Historian JoshuaMZeitz explains how Abraham Lincoln went from non-believer to unlikely faith leader, changing America’s relationship between politics and religion forever
n September 1862, weeks before he issued the preliminary Emancipation Proclamation, Abraham Lincoln wrestled with the enormous dilemma of whether to change the stakes of the Civil War. As he deliberated, he committed his thoughts to paper. In a private document that his secretaries found after his death, the president struggled to understand what God expected of him and of the nation.
Like many of his religious supporters, Lincoln believed that God had willed the Civil War, and, in time, the president would echo popular jeremiads that cast the suffering imposed on the nation as divine retribution for the sin of slavery. But where Lincoln grappled with the question of which side God had chosen, most Northern religious leaders — lay and clergy alike — were certain. The Union was on God’s side, and God was on the Union’s.
By numbers alone, organized Protestant churches were arguably the most influential public institutions in the United States. On the eve of the Civil War, the number of active Methodist clergymen roughly equaled the number of postal workers nationwide . By some estimates, the total receipts of all churches and religious organizations were almost equal to the federal government’s annual revenue. Among the country’s roughly 400 colleges, almost every last one was affiliated with a church.
Individual denominations often blurred the line between the sacred and the secular in their own fashion. A Presbyterian synod likened the Confederacy to Satan’s attempted usurpation of the throne of God. At Methodist meetings, American flags were often on prominent display — many Methodist churches also flew them on flagstaffs beside the crosses on their rooftops — and congregants were frequently encouraged to swear mass loyalty oaths.
He also infused his public speeches and papers with quotes, themes and language drawn from the King James Bible, a book he had memorized almost chapter and verse early in life, even before he was anything close to a believer. The translation with which most Americans were then familiar, published in 1767, was a revision to the original edition published in 1611. It knowingly invoked Elizabethan English —English, with its poetic rhythms and antediluvian verb formations, often ending in “-th.
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