Since 1900 the biographies that have been issued have largely been devoted to specialized studies, as of Lincoln as a lawyer, Lincoln as a political leader, Lincoln as a statesman; and there have been innumerable books and articles made up of reminiscences of the men who knew Lincoln more or less intimately.
None of the biographies before Holland attempted anything that could be called a critical analysis of Lincoln's character. There is virtually nothing in the earliest Lives of Lincoln concerning his religion or any other important aspect of his private and personal life. In the nature of the case those books were superficial.
Furthermore, some of the more important biographies of more recent years have made no attempt at systematic character study. While there is something about Lincoln's religion in almost every one of them, that topic has been quite incidental and subordinate to the main purpose of most of the larger books. The authors have been content to take for the most part the ready-formed judgment of those whose views most nearly accorded with their own.
The field of inquiry concerning Lincoln's religion is both more narrow and broader than it would at first appear. Many even of the more important biographical works about Lincoln yield nothing of any real value, so far as this topic is concerned. On the other hand, the subject has been exploited in magazine articles, newspaper contributions, lectures and addresses almost innumerable and by no mean consistent.
The task, then, is more and other than that of making a scrapbook of what different authorities have said about Abraham Lincoln's religion. A vast amount has been said by people who had no personal knowledge of the subject they were discussing and no adequate power of historical analysis. The volume of really first-hand evidence is not so vast as at first it appears; and while it cannot all be reconciled nor its direct contradictions eliminated, it is not hopelessly beyond the limits of constructive probability. It is possible to determine some facts about the religion of Abraham Lincoln with reasonable certainty and to interpret others in the light of their probable bearing upon the subject as a whole.
CHAPTER III
THE ENVIRONMENT OF LINCOLN'S BOYHOOD
We have read Buckle's History of Civilization to little effect if we have not learned that the development of an individual or a nation is profoundly influenced by environment. The biographers of Lincoln would appear to have kept this fact carefully in mind, for they have been at great pains to give to us detailed descriptions of the houses in which Lincoln lived and the neighborhoods where from time to time he resided. Although the camera and the descriptive power of the biographers have done much for us, they leave something to be desired in the way of sketching a background from which the Abraham Lincoln of the successive periods emerged into conditions of life and thought that were more or less religious. For the purpose of this present study the life of Lincoln divides itself into four parts.