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Jon MeachamAnd There Was Light: Abraham Lincoln and the American Struggle
Nonfiction | Biography | Adult | Published in 2022A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Themes
The Political Religion of the United States
The phrase “political religion” comes from Abraham Lincoln. It appears in a speech he gave on the importance of revering, as if they were sacred documents, the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. The idea that a healthy state would incorporate religious veneration for its laws and polity was described by Jean-Jacques Rousseau in The Social Contract, and Lincoln was following Rousseau when he used the phrase. Furthermore, a religious sense inheres in the idea that the American experiment in democracy is also a world-historical—and specifically providential— endeavor. This idea became common in the 19th century, linked to the American exceptionalism documented by de Tocqueville.
It’s clear that Lincoln was influenced by these ideas. He saw the Constitution as sacred and the Civil War as necessary to preserve something sacred. Moreover, as Lincoln aged, he became more idiosyncratic in his personal religious convictions, believing that the call of his conscience was, in some real sense, the voice of God, and that moral and spiritual development required principled adherence to that call. For Lincoln, who claims to have always had a natural antipathy to slavery and did consistently express reverent admiration for the founding principles of the American Republic, this call would be heeded and realized—imperfectly—over the course of a contentious political career.
For Lincoln, the divine call of conscience was a call to practical action—and to political action. Lincoln’s religion, in a sense, was a religion of moral duty that finds its greatest expression in law and politics.
According to Jon Meacham, Lincoln believed in the great “American experiment in democracy” (67). This experiment was a light for the rest of the world and the success of democracy, as a globally viable possibility, relied upon the American example. This would be one of the few most fundamental reasons why Lincoln strove so adamantly to maintain the Union and would not let secession go unchallenged. For Lincoln, the Civil War was not solely (or even primarily) about the abolition of slavery. It was, rather, about the possibility of a nation founded on Liberty and equality for all. The maintenance and unity of that nation was imperative for all people everywhere. This was, for Lincoln, a holy war.
Meacham quotes Lincoln expressing his admiration for Jefferson and the Federalists: “I have never had a feeling politically that did not spring from the sentiments embodied in the Declaration of Independence’” (117). Lincoln adored the works of Thomas Jefferson, especially the Declaration, which he saw as more than an assertion of independence from Britain. For Lincoln, the Declaration embodies the revolutionary assertion that all men, regardless of race, are political equals and must be treated as such. This was a moral imperative of such fundamental significance that it should be treated as a self-evident spiritual tenet binding member of the nation.
For Lincoln, the defense of civil liberties outlined in the Constitution, as well as the appeal to foundational principles of liberty and equality in the Declaration, make these founding documents of the United States essentially religious in character. He believed, on principle, that these founding documents should not be trampled over by a mob or brute majority rule. The democratic experiment had to be held within principled limits. Whether or not America could stand united was a great test of what’s possible for the future of humanity. In support of these founding documents as sacred texts, Lincoln writes:
[S]o to the support of the Constitution and Laws, let every American pledge his life, his property, and his sacred honor—let every man remember that to violate the law, is to trample on the blood of his father, and to tear the [charter] of his own, and his children’s liberty […] in short, let it become the political religion of the nation; and let the old and the young, the rich and the poor, the grave and the gay, of all sexes and tongues, and colors and conditions, sacrifice unceasingly upon its altar (66).
The explicit call to a “political religion,” as well as the religious imagery throughout many of Lincoln’s late speeches, show that Lincoln experienced political dedication to the American Republic as a frontier of experience not to be transcended by any other spheres of public or private life. The primacy of liberty and equality serve as first principles around which conscience could organize itself. The goal would be, as he famously put in the Gettysburg Address, “a government of the people, by the people and for the people.” This democratic ideal and equality was self-evidently not realized during Lincoln’s lifetime. It was a goal to strive toward. “Lincoln argued […] that the Founders’ notion of equality gave the nation a goal to seek, an ideal to realize” (118). These principles posit the goal, and conscience motivates us to strive toward them.
Meacham goes on: “History was the story of the degree to which mortals might close the gap between the ideal and the real, between the transcendent and the actual. And politics was a central arena in which that gap was either narrowed or widened” (129). Given the shape and nature of his own career, it may be fair to suggest that Meacham shares this narrative vision of history with Lincoln. Meacham believes that over the course of time, Lincoln’s political dedication became more thoroughly imbued with the direction of transcendent guiding principles. In fact, this could reflect the extent and depth of Lincoln’s practical action, which reach an apogee as president of the United States, especially during a war for the soul and maintenance of the country. Meacham writes, “While the Lincoln of New Salem thought of god as a remote Creator, uninvolved in history, the Lincoln of the White House came to a different view: that the human drama on earth was bound up with the inscrutable but evident will of God” (41). It does not seem like Lincoln ever presumed that “the arc of the moral universe is long but […] bends toward justice,” as Dr. King and others would go on to claim (King, Martin Luther, Jr. “Remaining Awake Through a Great Revolution.” National Cathedral, Washington, DC, Speech, 31 Mar. 1968). It does seem, though, that he believed humanity could actualize more just societies over time through principled adherence to the will of God, which we all experience through the call of conscience.
Lincoln’s Evolving Views on Slavery & Race
One of the major themes of Meacham’s biography is the developmental story of Lincoln’s conscience, which is most particularly expressed in his devotion to the limitation, and eventual eradication, of slavery. Although Lincoln says he had always been “naturally” antislavery—perhaps because of his hatred of farm labor as a child, the emancipation churches of Kentucky, and his firsthand experience of a slave auction in New Orleans—Lincoln’s record in the Illinois state legislature and in the US Congress reveal a person in conflict. Lincoln may have always been against slavery, but his compromising spirit, and inclination towards gradual change rather than radical transformation, led him to self-censorship and the support of legislation that favored limitations on slavery rather than abolition. In Congress, for instance, Lincoln sponsored a bill to end the institution of slavery in the United States capital, Washington, DC, but he also maintained close friendships with slaveholders and even accepting a slaveholder as a client when working as an attorney in Springfield. While Lincoln seems to have been repulsed by slavery, he often took stances, in both personal and public life, that reveal he was not as uncomfortable with it as the abolitionists.
After Lincoln’s archrival, Stephen Douglas, introduced the Kansas-Nebraska Act in 1854, Lincoln seems to have been spurred by conscience to a renewed political career, one defined largely by antislavery sentiment and morality. Meacham writes: “‘I have always hated’ slavery, Lincoln remarked in the summer of 1854, ‘but I have always been quiet about it until this new era of the introduction of the Nebraska Bill began’” (137). Prior to this, Lincoln had not run for political office since his short term as a congressman. This was something of a watershed moment in Lincoln’s personal life and subsequently the nation’s future.
In 1858, Lincoln engaged Stephen Douglas is a number of famous debates about racial superiority and institutional slavery. Even as Lincoln argued with vigor for the eventual eradication of slavery, he expressed bigoted views. During the Lincoln-Douglas debates, for instance, Lincoln said, “I protest against that counterfeit logic which concludes that, because I do not want a Black woman for a slave I must necessarily want her for a wife. I need not have her for either, I can just leave her alone. In some respects, she certainly is not my equal” (161). Even at this late point in life, Lincoln did not view Black Americans as his natural equal. In another case in these debates, he explicitly rejects the equality of the races and the superiority of the white race (164). Meacham writes:
Elements of his debate with Douglas make for painful reading. In speaking to a white electorate in 1858, Lincoln offered a morally informed antislavery argument but did not asset that Black people could become fully empowered citizens. He was a campaigner who believed that the public sentiment he so respected tended to be best shaped gradually. Not a preacher but a politician, not a full-time reformer but an office-seeker, he calibrated his case in 1858 with care (162).
Lincoln believed in the idea of “gradual emancipation” (142). Instead of outright abolition, as many of his comrades in the Republican Party desired, Lincoln took a moderate approach, seeking the slow eradication of the institution. Lincoln wanted to balance progress toward a more just and egalitarian future with the backlash that such progress would cause. He was also careful not to invoke moral judgment on Southerners for fear of alienating them. Many of his peers in the abolition movement were not equally worried.
As president of a divided nation in a bloody war with itself, Lincoln became even more convinced of the divine call of conscience and the importance of dedication to that truth. In the final years of his life, Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation, which formally freed all enslaved people in rebelling states, and privately exhibited signs that his former feelings about the natural differences between the races were not so inflexible.
Even as Lincoln boldly pursued a war to maintain the Union and issued the Emancipation Proclamation—which he took to be the most important part of his historical legacy—he never completely reached the apogee of his own moral ideal. Meacham writes:
Typically, the president was moderate on postwar plans. In his Proclamation of Amnesty and reconstruction, issued on Tuesday, December 8, 1863, the president stood by emancipation but would leave the states largely sovereign on questions of the rights of Black Americans once slavery was ended and the Union restored (320).
This is revealing of Lincoln’s lifelong character, one that balanced his progressive goals against a policy of appeasement, compromise, and moderation. Even if Lincoln’s views on race and institutional slavery had changed, he still managed and thought like a politician whose highest goal was the stability of a divided country.
The Role of Democratic Principles
For Meacham, the story of Lincoln, and the United States in the mid-1800s, is a story about democracy. Throughout the 1800s, the United States was the exemplar of the possibility of democracy throughout the world. The American Revolution in the late 1700s led the wave of cascading democratic revolutions throughout the world. In the 1830s, Alexis de Tocqueville, a French diplomat and researcher in America, wrote the monumental classic, Democracy in America. This book emphasized for a European audience the of American democracy and the extent to which Americans were dedicated, as a point of national spirit, to democratic principles.
Lincoln’s personal patriotic dedication to democracy was significantly heightened by his sense that the fate of the world hinged on the success, viability, and moral code of the American democracy. Note Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address. He views the noble and “great task” of the war era not as the abolition of slavery but as the preservation of democracy under the banner of “a new birth of freedom” (312). At a time of Union victory and his greatest degree of personal political power, Lincoln expressed a duty-bound dedication to democracy, i.e., a government “of the people, by the people, and for the people” (312). He often expressed the sense that the American experiment in democracy was not only domestically imperative but globally significant. Given his clearly stated “personal wish” that all men everywhere should be free, and the view that democracy most aptly permitted the possibility of freedom, it’s no wonder that he adopted religious and historical overtones to buttress the grandeur of his endeavor.
It should not be assumed that Lincoln was the only one concerned with democratic principles. In fact, since the rise of Andrew Jackson three decades earlier, the United States had continuously become a more democratic country. As a republic, it already includes some democratic principle in its founding, but these tendencies would be exacerbated as time went by. This commitment to democracy is expressed at no better time than the presidential election of 1864, a time during which the country was engaged in massive civil war. As Meacham writes, “The very fact of the 1864 election was notable: A nation engulfed by civil war was holding a national election whose results could remove the incumbent commander in chief at an hour of active rebellion” (318). In short, the fact of the 1864 election (which may have easily been postponed until the end of the war) is reflective of a nation that was thoroughly committed to democracy.
Lincoln, though he had been caricatured as a king and a despot by both Confederates and Northern Democrats, never made any attempt to shore up power for himself or avoid the election, as is far from unheard of for wartime leaders. Meacham quotes Lincoln saying, “We cannot have free government without elections, and if the rebellion could force us to forgo, or postpone a national election, it might fairly claim to have already conquered and ruined us” (319). The portrait of Lincoln that develops over the course Meacham’s book is of a man whose dedication to principle typically undergirds all his political action. In this regard we again see the moral simplicity of his view. Fair and consistent democratic elections are imperative.
Democracy ultimately understands the fundamental significance of public opinion. Meacham quotes Lincoln:
‘Our government rests in public opinion,’ he said. ‘Whoever can change public opinion, can change the government […] Public opinion, [on] any subject, always has a ‘central idea,’ from which all its minor thoughts radiate. That ‘central idea’ in our political public opinion, at the beginning was, and until recently has continued to be, ‘the equality of men’ (154).
In short, Lincoln believed that democracy rested on public opinion and that public opinion is ultimately centered around one, singular idea. In this case, Lincoln judges that idea to be equality. The logical result, then, is that the president, like any public servant in a democracy, should be dedicated to achieving equality.
Lincoln sought to grab ahold of this democratic principle, the “central idea” of public opinion, and consistently push further towards its realization. In accordance with democratic principle, the abolition of slavery was a real step towards truer democracy regardless of whether public opinion agreed with it since it furthered the equality of man. In such a case contradiction could be avoided by claiming that public opinion on a specific issue, like slavery, might mistake its own core idea.
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