I've been reading with great pleasure Edmund Wilson's Patriotic Gore. The subtitle--Studies in the Literature of the American Civil War--makes for an effect of double take when one arrives at the Table of Contents and finds no sign of Whitman or Melville but, for example, a long chapter devoted to Alexander H. Stephens, diarist, vice-president of the Confederacy, senator from Georgia in the period of the reconstruction and author of A Constitutional View of the Late War Between the States; Its Causes, Character, Conduct and Results Presented in a Series of Colloquies at Liberty Hall.
Stephens thought Lincoln was a tyrant and Wilson is generally sympathetic to that view. He suggests that the worst thing to have happened to Lincoln, save the assassination, was to have fallen into the hands of Carl Sandburg, and that there has "undoubtedly been written about him more romantic and sentimental rubbish than about any other American figure, with the possible exception of Edgar Allan Poe." Wilson substitutes for the cultural icon the Lincoln described by contemporary intimates, like his Springfield law partner William Herndon, and the portrait that emerges is of a brilliant and ambitious man, somewhat aloof and vain of his own powers, cold, calculating, skeptical.
The skepticism included the realm of religion. When in 1846 Lincoln ran for Congress, his opponent, a Methodist minister, leveled against him the charge of “infidelity.” Lincoln’s rejoinder, in the form of a campaign handbill, allows that while “not a member of any Christian Church,” he has however “never denied the truth of the Scriptures” or “spoken with intentional disrespect of religion in general.” He admits, by way perhaps of accounting for the rumor of his heresy, that as a much younger man he discussed and entertained heterodox philosophic notions.
The handbill is interesting mainly for what it seems to take care not to say. Lincoln gives no explanation for not being a church member, a current fact. He has never denied the truth of Scripture but does not now positively affirm it. He says that he has never spoken with intentional disrespect of religion but does not say that he believes in it now. He does not now disavow the skeptical views to which he says he was attracted as a younger man. David Bromwich, who has covered some of the same ground as Wilson in a recent series of articles for the New York Review of Books, concludes: “Even in this critical position, with his back against the wall, Lincoln took care not to say that he was a believer.”
This must be hard to take for many of those responsible for forcing upon our country and the world the disastrous presidency of George Bush. In a familiar recitation, the United States has forsaken its religious roots, forsworn a formerly religious culture, and the resulting triumphant secularism is the source of all our considerable woe. But it seems to me that the trend is in the opposite direction. The country’s founding principles are rooted in rationalism and Enlightenment idealism, not the regularly invoked “Judeo-Christian tradition,” and it is likely that Lincoln would be forced today to join a church before seeking high office.
So who and what are these “conservatives” talking about? Not Jefferson or Franklin and certainly not Thomas Paine. Not Lincoln, either. And not the books of Mark Twain, “the Lincoln of our literature”--nor, for that matter, the part of our cultural heritage created by Emerson, Thoreau, Whitman, Melville, Dickinson, Stephen Crane, Theodore Dreiser and Ernest Hemingway. The voices on the godly right are many and upraised, alternately plaintive and angry, but their claims seem unconnected to history and the facts of the case.