Allen Guelzo on Abraham Lincoln

Allen Guelzo's book "Abraham Lincoln: Redeemer President" is an excellent volume on the sixteenth president of the United States. If you want to come to know Lincoln in his context, I heartily commend this book.

Allen Guelzo is a remarkable scholar of American history. He got his start studying Jonathan Edwards, with his book Edwards on the Will, and he also coedited, with Doug Sweeney, The New England Theology: From Jonathan Edwards to Edwards Amasa Park. But he has since come to be known as one of the leading experts on the Civil War. I have discussed his book Gettysburg: The Last Invasion on this blog, where I consider the role of contingency for Christian historians. I have also enjoyed his book Reconstruction: A Concise History and his Great Courses lectures Mr. Lincoln: The Life of Abraham Lincoln, an engaging six-hour audio presentation of Lincoln’s life. I’m intrigued to see that Guelzo is releasing a biography of Robert E. Lee in September 2021. 

I recently read what may be his most lauded project: Abraham Lincoln: Redeemer President, recipient of the 2000 Lincoln Prize. This is an excellent volume on the sixteenth president of the United States. Guelzo, a talented writer, makes this book an engaging read. If you want to come to know Lincoln in his context, I heartily commend this book. 

Guelzo’s aim in this volume is not a mere biography but an intellectual biography of Lincoln (24). He casts Lincoln as deeply influenced by Whig philosophy, even after breaking with the Whig party to become the Republican party’s first president, and he shows how he contrasted especially with the Jeffersonian “yeoman farmer” vision of America. Lincoln lauded opportunity for every man to make his way in the world, as he himself did, emerging from childhood poverty through backbreaking work to lawing and finally the presidency. As a Whig, Lincoln championed industriousness as well as moral rigorism, and Guelzo shows how Lincoln retained “unwavering allegiance to the Whig ideology” throughout his life—an aspect of his thought that too many Lincoln biographers have ignored or downplayed (458). 

This Whig ideology fit well with Lincoln’s antislavery sentiments and ultimately with his efforts to emancipate the slaves in the US. Blacks, he believed, should be given the freedom and opportunity to better their lives through hard work and moral rigor. 

That is not to deny the complexity of Lincoln’s approach to African Americans (which could be condescending) and to the slavery question as it intersected with what for Lincoln was the priority of preserving the union. Guelzo helpfully shows that Lincoln approached the issue of slavery gingerly in the border states because the loss of those states would have spelled disaster for the North. He only gradually moved toward immediate emancipation, and his views on slavery were nuanced even toward the end of his life as he weighed how best to bring Southern states back into the union as quickly as possible. 

Even so, Lincoln was convinced that the founding fathers had planned for slavery’s eventual extinction (238), and he took action that would propel the nation toward that goal one way or another. Despite the complexity of his thought, Lincoln’s actions on behalf of African Americans cannot and should not be denied.

One of the most fascinating aspects of the book is the attention Guelzo gives to Lincoln’s religion. This is a natural aspect of an intellectual biography. It also bears interest to those of us historians who focus on religious history. 

Lincoln grew up in a Separate Baptist family that was strongly predestinarian—a doctrine that stuck with Lincoln throughout his life. He rejected his father’s religion and even wrote “a little Book on Infidelity” in his twenties, though his friends convinced him to burn it because of the public backlash that could have ruined his prospects (50–51). In that period of his life, Lincoln was “Enthusiastic in his infidelity,” one contemporary said (80). Lincoln continued to be a skeptic throughout his life, and he famously said, “Probably it is to be my lot to go on in a twilight, feeling and reasoning my way through life, as questioning, doubting Thomas did” (155–56). 

Many wanted (and still want) to say that Lincoln became an orthodox Christian secretly toward the end of his life (445), but the evidence does not support such a conclusion, as Guelzo lays it out. For example, the friends who knew him best say that they never heard Lincoln profess faith in Jesus Christ (151, 325). Lincoln himself said, “I am not a Christian,” and he was amazed that professing Christians could defend slavery (261). After he became president, he did seem to show an increasing interest in the mystery of God and his providence, but the hopes people expressed of his conversion were “usually exaggerations” (312). Guelzo observes, “He never spoke, in the language of evangelical Christianity, of Jesus as my Savior, and his repertoire of biblical citations was more a cultural habit rather than a religious one” (313). 

Nonetheless, Lincoln’s views did shift over time. Notably, he did believe in providence, and his reflections on that doctrine became important in his assessment of the Civil War. Amazingly, he made a vow to his Maker to proceed with emancipation if the North won a military victory (341). Guelzo spends valuable time trying to reconcile Lincoln the infidel with Lincoln the emancipator driven by providence (342). His views on providence are especially intriguing and are perhaps best captured in his Second Inaugural Address (414–21), in which he inquired into “the meaning of the war” and described what Guelzo calls “the divine weighing of the republic—not just the South, but South and North together—in which the war’s losses were the wages of national sin, payable by both in life and treasure” (417). Ultimately, Lincoln appealed to God’s inscrutable providence as explaining why “this terrible war” was needed: “until all the wealth piled by the bond-man’s two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash, shall be paid with another drawn by the sword” (418). 

The people’s response to Lincoln’s assassination and their desire to, in some ways, divinize him show how Lincoln became America’s “Redeemer President” (441). Abraham Lincoln was an intellectual who lived a fascinating and consequential life for the American nation. And Allen Guelzo’s Abraham Lincoln: Redeemer President artfully captures his thought and action in Lincoln’s context in a balanced discussion with insightful historical analysis. Highly recommended.