Lincoln, Religion, and Romantic Cultural Politics.

Lincoln, Religion, and Romantic Cultural Politics. By Stewart Winger. (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, c. 2003. Pp. viii, 271. $38.00, ISBN 0-87580-300-8.)

In this admirably intelligent study of the moral and religious themes in Abraham Lincoln's speeches and writings, Stewart Winger is less concerned to identify the particulars of Lincoln's opaque and evolving personal beliefs than to explore the meaning that his words took on in the cultural context in which they were delivered. The result is a book of real value, well and elegantly written. Winger argues that Lincoln's detachment from the dominant Protestant evangelical ethos of his time has led historians mistakenly to place him closer to the world of "infidel" Thomas Paine than to the swelling antebellum thought-stream of post-Enlightenment religious Romanticism, where he properly belongs (p. 7). By the early 1840s, Winger maintains, Lincoln had moved through his skeptical phase and was "on his way to becoming a Romantic Christian intellectual" (p. 190). Rather than representing a process of secularization, he typified an "intellectually serious, albeit mostly doomed, Romantic insurgency" (p. 7).

Winger's Lincoln is emphatically no Democrat. Examining Lincoln's assault on "Young America"; on the Democratic Party's recasting of Jeffersonian liberalism; and on the socially atomistic, morally bankrupt political doctrine represented by popular sovereignty, Winger presents the Lincoln-Douglas debates as a kind of theological dialogue (p. 22). He uses Lincoln's lengthy engagement with George Bancroft's ideas to contrast the Democrats' synthesis of liberal political theory, Romantic history, and faith in the inevitability of progress with Lincoln's "morally messier," more Calvinistic, and more ambivalent perspective on human nature and America's uniqueness (p. 77).

Winger has Lincoln swimming in the Romantic-religious currents that in the pages of the Whig Review were increasingly drowning out classical republican themes. He explains how, like the "Conscience" Whigs, Lincoln saw the state as a moral entity, subject to ethical standards higher than itself and standing under the judgment of history and God; and, how, as a lawyer, he exemplified the Romantic cast of mid-century jurisprudence, upholding community values and positing an active role for the law in support of a well-regulated society (p. 84). Whatever his enthusiasm for free labor and the expanding market economy, Lincoln's views on economics did not, Winger insists--in a critique of Gabor Boritt's Lincoln and the Economics of the American Dream (Urbana, 1994)--represent modern democratic materialism so much as the pursuit of a social order in which each individual could enjoy a moral independence consonant with the common good.

Winger is particularly assured in explaining the ideas that shaped antebellum political persuasion. He also has some fresh things to say about the wartime Lincoln, whom Winger presents as a providentialist of the Reformed Protestant tradition, increasingly self-assured in his religious pronouncements and confident in his political judgments. More controversially, he argues for a Lincoln whose Gettysburg Address was (pace Garry Wills) "trite and conventional" in its substantive ideas, though not its form (p. 203). He also finds the self-righteous tone of the Cooper Union speech (wrongly dated on page 147) still evident as late as spring 1864; only after the awful carnage of that summer would it be muted, in the call for humility in the Second Inaugural Address. However, Winger does not bring his searchlight to bear on the language of Lincoln's startling 1862 "Meditation on the Divine Will"; had be done so, it would surely have complicated his neat chronology.

RICHARD J. CARWARDINE

University of Oxford