“Washington the Father, Lincoln the Savior.” One-hundred and fifty years ago, those words lined the walls of the Illinois State Capitol as the body of Abraham Lincoln lay in state on May 4, 1865. Tens of thousands read them as they came to pay their respects. Millions more found similar sentiments in the nation’s papers, pews and parlors.
Taken out of context, such praise can sound like irreverent adulation, or to modern readers, like outdated hero worship. But understood in context, the then-popular eulogy of Lincoln as a national savior reveals a redemptive meaning to the Civil War as atonement for the nation’s original sin of slavery. While seldom-emphasized in modern studies and conversations, that meaning is relevant today.
To be sure, there were multiple meanings of “Lincoln the Savior.” Perhaps foremost in the minds of Americans then (and now) was Lincoln’s success in “saving” the Union. That was, after all, what Lincoln first described as his “paramount object.” But in the summer of 1862, Lincoln concluded that to save the Union, its armies must free the slaves. Gideon Welles, secretary of the Navy, recorded Lincoln’s announcement of the Emancipation Proclamation to his Cabinet: “God had decided this question in favor of the slaves.” For his role, Lincoln was praised as the Great Emancipator, a messiah-like liberator and savior of men.
It was Lincoln’s death, however, that proved the catalyst for his civil anointment as a national savior. In his Second Inaugural Address, just weeks before his assassination, Lincoln described the death and destruction of the Civil War as the “judgments of the Lord” for the nation’s “offense” of slavery. Though it was his fond hope and fervent prayer “that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away,” Lincoln reverently admonished, “if God wills that it continue until all the wealth piled by the bondsman’s two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said ‘the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.’ ”
For the biblically believing, Lincoln’s assassination on Good Friday was powerfully symbolic. But there was more than timing to his martyrdom. Frederick Douglass may have been the first to eulogize Lincoln’s life and death as an offering for national sins. In spontaneous remarks the day of his death, Douglass reverently observed: “It may be in the inscrutable wisdom of Him who controls the destinies of Nations, that this drawing of the Nation’s most precious heart’s blood was necessary to bring us back to that equilibrium which we must maintain if the Republic was to be permanently redeemed.” Hundreds of ministers would add to that chorus, interpreting the president’s death, in the words of Ronald C. White Jr., “as a sacrifice for the nation’s sins … the Civil War’s final casualty.”
By casting the Civil War as redemption for the national sin of slavery, “Lincoln endowed the Civil War with sacred meaning,” attested the PBS documentary "God in America," “creating an American scripture and articulating an American civil religion that still suffuses the idea of the nation with religious significance.” Indeed, in its sesquicentennial series "The Civil War by Those Who Lived It," the Library of America calls the Civil War “our Bible, a story of sin and judgment, suffering and despair, death and resurrection in a ‘new birth of freedom.’ ” The study of this “American Gospel” is as relevant to our generation as to any before, for each is responsible to “nobly save, or meanly lose,” what Lincoln called “the last best hope of earth.”
And there is another lesson. Although a distant generation might first misinterpret “Lincoln the Savior” as prideful hubris boasting triumphant success, it is best understood as reverent homage magnifying humble sacrifice. Then and now, Lincoln’s admirers call him a “genius,” and his detractors brand him a “tyrant.” Both focus excessively on his personal prowess. But in honoring Lincoln as a national savior, we need not focus on the greatness of the man; instead, we can see the goodness of God in redeeming the nation.
On the eve of the Civil War, Lincoln confessed, “I shall be most happy indeed, if I shall be an humble instrument in the hands of the Almighty.” Four years later, as he walked the streets of Richmond, the recently captured Confederate capital, an elderly slave ran to meet him and fell upon his knees. “Don’t kneel to me,” Lincoln kindly told him, “That is not right. You must kneel to God only, and thank Him for the liberty you will enjoy hereafter.”
When we remember “Lincoln the Savior,” it is God, not Lincoln, that we should honor.
Michael Erickson is an attorney who lives in Salt Lake City.