What Lincoln Believed: The Values and Convictions of America's Greatest President - Tapa dura

In Independence Hall in Philadelphia on February 22, 1861, where he stopped to speak as he traveled to his inauguration as president of the United States, Lincoln asserted that “the sentiment embodied in” the Declaration of Independence had made the American Revolution a source of “hope to the world for all future time.” Lincoln asked: “Now, my friends, can this country be saved upon that basis? If it can, I will consider myself one of the happiest men in the world if I can help to save it. If it can't be saved upon that principle, it will be truly awful.”

Other presidents might have saved the American Union, and other movements might have produced forms of representative government in other countries. But Abraham Lincoln helped to ensure that “government of the people, by the people, for the people” as an ideal for all of humanity would “not perish from the earth.” Lincoln preserved both the United States and its political creed: “The theory of our government is universal freedom.”

Among American presidents, Abraham Lincoln may be the best known and the least understood. Everyone knows that Lincoln saved the Union and freed the slaves during the American Civil War. Yet few know what he believed and what he stood for in a lifetime as a public figure. What Lincoln Believed is the most comprehensive study ever to appear of Abraham Lincoln’s values, opinions, and political principles.

The historic Lincoln was a far more complex and fascinating figure than the noble frontiersman of American folklore. Although he was born a Baptist and drew on the Bible in his oratory, Lincoln rejected Christianity in favor of deism, the eighteenth-century creed that replaced the God of the Bible with a God known only through nature and history. “Reason, cold, calculating, unimpassioned reason” was the basis of republican government, according to Lincoln.

Born on the frontier, Lincoln preferred city life. Raised on farms, Lincoln dreamed of factories and machines. He devoted much of his political career to promoting the industrialization of the United States by means of the “American System” of his political idol, the Kentucky Senator Henry Clay: national banking, government subsidies for canals and railroads, and the protection of American manufacturing from foreign competition. Fascinated by science and technology, Lincoln was the only American president to try to patent his own invention, a device to free stranded boats from sandbars. A friend recalled, “Intense thought with him was the rule, and not, as with most of us, the exception.”

Lincoln combined a principled and passionate hatred for slavery with a dread of violent upheaval and an inability to imagine a society in which blacks and whites were equals. Only reluctantly did Lincoln make the abolition of slavery, along with the restoration of the Union, one of his aims during the Civil War. And Lincoln was also slow to abandon the policy of “colonization” he derived from Thomas Jefferson and Henry Clay—the plan for the voluntary removal of most or all blacks from the United States.

For Lincoln, the global significance of the Civil War lay not in the abolition of slavery but in the demonstration that a democracy could be strong enough to suppress an unlawful rebellion. “We must settle this question right now, whether in a free government the minority have the right to break up the government whenever they choose. If we fail it will go far to prove the incapacity of the people to govern themselves.” If the United States broke apart, then democracy might be rejected as impractical elsewhere in the world, and “government of the people, by the people, for the people” would “perish from the earth.”

“No policy that does not rest upon some philosophic public opinion can be permanently maintained,” Lincoln once declared. In this groundbreaking book, the public philosophy that guided the deeds and statements of America’s greatest president is revealed in its entirety for the first time. Shattering stereotypes and dispelling myths, What Lincoln Believed will forever transform the way his fellow Americans and the world think of Abraham Lincoln.