The Soul of Abraham Lincoln

by William E. Barton

We shall have occasion in a subsequent chapter to recur to this so-called book which Lincoln is alleged to have written while in New Salem. It is sufficient at this time to remember, and the fact must not be overlooked, that our knowledge of this book depends solely upon the testimony of Herndon. Herndon never saw the book, and so far as is known he never talked with anyone who had seen it. He affirms that Lincoln never denied having written a book on the subject of religion, but he nowhere claims that Lincoln told him in detail concerning its contents. Herndon's principal visit, and perhaps the only one which he made to New Salem in quest of literary material, was in October in 1866. He had attended the Circuit Court of Menard County on Saturday, October 13, and on Sunday morning at 11:20 A.M., as he tells us with painstaking and lawyer-like particularity, he visited the site of New Salem. That afternoon and a part of the next morning, which he says was misty, cloudy, foggy, and cold, he made inquiry of the oldest inhabitant of that part of the country and wrote out the substance of his lecture on Ann Rutledge. This was a whole generation after Lincoln had removed from the now depopulated New Salem, and there were very few people in the neighborhood who remembered him through any personal association. The town had completely disappeared, but Herndon found the site of the houses that once had stood there, and also found and identified the grave of Ann Rutledge. To that visit we are indebted for a good deal of our knowledge of the background of Lincoln's life during this formative epoch. But we are not bound to accept all of Mr. Herndon's inferences regarding it.

It must be remembered that Herndon's lecture did not pass unchallenged. So small was the audience when he delivered it and so uniformally unfavorable were the press comments that he never repeated this lecture, and some of its statements are open to question. It is not in this lecture that we learn of the essay which Lincoln is alleged to have written in criticism of the Bible, but that was the visit on which Herndon appears to have gathered his information concerning Lincoln's more intimate relations with New Salem.

There is no good reason to doubt that Lincoln during this period read Volney and Paine, and that having read them he rushed rather quickly to paper and set down his immature thoughts in argumentative fashion. It would divert us from our present purpose of portraying the environment if we were to consider in detail at this point the story of Lincoln's burnt book. The reader will do well to remember, however, that Herndon, though truthful, was not infallible nor on this point free from bias; that neither Herndon nor anyone else then living was known to have seen, much less to have read, the book alleged to have been burned thirty-two years before; and that there was abundant opportunity not only for exaggeration but even for a complete misunderstanding concerning the actual content of this book.

Indeed, this incident has been allowed to pass with too little criticism or challenge. Those who did not believe Lincoln to have been a man of faith were glad to accept the story; those who believed that he later was a man of faith were not wholly unwilling to believe that he had once been an infidel and later had undergone a marked change of opinion. There seemed no good reason to dispute Herndon, and no one else was supposed to know more about the subject than he. But we shall discover that Herndon may not have learned the whole truth. There is more than a possibility that the manuscript that was burned was a document of quite another sort.

If Lincoln was regarded as an infidel, and if he ever was tempted to think himself one, we should not be justified in accepting that judgment as final until we knew and considered what was required in that time and place to constitute a man an infidel.

In the mind of most if not all of the Baptist preachers whom Lincoln heard while he was at New Salem, a belief that the earth was round was sufficient to brand a man as an infidel. The Methodists, as a rule, would have admitted that the earth was round, but Peter Cartwright would probably have considered a man an infidel who believed that the earth was not created in seven literal days. At Vandalia, Lincoln heard some ministers of wider vision, such as Edward Beecher and Julian M. Sturtevant, who were occasionally there, and John Mason Peck; but these experiences were rare. His association with Methodists was largely in the political arena, where he crossed swords three times with Peter Cartwright. That doughty hero of the Cross was born in Virginia on September 1, 1786, and exerted a mighty influence for good in early Illinois. With a nominal salary of $80 a year, and an actual salary of $30 or $40, he rode thousands of miles through deep mud, baptized 8,000 children and 4,000 adults, conducted camp-meetings and political campaigns, and sang and shouted and in his own language whipped the devil round the stump and hit him a crack at every jump until his death at Pleasant Plains, Illinois, September 25, 1872. He defeated Lincoln for the Legislature, and was defeated by him for Congress in 1846. So far as we know, Lincoln left no record of his feeling toward Cartwright and the Methodists. He could not have failed to respect such men, but it is not altogether certain that he was tempted to love them.

By the time Lincoln was seventeen, and possibly earlier, he believed the earth to be round. I shall not succeed in making the reader understand the possible effect of this discovery upon him and certain of his associates without relating an experience of my own.

In the summer of 1881, being then a college student on vacation, I taught school in the mountains of Kentucky far beyond the end of the railroad. The school was a large and prosperous one and brought many students from other districts who paid a trifling tuition and were preparing to teach. The curriculum included everything from the alphabet to a simplified normal course. A majority of my pupils had but one textbook, Webster's Blueback Speller. I endeavored to make up for the lack of textbooks by lessons in the Natural Sciences and in such other branches of study as seemed adapted to the requirements of my pupils. After a few weeks one of my pupils, son of a Baptist minister, was taken out of school. His father being interviewed stated that he was sorry to have the boy lose his education, but could not afford to permit him to be converted to infidelity. What the boy had learned which disturbed his father was that the earth was round.

The subject provoked widespread discussion, and finally resulted in a joint debate between two school teachers and two Baptist preachers on the question:

"Resolved, That the earth is flat and stationary, and that the sun moves around it once in twenty-four hours."