Jon Meacham

I’m not shy about saying that the Confederacy was evil or that the memory of its extermination gives me pleasure. When statues of Confederate leaders come down and whiners start moaning about their heritage, I adopt the line that destroying the Confederacy is my heritage. I’m not even from the old North, but I have a T-shirt commemorating the 20th Maine’s bayonet charge at Little Round Top: “Stand firm ye boys from Maine.”

Of course, those fighting for the Confederacy in the 1860s show more saw the situation entirely in reverse. As President Abraham Lincoln mused in a private scrap of writing in 1862, “The will of God prevails. In great contests each party claims to act in accordance with the will of God. Both may be, and one must be, wrong. God cannot be for and against the same thing at the same time.”

Lincoln’s long evolution toward this reverential conclusion, and toward his most singular triumph in the Emancipation Proclamation, is the subject of Jon Meacham’s “And There Was Light: Abraham Lincoln and the American Struggle.” If you’re a devotee of Lost Cause pseudohistory and its lionization of the South, you won’t enjoy this portrait of Lincoln as a great man in a just crusade.

The book’s title is well chosen, quoting as it does Genesis 1:3: “And God said, Let there be light: and there was light.” To conceive of the Civil War without reference to the Bible is historically stunted. Christianity saturated early America to such an extent that, as Tocqueville observed, “Americans combine the notions of religion and liberty so intimately in their minds, that it is impossible to make them conceive of one without the other.”

Meacham takes this into full account, adroitly positioning the Civil War as a clash not merely between two different conceptions of national identity, but between two theologies. One one side stood the South and its Northern defenders with the Bible’s acknowledgement of slavery without condemnation. On the other stood Lincoln and those who understood slavery as a transgression of the command to love thy neighbor as thyself, not to mention a reversal of the Genesis order (“in the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread”) that survived by “wringing [its] bread from the sweat of other men's faces.”

Against this background of warring theologies, Meacham offers an explicitly moral biography of Abraham Lincoln. Neither friend nor enemy of sectarian faith, Lincoln’s was a Christian-adjacent religion of conscience. He famously drew inspiration from the King James Version of the Bible without ever joining a church, giving rise to attacks on his infidelity (i.e., lack of faith). Yet it was Lincoln’s conception of “the right as God gives us to see the right” that led to slavery’s end.

His spiritual tributaries were many, often contradictory, but always flowing into what his law partner William Herndon summarized as “these two propositions: the Fatherhood of God, and the brotherhood of man.” Lincoln grew to manhood on an anti-slavery revivalist Baptist frontier. His feelings found words in the abolitionist sermons of the transcendentalist Unitarian minister Theodore Parker. Lincoln’s firm reliance on a mysterious yet good and sovereign providence deepened under the Presbyterian ministry of ​​Phineas D. Gurley, a disciple of Charles Hodge and Lincoln’s pastor through the Civil War.

Meacham charts the long arc of Lincoln’s voyage across these moral seas. Ever the pragmatic politician, Lincoln usually bent with the prevailing winds of white supremacy. He deflected any insinuation that whites and blacks were equals or that a multiracial democracy was either possible or desirable. He championed gradual, compensated emancipation and the colonisation of freed blacks elsewhere. He avowed that saving the Union was his only mission. And yet, his inward devotion to Jefferson’s declaration that all men are created equal readied him to proclaim emancipation the instant he believed military necessity gave him reason and responsibility to do so.

This story of Lincoln’s moral journey is also, in the words of Meacham’s subtitle, the story of the American struggle to decide what it will be. We’re still trying to figure that out, and there remains no shortage of partisans still trying to win the Civil War for their own ends. They say the Confederacy fought not over slavery, but for states’ rights and against federal tyranny. In rebuttal, I merely point to the Confederate Constitution. This document banned abolition, imposed a duty to return runaway slaves to masters, and authorized Congress to acquire territories and form states in which “the institution of negro slavery, as it now exists in the Confederate States, shall be recognized and protected.”

That power to acquire territory and form new states provides the basis for Meacham’s chilling portrait of the hemispheric slave hegemony envisioned by many influential Southerners. To build their house on a permanent and defensible rock, these men looked ever southward, toward Cuba, toward Mexico, toward Central America and beyond. They dreamed of opening new frontiers of plantation power by any means necessary. They sought to bring forth, upon this continent, a new empire, conceived in negro slavery, and dedicated to the proposition that all white men are created equal.

This is one plausible version of the alternate history that Lincoln, his theological influencers, and “ye boys of Maine” saved us from. Lincoln was flawed, imperfect, and precisely the man we needed. As he himself said in 1861, “I do not think that they have chosen the best man to conduct our affairs, now—I am sure they did not—but acting honestly and sincerely, and with your aid, I think we shall be able to get through the storm.” And we did. And we shall. And there was light. show less

Summary: The convictions shaping Lincoln’s public life including his opposition to slavery, the importance of the union, and his belief in providence.

One of the things I’ve appreciated about the writing of Jon Meacham is that he focuses on the formative influences, qualities of character, and deeply held convictions of his subjects. And this what sets his biography of Lincoln apart from the many other fine biographies of the sixteenth president.

Of course he traces the life of Lincoln show more from his humble upbringings, his law career, early political life, his rise in Republican circles, and his war-marred presidency and its tragic end. Two formative influences stand out. One is his step-mother Sarah, who encouraged his hunger for books and brought order to a struggling household. The other was Mary Todd Lincoln, his wife, who wanted to marry the man “who had the best prospects of being president.” She was at his side in all his political endeavors, the archetypal political spouse.

What she recognized was an ambitious man with a greatness of vision. The Declaration of Independence, even more than the Constitution, shaped him. It’s ringing words, “all men are created equal” form a bedrock conviction in Lincoln. Consequently, he could not envision a good society as one where one man enslaved and lived off the work of another.

Yet he was a also a savvy politician with an acute sense of the possible. This explained his pragmatic approach of only trying to stop the spread of slavery. This frustrated extreme abolitionists, including Frederick Douglass, who eventually reached a very different appraisal. An example of that sense of timing was the Emancipation Proclamation, planned for some time, but only proclaimed after victory at Antietam.

Closely tied to his intuitive sense of was his deep sense of feeling and empathy. Thus, he would struggle with the black bear of depression and would deeply grieve his lost son. Also, he was patient and gentle with a shrewish and increasingly unstable Mary. These same qualities were in evidence when he visited wounded soldiers in field hospitals.

Finally, though not a conventional Christian, Lincoln had a deep conviction of the providence of God in human affairs. He understood he could not bend or appropriate God’s will to his ends. The war would last as long as God willed, though this didn’t prevent him from looking for generals who would fight. He understood grace and forgiveness and had no intent to punish the South at war’s end. One wonders how different Reconstruction might have been were it not for Wilkes’ bullet.

One cannot, in an election year, help but think about presidential character. In the case of Lincoln, Meacham portrays a Lincoln with not only the requisite political skills, savvy, and ambition. He also had depths of character, breadth of vision and spiritual underpinnings to meet the challenges of the moment. Do we want that in those we entrust to our highest office? And if we do not, what does this say of us as a people? show less

I can't remember the last time a non-fiction audio book had me crying like a baby, but the end of 'And There Was Light: Abraham Lincoln and the American Struggle' by Jon Meacham did just that. This book focuses on Lincoln's slow transition from a young man who detested slavery, but was willing to let the South keep its slaves, into the more mature man who's abolitionist views we are more familiar with. He experienced a slow and steady realization that things couldn't be allowed to stay the show more way they were.

I have come to the conclusion that though 158 years have passed since the North won the Civil War, and so much has improved, I fear that a version of this fight is still ongoing, and it deeply saddens me. show less

I almost always have one nonfiction book on the go that I read exclusively before bed. I’m primarily a fiction reader so I don’t usually fall into the “one more chapter” trap that keeps me awake way past my bedtime if I follow this plan. This was not a great book for that. It’s intelligently written, presented, and argued, but the brain power I had left at the end of the day wasn’t quite up to absorbing everything Mr. Meacham had to say. Under those circumstances, the book had show more almost the exact opposite effect that it intended: I was depressed that we’re still fighting so many of the same battles that we’ve been fighting for so long. Equality of all kinds–why is that still so difficult for us?

After struggling through about 25% of the book, I finally put down my fiction books and focused on this one exclusively, no matter the time of day. Reading it while I was actually awake and functioning put me in a much better frame of mind to both follow the argument presented and to see it as the hope the author intended it to be. Yes, we do keep addressing many issues over and over again, but if you step back and look at the big picture, we’re tacking in the right direction. It’s a wobbly course, but we’re getting there.

I enjoyed the last half of the book so much (I think the actual text stopped at 43% and the rest was the bibliography, etc.), that I’m tempted to go back and start over. I recommend this for thoughtful readers who need some hope in today’s political climate. show less