Abraham Lincoln: Redeemer President. By Allen C. Guelzo. 1999.                     

In his 1999 book, Abraham Lincoln: Redeemer President, Allen Guelzo has created what he refers to as an intellectual biography.  In his own words, “Without in any way trying to obscure other ways of stating the case of Abraham Lincoln, the work we have to do here is an intellectual biography about a man not usually thought of as an intellectual in an era which, unfortunately, is not often thought of as an arena of ideas.”[1]  But Guelzo convincingly disputes the concept that either Lincoln or his times were lacking in intellectual accomplishments.  He contends that this impression is the result of popular folklore and belied by an analysis of the culture and the man.  Guelzo thinks that Lincoln’s success as a lawyer, his tenacity as president, and his fierce concentration on goals tend to overshadow other aspects and have clouded the intellectual side of his make-up.  The fact that he left relatively little writing contributes to the myth, as does the self-reading program with which he attained much of his advanced education.  Although Lincoln was well educated for his time and place, the fact that he did not attended college tends to diminish his intellectual reputation in the minds of many scholars.  Guelzo points out that an analysis of the reading material Lincoln devoured throughout his life clearly refutes this viewpoint. 

In exploring Lincoln’s intellectual underpinnings, Guelzo focuses on the issues of political ideology (he retained Whig ideals), philosophical moorings from the age of enlightenment (he particularly favored Mill and Locke), and the powerful influence of evangelic theology (he was rooted in Calvinism).  Although it is necessary to study these as discrete elements to some extent, they are very much interrelated and interactive.  Many intellectual crosscurrents emitting from these ideas affected Lincoln’s intellectual make-up, and help to explain the complexity of his personality. 

The political ideals of the Whig Party most closely aligned with Lincoln’s intellectual values, despite his later labeling of being of and for the people.  He was, of course, a deeply committed Whig before becoming a Republican.  As Guelzo explains:

Whigs and Democrats alike thought of themselves as champions of liberty, but it quickly became obvious that Whigs though of liberty as freedom from the rednecked restraints of localism, whereas Democrats though of freedom as the privilege of restraining large concentrations of wealth and power.  …  Thus, while Whiggery found itself more and more resembling the confident and nationalistic middle-class liberalism of Europe, the Democrats found themselves more and more speaking for slave-based agriculture and for industrial workers who either resented the power of their bourgeois employers or resisted the imposition of bourgeois moral culture.[2] 

Guelzo points out that although the Whig Party ceased to exist during the 1850s, many of its ideals lived on in the new Republican Party.  These included the theory of rational individualism, equality of opportunity, and entrepreneurial liberty.  Among the prominent ideological values the Republicans inherited from their Whig progenitors, and that Lincoln fully embraced, was an intense commitment to anti-Jeffersonian liberalism.

The magnitude of Lincoln’s accomplishments provides a partial explanation of why his intellectual stature is under recognized.  His success in redefining the Union and liberating enslaved people demand so much attention that it often stifles other consideration.  These achievements tend to cast Lincoln in the role of rational politician and focus attention on these aspects of his development.  This is usually at the expense of understanding his intellectual foundation.  But Lincoln was much more than a practical politician and lawyer.  The ideals of the enlightenment were fundamental to his intellectual underpinnings.  He believed in Lockean rational individualism and was an avid reader of Carlyle, Buckle, Spencer, Wayland, and Carey.  The enlightenment writings of Hobbes, Locke, Mill, and Montesquieu particularly influenced Lincoln.  Yet his study of these philosophical giants does not alone explain Lincoln’s intellectual complexity.  As Guelzo observes:

While American politics has been united in its devotion to the Enlightenment, and with it the rule of equality and liberty, it has remained bitterly divided over which Enlightenment stream it ought to embody, the rational individualism of Locke or the passionate communal relativism of Rousseau, which was so determinedly expressed by both Thomas Jefferson and Andrew Jackson.  The Whigs, in varying ways, existed as an embodiment of the Lockean Enlightenment, as did Lincoln, an intellectual positioning which underlies his lifelong antipathy to the Jacksonian Democracy.  For all of Lincoln’s willingness to quote Jefferson to his own purposes, it was the Jefferson of the common Enlightenment they shared which he quoted, not the Democratic Rousseauian political culture which Jefferson spoke for and which Lincoln condemned from his earliest political awareness.[3] 

Although Lincoln’s liberalism resulted from ideas that were intrinsically antislavery in nature, they did not provide the political means to oppose the power of the Southern slave states in America until after 1860.

Evangelical Protestant Christianity influenced Lincoln and his actions throughout his life.  It is not that Lincoln professed Christian faith in the normally accepted sense of that concept.  Many researchers believe that he was a deist although he appeared to move closer to Christianity during his tenure as President.  Regardless of the issues of his personal faith, the ideals associated with Calvinist thinking provided a major influence in his make-up.  Guelzo admits that Lincoln kept a lifelong distance from orthodox Christianity, but contends that he never seemed to have relinquished a belief in God as creator and providence.  Lincoln’s best political rhetoric clearly reflects this observation.  In Guelzo’s words:

Lincoln did not doubt that there was some form of “providence’ at work in the order of the universe; the question was what the nature of this “providence” actually was.  …  At its barest, providence was for Lincoln nothing more that the “necessity” imposed by cause and effect, just as the will responded automatically to motives and the call of self-interest.[4]

Lincoln struggled with the questions of providence, predestination, necessity, and Universal Unitarianism throughout his life.  Although he constantly tested the ground beyond his deist views, Guelzo does not believe that he ever accepted the idea of a personal God.  For example, Lincoln would refer to Jesus as “a savior,” but never as “my savior.”  But the engrained values of right and wrong that came from his Calvinist upbringing were an ever present element in his thinking and intellectual make-up. 

Lincoln possessed a love of art and literature, which provided him one of the few pleasures he enjoyed throughout his life.  He particularly enjoyed the theatre where his love of art and literature often came together.[5]  Guelzo contends—as have others—that Lincoln learned many of his political skills from his theatre outings.  His incredible communications skills, his dramatic expressions, and his use of great writings all demonstrate a great influence of the arts.  In addressing both Lincoln’s use of the theatre and his religious ambiguity, Guelzo states:

Quoting alternately from the Bible and Shakespeare, Lincoln managed by small gestures to please and amuse both secular and evangelical Whigs, without alluding to the larger and more provocative fundamental problems behind them.  He would not attack Christian denominations but he would not join them, either; he would quote Scripture, but more by way of proverb and illustration than authority; and he would pay pew rent in churches and occasionally turn up there on Sundays, but more as a matter of intellectual respect for any religion that painted the same backdrop of necessity, providence, and predestination which colored his own perceptions of the world.  He remained, by any technical definition, an “infidel,” but it was an infidelity with a darkly Calvinistic twist, which convinced Lincoln that he had no will to embrace Christianity even if he had wanted to.  …  That he could perform this straddling as easily as he did was due to a certain slipperiness that was already available in Protestant thinking, and especially in key concepts like providence.  …  Lincoln could, on those terms, speak quite freely about providence in the 1850s without seeming to cross the religious sensibilities of his neighbors—in fact, to flatter them—and yet without also committing himself to what his neighbors believed.”[6]

In other words, great thoughts not only influenced Lincoln, but he was very able to manipulate them in the interest of his ambitions. 

Despite Guelzo's stated intention of creating an intellectual biography of Lincoln, many aspects— perhaps most— of Abraham Lincoln: Redeemer President, resemble a conventional biography.  He addressed every phase of Lincoln’s personal life and professional careers.  From the fight for nomination in 1860 through most of the war years, Redeemer President is primarily a standard biography of Lincoln.  He addresses major events such as the Kansas-Nebraska Act, slavery debates, the Dred Scott issue, Bleeding Kansas, debates with Douglas, his election to the presidency, disunion, and the war with little attention to intellectual factors.  An exception would be the role of the Declaration of Independence on Lincoln’s thinking during the campaign for president and while struggling with the issue of the Emancipation Proclamation.  Yet Guelzo does present Lincoln’s involvement in the events of these times within the context of his ideas and to that extent, remains true to the purpose of his book.   

The significances of the title Abraham Lincoln: Redeemer President, harkens back to 1856 when Walt Whitman wrote in the Brooklyn Daily Eagle that he hoped for a “redeemer President.”  Guelzo contends that Lincoln proved to be more of a redeemer that even Whitman could have hoped.  As he stated in December 2000 interview, “Lincoln redeemed the republic from slavery and disunion, and allowed it once more to stand up as the champion of human freedom.  But there is this ironic twist: this “redeemer President” himself had no faith in a Redeemer, and thought of God more in terms of a Judge than a Reconciler.”[7]  Guelzo’s book does a credible job of demonstrating why Abraham Lincoln was truly a redeemer President and is worthy of that title.  His contention that it is an intellectual biography is only partially true, although this does not detract from its value.  We receive more insight into Lincoln’s intellectual moorings than in most biographies, but much of this book remains a rather standard biography. 

Gary J. Ohls