The Soul of Abraham Lincoln

by William E. Barton

CHAPTER VII

THE RULES OF EVIDENCE

Thus far we have dealt primarily with the environments of Lincoln's religious life. We have not been able to escape the conviction that Lincoln's religious life was an evolution, influenced by his environment and experience. We have considered in these successive chapters some matters in detail which seemed to belong particularly to the respective periods of which those chapters have treated; but we have reserved, in general, the evidence that bears upon his religion as a whole for more critical examination. Particularly have we reserved those portions of the evidence which, first published after his death, belong to no one epoch of his life and have become the occasion of controversy. What kind of man he was religiously in 1865 we shall hope to know better; indeed, it is not unreasonable to hope that examination may show in part the processes by which his religion found its final form and expression.

We know already that there had been a development. We know that the Abraham Lincoln who in 1834 delivered his political opinions in labored and florid style and with the logic current in stump oratory had undergone mental development and had emerged into the Lincoln who delivered his thoughts in translucent Anglo-Saxon at Gettysburg and the Second Inaugural. That there had been a moral and spiritual development also we have already been assured. Perhaps it was greater than he himself consciously understood. We shall now endeavor to ascertain what it had come to be.

In this inquiry we have no easy task. The mass of evidence is great, and the contradictions are many. There were contradictions in the personality of the man himself, and many contradictions in the views which men, even honest and unprejudiced men, had of him; and not all the testimony is unprejudiced.

Lincoln was a man of many moods. He reacted differently to different stimuli, and to the same stimulus at different times. His feelings ran the gamut from abysmal dejection to rollicking gaiety: and he never revealed his whole nature to any one man, nor showed the whole of his nature at any one time. He cannot be judged by the mechanical tests of a rigid consistency: for he was not that kind of man.

When Dr. J. G. Holland went to Springfield immediately after the death of Lincoln to gather material for his biography he was surprised beyond measure to find how conflicting were the local judgments of Lincoln's character. Concerning this he wrote:

"Such a nature and character seem full of contradictions; and a man who is subject to such transitions will always be a mystery to those who do not know him wholly. Thus no two men among his intimate friends will agree concerning him.

"The writer has conversed with multitudes of men who claimed to know Mr. Lincoln intimately; yet there are not two of the whole number who agree in their estimate of him. The fact was that he rarely showed more than one aspect of himself to one man. He opened himself to men in different directions. It was rare that he exhibited what was religious in him; and he never did this at all, except when he found just the nature and character that were sympathetic with that aspect and element of his character. A great deal of his best, deepest, largest life he kept almost constantly from view, because he would not expose it to the eyes and apprehension of the careless multitude.

"To illustrate the effect of the peculiarity of Mr. Lincoln's intercourse with men, it may be said that men who knew him through all his professional and political life have offered opinions as diametrically opposite as these, viz.: that he was a very ambitious man, and that he was without a particle of ambition; that he was one of the saddest men that ever lived, and that he was one of the jolliest men that ever lived; that he was very religious, but that he was not a Christian; that he was a Christian, but did not know it; that he was so far from being a religious man or a Christian that 'the less said upon the subject the better'; that he was the most cunning man in America, and that he had not a particle of cunning in him; that he had the strongest personal attachments, and that he had no personal attachments at all—only a general good feeling toward everybody; that he was a man of indomitable will, and that he was a man almost without a will; that he was a tyrant, and that he was the softest-hearted, most brotherly man that ever lived; that he was remarkable for his pure-mindedness, and that he was the foulest in his jests and stories of any man in the country; that he was a witty man, and that he was only a retailer of the wit of others; that his apparent candor and fairness were only apparent, and that they were as real as his head and his hands; that he was a boor, and that he was in all essential respects a gentleman; that he was a leader of the people, and that he was always led by the people; that he was cool and impassive, and that he was susceptible of the strongest passions. It is only by tracing these separate streams of impression back to their fountain that we are able to arrive at anything like a competent comprehension of the man, or to learn why he came to be held in such various estimation. Men caught only separate aspects of his character—only the fragments that were called into exhibition by their own qualities."—Holland: Life of Lincoln, pp. 241-42.

Some writers, and more orators, have professed to see in the character of Lincoln a perfect balancing of all desirable qualities. Bishop Fowler, in what was perhaps the most widely popular of all popular orations on Lincoln, attributed his own inability to analyze the character of Lincoln to its perfect sphericity, a consistency such that any attempt to consider any quality by itself met the counterbalancing consideration of all the other qualities. But the antitheses in Lincoln's character were not those of a perfect consistency.[27] They were of a sort which puzzled those who knew him best, and were most easily explained by those who gave least study to the man himself and most to their own theories of what a man like Mr. Lincoln must have been.

Of these sharp antitheses in Lincoln's character, Col. Clark E. Carr, who knew him well, said in an address which I heard: