A History of the American People

in league with Hell,' and the South was nowsuffering for its sins' as a matter of divine logic.' He also worked out that General McClellan's much criticized vacillations were an example of God's masterful cunning since they made a quick Northern victory impossible and so insured that the South would be much more heavily punished in the end. As against all these raucous certainties, there were the doubts, the puzzlings, and the agonizing efforts of Abraham Lincoln to rationalize God's purposes. To anyone who reads his letters and speeches, and the records of his private conversations, it is hard not to believe that, whatever his religious state of mind before the war again, he acquired faith of a kind before it ended. His evident and total sincerity shines through all his words as the war took its terrible toll. He certainly felt the spirit of guidance.I am satisfied,' he wrote, that when the Almighty wants me to do or not to do a particular thing, he finds a way of letting me know it.' He thus waited, as the Cabinet papers show, for providential guidance at certain critical points of the war. He never claimed to be the personal agent of God's will, as everybody else seemed to be doing. But he wrote:If it were not for my firm belief in an overriding providence it would be difficult for me,
in the midst of such complications of affairs, to keep my reason in its seat. But I am confident
that the Almighty has his plans and will work them out; and ... they will be the wisest and the
best for us.' When asked if God was on the side of the North, he replied: I am not at all concerned about that, for I know the Lord is always on the side of the right. But it is my constant anxiety and prayer that I and this nation should be on the Lord's side.' As he put it,I am not
bound to win but I am bound to be true. I am not bound to succeed, but I am bound to live up to
the light I have.’
Early in the war, a delegation of Baltimore blacks presented him with a finely bound Bible, in
appreciation of his work for the negroes. He took to reading it more and more as the war
proceeded, especially the Prophets and the Psalms. An old friend, Joshua Speed, found him
reading it and said: I am glad to see you so profitably engaged.' Lincoln:Yes. I am profitably
engaged.' Speed: Well, I see you have recovered from your skepticism [about religion and the progress of the war]. I am sorry to say that I have not.' Lincoln:You are wrong, Speed. Take all
of this book upon reason that you can, and the balance on faith, and you will live and die a
happier and a better man.' As he told the Baltimore blacks: This Great Book ... is the best gift God gave to man.' After reading the Bible, Lincoln argued within himself as to what was the best course to pursue, often calling in an old friend like Leonard Swett, to rehearse pros and cons before a sympathetic listener. Thus arguing within himself, Lincoln incarnated the national, republican, and democratic morality which the American religious experience had brought into existence-probably more completely and accurately than a man committed to a specific church. He caught exactly the same mood as President Washington in his Farewell Message to Congress, and that is one reason why his conduct in the events leading up to the war, and during the war itself, seems, in retrospect-and seemed so to many at the time-so unerringly to accord with the national spirit. Unlike Governor Winthrop and the first colonists, Lincoln did not see the republic as the Elect Nation because that implied it was always right, and the fact that the Civil War had occurred at all indicated that America was fallible. But, if fallible, it was also anxious to do right. The Americas, as he put it, werethe Almost Chosen People' and the war was part of God's scheme, a
great testing of the nation by an ordeal of blood, showing the way to charity and thus to rebirth.
In this spirit Lincoln approached the problem of emancipating the slaves. The moment had to
be well chosen not merely to keep the border states in the war, and fighting, but because in a
sense it marked a change in the object for which the war was being fought. Lincoln had entered