Jon Meacham

Abraham Lincoln and the American Struggle

And There Was Light

J. L. Askew

Meacham’s premise is that Lincoln’s governance of “a country at war with itself” offers lessons for today. But does this justify another iteration of Lincoln iconography? The author says nothing fresh on the subject. The book cover and title proclaim Meacham’s intent: to burnish Lincoln’s star to greater brightness despite thousands of others that have preceded him.
To try to break new ground Meacham claims he’s found something “that is striking and underappreciated in the popular impression of Lincoln”, that the future president grew up in a family and community of churchgoers exposed to “antislavery preaching and subscribed to antislavery theology.” Of course, this is the unifying thread, Lincoln’s monomania on slavery.
While conceding that his subject “was morally imperfect”, as a devotee of Lincoln, Meacham adds, “his duty lay in attempting to discern and to apply the will of the divine to human affairs.” And through what lens did Lincoln divine God’s will? We get an idea from the opinion of a close friend of the president who said Lincoln’s views were most closely aligned with the teachings of Theodore Parker. Parker was a minister and Radical Abolitionist who believed “questions of reality” could be answered through “reason and conscience.” While reason and conscience can be used for good, they are fallible, subject to the individual, and thus, an imperfect basis for “religion”. Parker and his fellow abolitionists believed in a “higher law” that superseded both the Constitution and the Bible. Parker was a member of the “Secret Six”, the group of conspirators who financed John Brown’s terrorist raid at Harper’s Ferry. But Meacham never mentions the fanatical views of the Abolitionists, choosing to demonize the other side whom he calls “implacable secessionists”.
For example, Meacham claims the South “caricatured their foes”, citing the famous words of Southern minister James H. Thornwell: “The parties in this conflict are not merely Abolitionists and slaveholders, they are atheists, Socialists, Communists, Red Republicans, Jacobins on the one side and the friends of order and regulated freedom on the other.” But Thornwell’s statement is largely true. Utopian communes like Brook Farm, Fruitland, and Oneida germinated in the North. And Radical Abolitionists were made up of Transcendentalists, Quakers, Unitarians, and atheists.
The country had been divided since its founding, New England, and the South each vying for control. As the country grew, these differences became more pronounced, the South becoming an agricultural powerhouse and the North a manufacturing juggernaut. Slavery was just one of many differences between the sections, a point Meacham concedes, calling the conflict “a clash of visions bound up with money, race, identity, and faith.” Yet Meacham claims slavery as the cause of the war.
This book is quite repetitive with scores of quotes, a litany of effusive praise for Lincoln that quickly becomes tedious. While the sixteenth president was the most powerful man to ever hold the office, Meacham claims Lincoln the politician was merely the “means of his life priority over its ends – ends he would” explain in his second inaugural address. But Meacham has it backwards. Lincoln was consumed with ambition and once he got the brass ring of the presidency, he would not compromise to avoid war, not with his cabinet, not with Republican leaders, nor with the South. 
The second inaugural address did not detail Lincoln’s “life ends” but is really a sermon. The president makes a pronouncement of judgement, that “God was exacting blood vengeance for the sin of slavery” against the United States. The speech was a religious discourse justifying Lincoln and wrapping the war in holy vestments. Lincoln’s speeches are sacred to Meacham and other Lincoln votaries and the second inaugural is holy writ, but the truth is not in Lincoln’s words but in his actions. Lincoln sent his generals into the South, destroying, looting, burning, and raping to hold onto empire. 
Italian academic Raimondo Luraghi, a lifelong student of American history and a “neutral party” in the debate, said “no serious scholar can fail to see the absurdity” of claiming the South seceded to defend slavery and the North fought to end it. “The dispute with the North had become a matter of principle” and “the South decided to fend for itself“ and “pursue the illusion of independence.” Meacham misses all of this. His book is an uncritical hymn to Lincoln and is fraught with presentism.
For a more balanced treatment, see the book “Abraham Lincoln: The Southern View” by L. Seabrook.

And There Was Light Abraham Lincoln and the American Struggle

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