imperialism in his speech “The March of the Flag,” Beveridge declared to the world that Americans were a mighty people” God had “planted on this soil; a people sprung from the most masterful blood of history; a people

perpetually revitalized by the virile, man-producing workingfolk of all the earth.” Americans were “a people imperial by virtue of their power, by right of their institutions, by authority of their Heaven-directed purposes—the propagandists and not the misers of liberty.” The narrative of America was “a glorious history our God has bestowed upon His chosen people.”

Distasteful as it might seem to Americans in the Twenty-First Century, the Lincolnian nation-empire was what made the American republic strong enough to fight two world wars and to finally make the world—in the words of Woodrow Wilson—safe for democracy. The Lincolnian nation-empire was also good economically for Lincoln’s Midwestern heartland. Detroit, Cleveland, Chicago, Cincinnati, Milwaukee, St. Louis, and smaller cities like Akron, Dayton, Flint, Toledo, and South Bend all reached their demographic heights in either the 1950 or 1960 census. Even the South benefitted. Henry Grady, editor of the Atlanta Constitution in the Gilded Age, saw in in the Lincolnian nation the postwar South’s ticket to prosperity. It was Grady “who first taught the rising generation of the South to bind the name of Lincoln with that of Washington ‘as a sign upon their hand and a frontlet on their brow’.”

The Lincolnian nation led by the Midwest and Northeast and variously assisted by the Far West and South, lasted for over a century. That it was bookended by wars—the Civil War and World War II—was consequential but perhaps unnoticed. The United States emerged from the Second World War, argues Yuval Levin, “exceptionally unified and cohesive, and possessed of an unusual confidence in large institutions.” Schools and churches and businesses and the government all upheld a social order predicated on a loosely Christian—liberal Protestant and Roman Catholic—civil religion that married the state and metaphysics in a union loose enough for the citizenry to have free consciences but strong enough to uphold a unitary socio-moral order. Starting in the 1950s, Levin notes, that unified socio-moral order gave way. The Lincolnian nation unwound and fragmented. “Over the subsequent decades, the culture liberalized, the economy was deregulated, and an exceptional midcentury consensus in politics gave way to renewed divisions.”

The socio-economic unraveling was not necessarily a bad thing; the Sunbelt grew and so did the Far West. Texas’ population ballooned from 7.7 million people in 1950 to nearly 21 million in 2000. The national standard of living also grew. But the industrial heartland of the Lincolnian nation collapsed. The mix of politics and culture that Lincoln believed made the nation great—protectionism, liberalism, capitalism, and a liberal but sturdy Christianity—no longer had a constituency as rising labor prices made destinations in the South and West more attractive for businesses. The post-war economic order also saw the resurrection of the German and Japanese economies. Shorn of fascism and wedded to the United States militarily, free trade seemed the order of the day. The Lincoln’s vision of America won, and in 1980 another Illinoisan would help the Lincolnian nation reach its political apotheosis even as its economic foundation shifted. Ronald Reagan added Charismatic Evangelicals to the Republican coalition. Electorally and economically, the addition worked. Republican presidential landslides in 1984 and 1988 and Republican led congresses in the mid 1990s to a period of significant economic prosperity, especially in the Sunbelt. Yet, the Lincolnian aspects of the Republican party were already fading.

Evangelical figures like Jerry Falwell had close relationships with Charismatic Pentecostal leaders who until the 1980s had almost no major inroads in either political party but especially in the WASPy Republican Party. Lincoln, hardly a theologian or even a churchman, eyed Revivalists warily as well. When Lincoln ran as a Whig for the US House of Representatives in 1846, his Democratic opponent was fiery Methodist itinerant minister Peter Cartwright. The Methodist Cartwright eschewed the historical delineation of the churchly and political spheres and preached a sort of Christian politics that made a muscular and near-theocratic invasion of the political by the churchly a virtue. Cartwright “had an arm of flesh as well as a word of power, and who, at times, believed in a dispensation of muscular Christianity as well as a dispensation of the holy ghost.” Local poor whites—the “roughs and bruisers at camp-meetings and elsewhere” who attended camp meetings—“stood in awe of [Cartwright’s] brawny arm, and many anecdotes are told of his courage and daring that sent terror to their ranks.” Cartwright “felt that he was one of the Lord’s breaking plows, and that he had to drive his way through all kinds of roots and stubborn soil. The preacher’s “gesticulation, his manner of listening, his walk, and his laugh were peculiar, and would command attention in a crowd of a thousand.”Cartwright openly accused Lincoln of being an agnostic if not an atheist. While not necessarily a political death sentence, freethinking was a political handicap in frontier politics of the Early Republic. Lincoln did not respond to the would-be theocrat Methodist with a robust defense of secularism or a plea for irreligious politics. He admitted that he was not a member of a church. But also stated that he was not a scoffer at Christianity. “I have never denied the truth of the Scriptures; and I have never spoken with intentional disrespect of religion in general, or of any denomination of Christians in particular.” Lincoln could not “be brought to support a man for office, whom I knew to be an open enemy of, and scoffer at, religion.” The people of 1846 Illinois—by all measures a religious people—elected Lincoln to congress by a wide margin over Cartwright. Lincolnian religious politics and the Lincolnian nation went hand in hand. Support for religion was coupled with a comfortable space between clerical and churchly invasions of the political sphere. While it wasn’t necessarily preferable to be irreligious in the Lincolnian nation, there was no churchly or clerical test applied to politicians either.

By 2016, Evangelicals of the revivalist and charismatic stripe had cozied themselves to the Republican presidential frontrunner, Donald Trump. His spiritual advisor was Pentecostal minister Paula White, and one of his loudest cheerleaders was Baptist megachurch pastor Robert Jeffries. These were not merely conservative Protestants, but revivalist charismatics and Pentecostals who had no history with traditional Protestant political theology during the Reformation or the development of Protestant political theology in the American republic. Abraham Lincoln was married in an Episcopal service and attended a conservative Old School Presbyterian congregation during his presidency. His pastor, Phineas Gurley, was a former US Senate chaplain and hardly abstentious about religious leaders interacting with politicians. But Gurley never made partisan pronouncements from the pulpit, nor did he demand politicians conform to a specific clerical, churchly, or even religious ideal. It was enough that politicians respected religion.

Trumpist clerics seem less interested in Gurley’s reticence.  Greg Locke, a Charismatic Fundamentalist Baptist minister and Trump booster from Tennessee, declared to a gathering that “there’s no reason why the church of the living God and the Kingdom of Jesus Christ should not rule this nation.” This was a far cry from the Lincolnian nation’s settlement on religion and politics. Locke and his fellow-travelers echoed Peter Cartwright’s desire to use a strong clerical arm to put the American republic in good order, but Cartwright’s vision was rejected in his own time even by religious Americans, who sided with Lincoln. The Republican Party, hardly irreligious, historically respected religion without asking the church to rule the state. Lincoln wanted to uphold religion’s place in the civil order without flirting with theocracy. Modern Republican flirtations with theocratic Pentecostals would be like Lincoln making common cause with Peter Cartwight, something the future president refused to do.

The Republican party of 2024 has inherited Lincolnian nationalism and the successors of Lincoln’s first political enemy. But the Republican Party, the most natural inheritor of the Lincolnian legacy, is increasingly controlled by religious figures who not only have no historical connection to Lincoln’s legacy, but actively oppose it. What likeness of Lincoln will be drawn for the emerging Republican party of 2024 is impossible to know, but it will inevitably be a very different Lincoln than the one that made the twentieth century United States.


Miles Smith IV is an Assistant Professor of History at Hillsdale College.

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