The buried Lincoln

Delivered at a Sunday Circle on February 8, 2009 at the Unitarian Universalist Congregation Meeting House (Blacksburg, VA), by Morton Nadler, a member of the Congregation.

On February 12, 1809, two boys were born, one in England, Charles Robert Darwin, to a wealthy family, and one in frontier Kentucky, Abraham Lincoln.

Fast forward 32 years. A Scottish publisher, Robert Chambers, had just published a book anonymously on evolution, Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation. Our two young men both obtained copies — along with Queen Victoria and other notables.

Chambers wrote that just as it was generally admitted that the physical universe obeyed natural laws, so should it be realized that the biological world did also. He postulated that from spontaneously generated simple life forms by unspecified causes more and more complicated forms, species, developed.

…how can we suppose that the august Being who brought all these countless worlds into form by the simple establishment of a natural principle flowing from his mind, was to interfere personally and specially on every occasion when a new shell-fish or reptile was to be ushered into existence on one of these worlds? Surely this idea is too ridiculous to be for a moment entertained.

Darwin was suspected of being the author until Chambers was identified. Here is what William Herndon, Lincoln’s law partner and biographer wrote about the effect of this book on Lincoln:

A gentleman in Springfield gave him a book called, I believe, “Vestiges of Creation,” which interested him so much that he read it through. The volume was published in Edinburgh, and undertook to demonstrate the doctrine of development or evolution. The treatise interested him greatly, and he was deeply impressed with the notion of the so-called "universal law"-evolution; he did not extend greatly his researches, but by continued thinking in a single channel seemed to grow into a warm advocate of the new doctrine. Beyond what I have stated he made no further investigation into the realm of philosophy. "There are no accidents," he said one day, "in my philosophy. Every effect must have its cause. The past is the cause of the present, and the present will be the cause of the future. All these are links in the endless chain stretching from the finite to the infinite." From what has been said it would follow logically that he did not believe, except in a very restricted sense, in the freedom of the will. We often argued the question, I taking the opposite view; he changed the expression, calling it the freedom of the mind, and insisted that man always acted from a motive. I once contended that man was free and could act without a motive. He smiled at my philosophy, and answered that it was impossible, because the motive was born before the man."

Darwin was already working on his theory of evolution driven by natural selection; Lincoln was interested in scientific questions as one of the guides to his intensely humane and secular political outlook. Both men were strongly influenced by the discoveries of geological science of the antiquity of the earth, far exceeding the pitiful chronology derived from the book of Genesis.

In a meditation on a visit to Niagara Falls Lincoln wrote:

The geologist will demonstrate that the plunge, or fall, was once at Lake Ontario, and has worn its way back to its present position; he will ascertain how fast it is wearing now, and so get a basis for determining how long it has been wearing back from Lake Ontario, and finally demonstrate by it that this world is at least fourteen thousand years old.…

Co[n]temporary with the whole race of men, and older than the first man, Niagara is strong, and fresh to-day as ten thousand years ago. The Mammoth and Mastodon—now so long dead, that fragments of their monstrous bones, alone testify, that they ever lived, have gazed on Niagara. In that long—long time, never still for a single moment.

So Abraham Lincoln knew about evolution. He was elected to the presidency a little over a year after the publication of Origin of Species. By then, speculation on evolution had been making the rounds within Freethought circles for years, and one of Lincoln's favorite activities, according to Herndon, was to argue Freethought issues with his rough-and-tumble Freethought buddies. Herndon reported that Lincoln had read Darwin before most people had heard of him.

Abraham Lincoln's Religious Views
by William Herndon (Herndon was Lincoln’s law partner)

From what I know of Mr. Lincoln, and from what I have heard and verily believe, I can say, first, that he did not believe in special creation, his idea being that all creation was an evolution under law; secondly, that he did not believe that the Bible was a special revelation from God, as the Christian world contends; thirdly, he did not believe in miracles as understood by Christians; fourthly, he believed in universal inspiration and miracles under law; fifthly, he did not believe that Jesus was the Christ, the son of God, as the Christian church contends; sixthly, he believed that all things, both matter and mind, were governed by laws, universal, absolute and eternal. All his speeches and remarks in Washington conclusively prove this. Law was to Lincoln everything, and special interferences, shams and delusions.

1835 he wrote out a small work on Infidelity, and intended to have it published. This book was an attack upon the whole grounds of Christianity, and especially was it an attack upon the idea that Jesus was the Christ, the true and only-begotten son of God, as the Christian world contends. Mr. Lincoln was at that time in New Salem, keeping store for Mr. Samuel Hill, a merchant and postmaster of that place. Lincoln and Hill were very friendly. Hill, I think, was a skeptic at the time. Lincoln, one day after the book was finished, read it to Mr. Hill, his good friend. Hill tried to persuade him not to make it public, not to publish it. Hill, at that time, saw in Lincoln a rising man, and wished him success. Lincoln refused to destroy it -- said it should be published. Hill swore it should never see the light of day. He had an eye on Lincoln's popularity -- his present and future success; and believing that if the book was published it would kill Lincoln forever, he snatched it from Lincoln's hand when Lincoln was not expecting it, and ran it into an old-fashioned tin plate stove, heated as hot as a furnace; and so Lincoln's book went up to the clouds in smoke. It is confessed by all who heard parts of it that it was at once able and eloquent; and, if I may judge it from Mr. Lincoln's subsequent ideas and opinions, often expressed to me and to others in my presence, it was able, strong, plain and fair. His argument was grounded on the internal mistakes of the Old and New Testaments, and on reason and on the experiences and observations of men. The criticisms from internal defects were sharp, strong, and manly.

Lincoln was very familiar with the writings of the Unitarian ministers Channing and Parker, whose works he owned. The influence of Parker is reflected in the Gettysburg address. In 1850, Parker was the first to use the phrase, "of all the people, by all the people, for all the people."

From other writings of friends and intimates it appears that Lincoln was a not-so-closeted atheist. We do not know where Darwin was, but he held off publishing his theory of evolution by random variation and natural selection for 20 years. Was it for scientific certainty—or was it out of caution because he knew what it would do to Christianity and his devout wife?

"I am a strong advocate for free thought on all subjects, yet it appears to me (whether rightly or wrongly) that direct arguments against christianity & theism produce hardly any effect on the public; & freedom of thought is best promoted by the gradual illumination of men's minds, which follow[s] from the advance of science. It has, therefore, been always my object to avoid writing on religion, & I have confined myself to science. I may, however, have been unduly biassed by the pain which it would give some members of my family, if I aided in any way direct attacks on religion"

Just as Lincoln knew and supported the theory of evolution, so Darwin followed the progress of the Civil War and passionately hoped for the abolition of slavery as its outcome. A recent book even tries to make the case that it was his hatred of slavery that led him to the theory of descent of all species from a single common ancestor. This was supposedly advanced to refute the apologists for Negro slavery, that there were actually two separate species, one superior, one inferior.

Lincoln was very interested in science and technology. In 1858 he gave a lecture on discoveries and inventions, which he repeated several times, showing wide reading and thinking on the subject.

The Morrill Act, which established the Land-Grant Universities, was twice vetoed by Buchanan. Lincoln signed it the first time it was presented to him.

Darwin and Lincoln shared a horror of slavery which both had witnessed in virulent operation.

Historians cannot agree on Lincoln’s driving motivation. Two extreme views have been expressed:

He was an astute and manipulative politician who set out from the beginning to abolish slavery and maneuvered public opinion step-by-step to achieve this goal—or—he was really so respectful of the Constitution’s endorsement of slavery that he couldn’t—or wouldn’t—act on slavery until he was forced to by the course of events.

An example of Lincoln as sly is given by Striner (2006):

It is only when seen in this light of moral value that the gifts of Lincoln as a strategist can really be considered. But when seen in this light, Lincoln's gifts amounted to the following: (1) His capacity to view the large picture in a flash and to relate the subsidiary parts of a problem to the whole; (2) his capacity to visualize surges of power as they moved along dynamic lines of force; (3) his gift for doing best-case and worst-case contingency planning simultaneously; (4) his ability to develop his plans incrementally, expanding his power by degrees as he diminished the power of his enemies; (5) his ability to practice deception as a ploy within a context of honesty.

All of these abilities were channeled by Lincoln in the following manner when it came to the problem of slavery: (1) He believed it was impossible for him to deal with the institution unless he condemned it as an unambiguous evil; (2) however, knowing and saying that slavery was wrong was just a prelude to strong civic action; (3) the great challenge for the anti-slavery movement was to deal with the evil effectively; (4) the best incremental plan was to revive the early national creed that was inimical to human enslavement: "all men are created equal"; (5) in so doing, one should summon all available power to manipulate the flow of events in this general direction while fighting to prevent any further erosion of the national creed.

Can we believe him when he claimed that at the outset he felt that under the Constitution Congress only had the power to keep slavery out of the territories? Without expansion slavery would wither away—“by 1900!” He was also very concerned about the Border States. At his inauguration there were such fears of an attack on his train passing through Baltimore that he crept incognito into Washington at midnight.

Fredrickson, in Big Enough to be Inconsistent, defends a third view: that his views changed with his experience.

Example: he, like Jefferson, felt that the two races could not coexist and favored “colonization.” However the progress of the war and the contributions of the Negro troops brought him around to respect the views of the Negro leaders and abandoned this view. Likewise, he was against civil and political rights for Negroes but came to support them—at least for “the most intelligent.”

The controversy is actually meaningless, because whichever view describes “how he really felt,” he would have carried out exactly the same steps, the same policies!

Consider his support for colonization. He gave the reasons for his support of this form of ethnic cleansing. He sincerely felt that the two races could not coexist. In his relations with, for example, Frederick Douglass, he showed himself to be totally un-self-conscious as he engaged with him as one man with another. He presented his own views respectfully and listened to the other man’s objections. He answered those objections, again respectfully. He convinced Douglass simply by his warm and un-self-conscious behavior that he was absolutely non-racist. He also convinced him of his program as the best steps to end slavery.

In his meetings with other black leaders he became convinced by them that colonization was absolutely the wrong way to go, that African-Americans were as American as any white.

Here is one more example of the forgotten amazing Lincoln.

In 1836 Lincoln was a successful candidate to the state legislature for Sangamon County, Illinois. In this hitherto Democrat county Lincoln led the Whig ticket to victory.

During the campaign he wrote a letter to The Journal, a local newspaper. In that letter we find the remarkable statement:

I go for all sharing the privileges of the government who assist in bearing its burdens. Consequently , I go for admitting all whites to the right of suffrage who pay taxes or bear arms (by no means excluding females [emph. added, MN]).

His biographer, his law partner W.H. Herndon, comments: “there is much food for thought in the second paragraph. His broad plan for universal suffrage commends itself to the ladies, and we need no further evidence to satisfy our minds of his position on the subject of ‘Woman’s Rights.’ Had he lived.”

Incidentally, one hundred years later, on February 12, 1909, the NAACP was founded. Among the six founders were two Unitarians: Mary White Ovington and Oswald Garrison Villard.