The Soul of Abraham Lincoln

by William E. Barton

Mr. Henry B. Rankin, who wrote his Reminiscences in 1916, states that he was a boy in Lincoln's office and his parents knew Lincoln intimately during his years of struggle in New Salem. Mr. Rankin's recollection of a conversation which Lincoln had with Mr. Rankin's mother indicates that Lincoln had some such feeling as far back as his New Salem days. The Rankin family were warm friends of Peter Cartwright, whom they called Uncle Peter, and also of Mr. Lincoln. Mrs. Rankin asked him concerning the rumor that he was an infidel, and Lincoln denied it; but being pressed to explain why he did not then confess his Christian faith, he gave to her much the answer which in later years he gave to Mr. Deming and to Dr. Gurley (Reminiscences of Lincoln, pp. 324-26).

I think, then, we are compelled to accept this threefold testimony as establishing beyond any reasonable doubt the answer that Lincoln himself gave to the question, why he did not unite with the Church. It is a great pity that he was not brought into contact with some form of organized Christianity, orthodox and constructive in its essential teachings, but with conditions of church membership as broad as those of entrance into the kingdom of heaven. Churches have learned a little better than they understood in 1846 that a church creed should be a testimony and not a test; that it is entirely consistent with the organization and ideal of a thoroughly orthodox church to receive into its membership any and every person who loves God and his fellow-man even though he doubts thirty-eight of the thirty-nine articles of the creed and is more or less uncertain about the other one.

But we cannot consider the question of Lincoln's possible church membership and his failure to acquire it without asking whether the fault was wholly that of the churches. Other men beside Abraham Lincoln were more liberal than the churches, including old Mentor Graham, but were able to find a home there; though Graham was ultimately turned out of the so-called "hardshell" church for his warm advocacy of the principles of temperance. Some share of the responsibility for his failure to unite with the Church must belong to Lincoln himself.

It is a hazardous thing to suggest any element short of perfection in the life or thought of any popular hero. Nevertheless let us remind ourselves that Lincoln had the defects of his qualities.

Lincoln lacked some of the finer feelings. He combined a deep personal sympathy for anything which he could visualize with a rather strange mental obtuseness toward things remote or abstract. Darwin, who was born in the same year, had an early love of poetry and music. How these tastes became atrophied in his concentration of thought upon matters relating to the natural sciences was confessed and mourned by him, and has often been commented upon by others. The time came to him when music and poetry gave him physical nausea. Lincoln never had an appreciation or love of anything very fine either in poetry or music. At a time when he was being considered for President he could sit in a stage coach playing "Yankee Doodle" on the mouth-organ[55] and playing it badly, but he had no fine musical or poetic taste.

Not long before his assassination his sister-in-law, Mrs. Edwards, visited at the White House, and he accompanied her one evening to the conservatory. She greatly admired the rare exotics which she there beheld for the first time, and Lincoln vainly strove to share her enthusiasm but confessed to her that something had been left out of his nature. Such things seemed to make no appeal to him.

Of Lincoln's lack in matters involving the finer feelings we have abundant testimony not only in the pages of Lamon and Herndon, but in other intimate sketches of his life in Illinois, as, for example, in Whitney's With Lincoln on the Circuit,[56] and especially in his article in the Arena in April, 1898. There were aspects of religion which did not make as strong an appeal to Abraham Lincoln as they would have made but for this blind spot in his nature.

It is not the purpose of this book to go in any detail into Mr. Lincoln's love affairs; but if any further illustration were desired of this point of which we are speaking, it could be found very painfully in his relations with Miss Owens, and his letter to Mrs. Browning.

Reference has been made to a certain lack of good taste which Lincoln sometimes manifested, and of which the reminiscences of Lamon, Herndon, Whitney, and others of his associates have given us sufficient example. But it was not always so with Lincoln. There was in him an innate courtesy, an intuitive sympathy, an ability to adapt himself to another's point of view, which gave him the essential quality of a gentleman. Fred Douglass said of him that Mr. Lincoln was the only white man with whom he ever talked for an hour who did not in some way remind him that he was a negro. That same fine feeling showed itself in many ways.

It should be remembered, too, when his uncouthness of apparel is recalled, that while he was always a careless man in his dress, the period in which he lived was one in which people of the regions where he formed his lifelong habits were not given to fastidious dress. He dressed much as other men dressed. The shawl which he wore was such a shawl as the author's father wore; such as many men wore. It was a mark of good breeding rather than the reverse, and some men wore the shawl very effectively for purposes of display. The author himself has often carried with him in long rides in the southern mountains what was called a "saddle-shawl" not unlike that of Lincoln; and he now owns such a shawl, bequeathed to him by one of Lincoln's contemporaries, and of the same color and approximately the same size that Lincoln used.