Back in 2012, when the biopic Lincoln was in theaters, it received an unfavorable notice on the editorial page of the Star Tribune newspaper from Edmund Santurri, a religion professor at St. Olaf College. Dr. Santurri's complaint was essentially that the movie did not do justice to Lincoln's deep religious sensibility. I gave an unfavorable notice to Dr. Santurri's unfavorable notice, here, where I argued briefly that his editorial overstated the case, that Lincoln had as a younger but mature adult been skeptical on religious questions (as Santurri allows in the editorial), and that the religious language and allusions of his subsequent presidential oratory do not establish that his views changed.
Well, a couple weeks ago I got a nice message from Dr. Santurri. It seems he'd been googling himself and came across my 8-year-old post. I hadn't persuaded him, nor do I recant my opposing view, but he seems as temperate and decent as you'd expect a professor of religion to be.
Dr. Santurri's note set me to thinking again about Lincoln, and how it might have happened that I developed a heterodox view of probably the most famous and loved figure in American history. I think it has a lot to do with the chapter on Lincoln in Edmund Wilson's Patriotic Gore. Though it's a door stop, coming in at around 800 pages, I'd recommend this book to anyone interested in American culture, American literature, American history, our Civil War, or Lincoln, who is the subject of one of its chapters. I wanted to reread that chapter but discovered that I no longer own the book—I vaguely remember that my copy was in poor shape, the combination of its 800-page mass and many perusals having defeated the binding, and I probably discarded it before my most recent move. So I made an online order, which arrived a few days ago, and I've been happily communing with Edmund Wilson till about 2 in the morning for the last several nights. Kinky!
Here is a Wilsonian sentence that, reading it again, I remember being smitten by the first time around:
There has undoubtedly been written about [Lincoln] more romantic and sentimental rubbish than about any other American figure, with the possible exception of Edgar Allan Poe; and there are moments when one is tempted to feel that the cruellest thing that has happened to Lincoln since he was shot by Booth has been to fall into the hands of Carl Sandburg.
The reference is to Sandburg's six-volume Lincoln biography, The Prairie Years (2 volumes) and The War Years (4 volumes). It's an immense work of hagiography and, even if you've never dipped into it, so influential as to account for your view of Lincoln, assuming you've mainly just accepted what you heard from school teachers. This is the Lincoln who was born poor, the son of a saintly mother who died young, whose stepmother believed in him, who always had an improving book in his pocket for when he took a break from splitting rails, the honest store clerk and spinner of humorous yarns that, on closer inspection, were infused with unassuming profundity, the homespun genius who was rebuffed by Ann Rutledge, the love of his life, and whose lofty principles caused him to lose elections, a source of dejection until, in 1860, a desperate country turned to him, and he led it through the Civil War, freed the slaves, composed an American scripture for the dedication of the cemetery at Gettysburg, wrote kindly letters of condolence to war widows, and, the great struggle finally won, was martyred on Good Friday, 1865. What Wilson, in about 30 pages, erects against this "sentimental rubbish" is a Lincoln who was embarrassed by his impoverished background, determined to make his way in the world, cold, calculating, supremely intelligent, possibly even more ambitious than he was smart, and persuaded of his superiority to other men. Wilson's authority for this quite different portrait is Lincoln's own papers, including speeches he gave in his 20s at the Young Men's Lyceum of Springfield, and, perhaps more decisive, the testimony of people he knew before he was famous, in particular his Springfield law partner William Herndon. Herndon's own life is interesting—his alcoholism delayed progress on the biography of his former law partner, and in the end he needed the assistance of an editor and co-author, Jesse Weik, to get to the finish line. But Herndon's Lincoln: The True Story of a Great Life was published in 1889, and the negative reviews may be attributed, if your view of the question is Wilson's, to the way in which it undercut the flourishing industry of Lincoln worship. Wikipedia:
The book received wildly mixed reviews due to the inclusion of such unvarnished elements as Lincoln's mother's illegitimacy (and even the rumors of Lincoln's own), its sometimes viciously negative portrayal of Herndon's longtime enemy Mary Todd Lincoln, Abraham Lincoln's suicidal depression, and other decidedly less than hagiographic accounts of the martyred president who was quickly becoming the most venerated and romanticized figure in American history . . . .
Particularly damning was the denunciation of the book by Robert Todd Lincoln, whose grudge against Herndon stemmed largely from Herndon's accounting of Ann Rutledge as the only romantic love of his father's life. Weik felt that Herndon's portrayal of Robert's mother and the Lincolns' domestic life was especially hurtful.
Wikipedia doesn't say so, but, according to Wilson, Herndon is also the principal source for information about Lincoln's religious skepticism. When he first knew Lincoln, the future president was already familiar with the views of Voltaire, Volney, and Thomas Paine. Herndon loaned him works by Darwin, Spencer, and Feuerbach. He also flatly states that Lincoln did not believe "that Jesus was . . . the son of God" or that "the Bible was the special divine revelation of God as the Christian world contends." I mentioned before that, in the handbill Lincoln produced to respond in 1846 to a political opponent who charged him with "infidelity," he gave no explanation for not being a member of any church, "a current fact." But it was more than a current fact. Lincoln was never a member of any church. On Good Friday, 1865, he went to the theater. In presidential "fact sheets" such as are distributed to kids in social studies class, the space for "religion" is most commonly filled with "Methodist," "Episcopalian," and "Presbyterian." For Lincoln, the usefully tactful phrase is "no formal affiliation" (ditto for Thomas Jefferson).
The subtitle of Patriotic Gore is Studies in the Literature of the American Civil War. It's an idiosyncratic work in the respect that authors you'd expect to hear about—Melville, Whitman—are not featured, but we learn a lot about such figures as Frederick Olmsted, Sidney Lanier, and John W. De Forest. One of the chapters I like most is devoted to Alexander H. Stephens, the vice president of the Confederacy. In other chapters Wilson discusses William T. Sherman, the Union general who burned a swatch across the South from Atlanta to the sea, and the jurist Oliver Wendell Holmes: I don't think these men, however well known, are usually thought of as having made contributions to American literature.
You'd be excused, from what I've said so far, for concluding that the book is aggressive and revisionist. The title (from the state song of Maryland) is reductive—patriotism engenders "gore"—and the effect of the chapter on Lincoln is to depict a human, not a saint. The pervading ambience, however, is of learnedness worn lightly and expressed in a style at once elegant and conversational. The chapter on Grant is the opposite of reductive. Mark Twain had tried to persuade the former general and president to write a memoir, but Grant, pleading that he had no literary gift and anyway didn't need the money, declined. Three years later he had been swindled out of all his money and diagnosed with incurable throat cancer. He now undertook the composition of his memoirs in order to leave something to his family, and, as Wilson explains, it turns out that he did have a literary gift, even if his sensibility was sometimes clouded by the cocaine he used to ward off pain. He dictated the first part and then, when he could no longer speak, wrote out longhand the remainder. The Personal Memoirs of U.S. Grant was completed eleven months after he'd begun and a week before he died. It was an immediate best seller and earned for Grant's family about $450,000. Wilson quotes, approvingly, from the contemporary review of Victorian poet and critic Matthew Arnold, a man about as unlike Grant as can be imagined:
. . . . I found a man of sterling good-sense as well as of the firmest resolution; a man, withal, humane, simple, modest; from all restless self-consciousness and desire for display perfectly free; never boastful where he himself was concerned . . . . I found a language straightforward, nervous, firm, possessing in general the high merit of saying clearly in the fewest possible words what had to be said, and saying it, frequently, with shrewd and unexpected turns of expression.
Wilson's narrative of Lee's surrender to Grant at the Appomattox Courthouse does, however, have a revisionist thrust—and it turns out that the truth is more interesting than the more familiar melodrama. Grant was as one with Lincoln in his inclination, or determination, to offer the South generous terms, but The Personal Memoirs also make clear that he did not by a long stretch revere Lee and had never subscribed to the theory of the Confederate general's nearly mystical powers. This probably accounts in large degree for his success. Whereas the former Union generals had minced around, Grant had a clear-eyed view of his side's advantages, and he pursued the Confederate army implacably, engaged it steadily in a vicious war of attrition that the out manned and out supplied Confederates could never win, and by the early spring of 1865 had reduced the opposing army to a ragtag collection of starvelings. "There is nothing for me to do but go and see General Grant," said Lee, adding, "and I would rather die a thousand deaths." Wilson observes, "He would hardly have spoken thus of McClellan."