The nature of Abraham Lincolns religious beliefs is perhaps the most perplexing enigma of his legacy. Examining the relationship between Lincolns religious language and antebellum political culture, Winger offers a new perspective on the Great Emancipator. Lincolns greatest speeches, Winger shows, articulate a Romantic Protestant vision of American identity and destiny. Recent considerations of Lincolns religion have presented conflicting views of the president as either a conventional nineteenth-century evangelical or a skeptic in the tradition of Thomas Paine. Winger offers an illuminating alternative based on the connections between Lincolns personal piety and his public performance. Exploring Lincolns quest for the moral basis of politics, Winger shows that Lincolns religious language reflected a poetic, Romantic understanding of faith and its political implications. A man who took ideas seriously, Lincoln conducted a decades-long dialogue with Stephen Douglas and George Bancroft about popular sovereignty and Americas place in history. Although the Lincoln-Douglas debates became almost theological arguments about the ethics of slavery in a democracy, they were carried out in the context of intense party politics and personal ambition. Throughout, Lincoln expressed an intellectually grounded piety that placed his beloved Union under the judgment of both history and God. The crisis of war transformed and deepened Lincolns religious politics, and the Second Inaugural Address reveals a Lincoln brought to humility by his powerlessness before Gods commanding will. Lincoln, Religion, and Romantic Cultural Politics presents a powerful vision of Lincoln, one that will challenge and intrigue everyone interested in this towering figure.
Table of ContentsAcknowledgments Introduction Part One: Lincoln and Young America 1. Debating the Meaning of America 2. Of Priests and Prophets Part Two: The Romantic Whig Response 3. Romantic Protestantism and Whig Rhetoric
