THE RULES OF EVIDENCE
THUS far we have dealt primarily with the environments of Lincoln's
religious life. We have not been able to escape the conviction
that Lincoln's religious life was an evolution, influenced by his
environment and experience. We have considered in these successive
chapters some matters in detail which seemed to belong particularly to
the respective periods of which those chapters have treated; but we
have reserved, in general, the evidence that bears upon his religion as
a whole for more critical examination. Particularly have we reserved
those portions of the evidence which, first published after his death,
belong to no one epoch of his life and have become the occasion of
controversy. What kind of man he was religiously in 1865 we shall hope
to know better; indeed, it is not unreasonable to hope that examination
may show in part the processes by which his religion found its final
form and expression.
We know already that there had been a development. We know that the
Abraham Lincoln who in 1834 delivered his political opinions in
labored and florid style and with the logic current in stump oratory
had undergone mental development and had emerged into the Lincoln who
delivered his thoughts in translucent Anglo-Saxon at Gettysburg and the
Second Inaugural. That there had been a moral and spiritual development
also we have already been assured. Perhaps it was greater than he
himself consciously understood. We shall now endeavor to ascertain what
it had come to be.
In this inquiry we have no easy task. The mass of evidence is great,
and the contradictions are many. There were contradictions in the
personality of the man himself, and many contradictions in the views
which men, even honest and unprejudiced men, had of him; and not all
the testimony is unprejudiced.
Lincoln was a man of many moods. He reacted differently to different
stimuli, and to the same stimulus at different times. His feelings ran
the gamut from abysmal dejection to rollicking gaiety: and he never
revealed his whole nature to any one man, nor showed the whole of his
nature at any one time. He cannot be judged by the mechanical tests of
a rigid consistency: for he was not that kind of man.
When Dr. J. G. Holland went to Springfield immediately after the death
of Lincoln to gather material for his biography he was surprised beyond
measure to find how conflicting were the local judgments of Lincoln's
character. Concerning this he wrote:
"Such a nature and character seem full of contradictions; and a man
who is subject to such transitions will always be a mystery to those
who do not know him wholly. Thus no two men among his intimate friends
will agree concerning him.
"The writer has conversed with multitudes of men who claimed to know
Mr. Lincoln intimately; yet there are not two of the whole number who
agree in their estimate of him. The fact was that he rarely showed
more than one aspect of himself to one man. He opened himself to
men in different directions. It was rare that he exhibited what was
religious in him; and he never did this at all, except when he found
just the nature and character that were sympathetic with that aspect
and element of his character. A great deal of his best, deepest,
largest life he kept almost constantly from view, because he would not
expose it to the eyes and apprehension of the careless multitude.
"To illustrate the effect of the peculiarity of Mr. Lincoln's
intercourse with men, it may be said that men who knew him through
all his professional and political life have offered opinions as
diametrically opposite as these, viz.: that he was a very ambitious
man, and that he was without a particle of ambition; that he was
one of the saddest men that ever lived, and that he was one of the
jolliest men that ever lived; that he was very religious, but that
he was not a Christian; that he was a Christian, but did not know it;
that he was so far from being a religious man or a Christian that 'the
less said upon the subject the better'; that he was the most cunning
man in America, and that he had not a particle of cunning in him; that
he had the strongest personal attachments, and that he had no personal
attachments at all--only a general good feeling toward everybody; that
he was a man of indomitable will, and that he was a man almost without
a will; that he was a tyrant, and that he was the softest-hearted,
most brotherly man that ever lived; that he was remarkable for his
pure-mindedness, and that he was the foulest in his jests and stories
of any man in the country; that he was a witty man, and that he was
only a retailer of the wit of others; that his apparent candor and
fairness were only apparent, and that they were as real as his head
and his hands; that he was a boor, and that he was in all essential
respects a gentleman; that he was a leader of the people, and that he
was always led by the people; that he was cool and impassive, and that
he was susceptible of the strongest passions. It is only by tracing
these separate streams of impression back to their fountain that we
are able to arrive at anything like a competent comprehension of the
man, or to learn why he came to be held in such various estimation.
Men caught only separate aspects of his character--only the fragments
that were called into exhibition by their own qualities."--HOLLAND:
_Life of Lincoln_, pp. 241-42.
Some writers, and more orators, have professed to see in the character
of Lincoln a perfect balancing of all desirable qualities. Bishop
Fowler, in what was perhaps the most widely popular of all popular
orations on Lincoln, attributed his own inability to analyze the
character of Lincoln to its perfect sphericity, a consistency such that
any attempt to consider any quality by itself met the counterbalancing
consideration of all the other qualities. But the antitheses in
Lincoln's character were not those of a perfect consistency.[27] They
were of a sort which puzzled those who knew him best, and were most
easily explained by those who gave least study to the man himself and
most to their own theories of what a man like Mr. Lincoln must have
been.
Of these sharp antitheses in Lincoln's character, Col. Clark E. Carr,
who knew him well, said in an address which I heard:
"Abraham Lincoln was the drollest man I ever saw.
"He could make a cat laugh. Never was another man so vivacious; never
have I seen another who provoked so much mirth, and who entered into
rollicking fun with such glee. He was the most comical and jocose of
human beings, laughing with the same zest at his own jokes as at those
of others. I did not wonder that, while actively engaged in party
politics, his opponents who had seen him in these moods called Abraham
Lincoln a clown and an ape.
"Abraham Lincoln was the most serious man I ever saw.
"When I heard him protest against blighting our new territories with
the curse of human slavery, in his debates with Senator Douglas,
no man could have been more in earnest, none more serious. In his
analysis of legal problems, whether in the practice of his profession
or in the consideration of State papers, he became wholly absorbed
in his subject. Sometimes he lapsed into reverie and communed with
his own thoughts, noting nothing that was going on about him until
aroused, when perhaps he would enter into a discussion of the subject
that had occupied his mind, or perhaps break out into laughter and
tell a joke or story that set the table in a roar.
"When I saw him at Gettysburg as he exclaimed, 'That we here highly
resolve that the dead shall not have died in vain; that the nation
shall, under God, have a new birth of freedom, and that the government
of the people, by the people, and for the people, shall not perish
from the earth!'--when I heard him declare in his second inaugural
address, 'Fondly do we hope, fervently do we pray, that this mighty
scourge of war may speedily pass away. Yet if God wills that it
continue until all the wealth piled up by the bondman'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, so still it must be said,
"the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether."... With
malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right
as God gives us to see the right,'--as I looked upon him and heard him
utter these sentiments, upon these occasions, Abraham Lincoln was the
most solemn, the most dignified, the most majestic, and at the same
time the most benignant human being I ever saw.
"Rochefoucauld says that 'Gravity is a mystery of the body invented to
conceal defects of the mind.' Lord Shaftesbury says that 'Gravity is
the very essence of imposture.' Abraham Lincoln had none of this.
"Man is the most serious of animals. Man is the most frivolous of
animals. It is said that man is the only animal that can both laugh
and cry. Abraham Lincoln gave full vent to his emotions. He went
through life with no restraints nor manacles upon his human nature.
He was honest in the expression of his feelings, whether serious or
otherwise, honest in their manifestation, honest with himself.
"It was because Abraham Lincoln was the most human of human
beings that he is loved as has never been any other man that ever
lived."--CLARK E. CARR: _My Day and Generation_, pp. 107-9.
There was much reason for this wide disparity of opinion in the
varying moods of Lincoln himself, and the contrary aspects of his
personality. But this was not the sole reason. Springfield itself was
greatly divided concerning Mr. Lincoln. There were lawyers who had been
on opposing sides of cases against him and had sometimes won them.
There were all the petty animosities which grow up in a small city.
Furthermore, Springfield was moderately full of disappointed people
who had expected that their friendship for Lincoln would have procured
for them some political appointment. Any political aspirant living
in Maine or Missouri who had a fourth cousin living in Springfield
and possessed of a speaking acquaintance with Mr. Lincoln, felt that
he and his kinsfolk suffered an unmerited discourtesy if Mr. Lincoln
through such influence did not produce on application a commission as
Major-General or an appointment as Ambassador to some foreign court.
We have a yet further difficulty to face in the conflict of testimony
of habitually truthful people. If it were becoming in the author of
a book such as this to pass any general criticism upon those authors
who have preceded him in the same field, it might, perhaps, be counted
not invidious to say that for the most part writers on the religion of
Lincoln have been content to adduce the testimony of a limited number
of apparently truthful witnesses in support of their theory, but have
not given the evidence very much examination beyond the general fact
that the witnesses were habitually truthful people. We shall not arrive
at the truth in this fashion.
We may borrow an illustration from a field which lies just outside the
scope of our present inquiry. Even to this day it is possible to start
a warm discussion almost anywhere in Springfield over the question of
Lincoln's domestic affairs. It is possible to prove on the testimony
of unimpeached witnesses that Lincoln loved his wife passionately, and
that he did not love her at all; that he married Mary Todd because he
loved her and had already answered in his own heart all his previous
questions and misgivings, and that he married her because she and her
relatives practically compelled him to do so, and that he went to the
marriage altar muttering that he was going to hell; that Mary Todd
not only admired Abraham Lincoln, but loved him with a beautiful and
wifely devotion, and that she hated him and never ceased to wreak
revenge upon him for having once deserted her upon the eve of their
announced marriage; that Mary Todd wore a white silk dress on the night
of her wedding, and that she never owned a white silk dress until she
had become a resident of the White House; that the wedding was a gay
affair, with a great dinner, and was followed by a reception for which
several hundred printed invitations were issued, and that the wedding
was hastily performed on a Sunday evening, Mr. Dresser, the minister,
cutting short his evening service and dropping in on the way home
to solemnize a quickly extemporized marriage contract. It would seem
fairly easy to discover from a calendar of the year 1842 at least
what day in the week was chosen for the wedding, but few if any of
the disputants, or even of the biographers, appear to have taken this
pains. If the present writer should ever have occasion to write about
Abraham Lincoln's married life, he would not proceed very far without
consulting a calendar for that year; and he would hope to settle at
least one point in the controversy by telling the world that in 1842
the fourth day of November did not occur on Sunday or Tuesday, but on
Friday;[28] Mr. and Mrs. Lincoln both being tinged with superstition,
he might raise the question whether the celebration of the wedding upon
that date probably was or was not long premeditated. But the present
book does not concern itself with these questions, and the matter is
here introduced merely to illustrate that no point in controversy in a
matter of this character can be definitely settled by the unsupported
testimony of a single honest witness relying upon his memory after the
lapse of many years.
Evidence such as we are to consider is of two kinds, known in logic
as _a priori_ and _a posteriori_. The first kind is evidence from
antecedent probability; the second is evidence relating to matter after
the fact. An illustration will serve:
A man is found dead, with a wound in his forehead, and there are no
witnesses who can be produced in court who saw the man die. The wound
appears to have been produced by a bullet, and, as no weapon is found
beside the body, there is a presumption that the man has been murdered.
A neighbor is accused of having committed the deed. The _a priori_
evidence is adduced in testimony that the defendant and the deceased
had long been on bad terms with each other on account of a line fence
between their adjacent properties; that the defendant had threatened
to kill the deceased and had recently bought a revolver. The evidence
_a posteriori_ is found in the fact that the defendant's revolver on
examination shows one empty chamber and that the ball in the deceased
man's brain is of the caliber suited to his weapon and of the same
manufacture as the unused cartridges in the weapon. To this may be
added other incriminating facts, as of measured footprints near the
scene of murder which correspond to the size of the defendant's boots,
and of possible blood stains upon his clothing.
A very large volume of _a priori_ evidence is sometimes set aside
by a single _a posteriori_ fact; for instance, in the foregoing
supposititious case it may be entirely possible to prove that the
murder was committed by a tramp, and that the defendant was ten miles
away at the time the deed was done.
On the other hand, a large volume of _a posteriori_ evidence sometimes
disappears in the face of a single _a priori_ consideration. A man is
accused of having stolen a sheep. It is shown in evidence that on the
evening when the sheep was stolen he walked through his neighbor's
pasture and was seen to approach the sheep; that he sold mutton on the
day after the loss of the sheep, and that a fresh sheepskin was found
nailed to his barn door. All this _a posteriori_ evidence and much more
may be completely set aside in the minds of the jury by the single fact
that the man accused has lived for forty years in the community and has
borne a reputation incompatible with the crime of sheep-stealing.
In the examination of testimony concerning alleged utterances of
Abraham Lincoln in matters of religious belief, we must ask such
questions as these:
Is the witness credible? Had he opportunity to know what he professes
to relate? Were other witnesses present, and if so, do they agree in
their recollection of the words spoken? Was the interview published at
a time when it could have been denied by those who had knowledge of
the incident? Had the witness time to enlarge the incident by frequent
telling and by such exaggeration and enlargement of detail as is likely
to occur with the lapse of years? Had the witness a probable motive
for exaggeration; does he appear to tell what he would presumably have
liked Mr. Lincoln to say, and does it sound more like the narrator's
own style than it does like Mr. Lincoln? Do the language and the
sentiments expressed accord with the published addresses, letters, and
authentic documents of Abraham Lincoln, and are the views expressed
in accord with the views which he is known to have held? On the other
hand, is it possible that in the freedom of personal conversation Mr.
Lincoln may have said some things which he would not have been likely
to say in formal discourse or to write in official documents?
It is not necessary that we formally ask these and only these
questions; but these are the kinds of sieve through which oral
testimony must be passed if we are to learn the truth.
Particular care needs to be exercised in the application of these
tests, and especially in the employment of all _a priori_ methods. The
author of this volume is a Christian minister, and would be heartily
glad to find in Mr. Lincoln's authentic utterances indubitable evidence
that Mr. Lincoln was essentially a Christian; there is need that he
take especial care not to apply these discriminating tests in such
fashion as to sustain his own prejudices. Nor must he magnify his
caution until it becomes an inverted prejudice.
On the other hand, the _a priori_ method must on no account be ruled
out. Mr. Lincoln left a great quantity of authentic material. His
speeches, letters, and state papers fill twelve volumes, and even
these do not contain all of his signed material. We are compelled to
judge alleged utterances of his somewhat in the light of our certain
knowledge of what he wrote and said. Let us illustrate the application
of this principle:
If an aged man living in central Illinois were now to arise
and say: "I knew Abraham Lincoln, and he said to me one day in
private conversation, 'There is no God,'" we should be justified
in discrediting that man's testimony, even though he bore a good
reputation for veracity. The antecedent improbability of such a
declaration on the part of Mr. Lincoln is too great for us to accept it
on the basis of one man's recollection of a private and unwitnessed
conversation fifty years after Mr. Lincoln's death.
We should be equally justified in rejecting the testimony at this late
date of one of Mr. Lincoln's old-time neighbors who would say that Mr.
Lincoln told him that he believed the whole of the Athanasian Creed.
Especial care is necessary in dealing with the alleged utterances of
deceased persons in matters of religion. The author of this book has
conducted a thousand funerals, and has been told every conceivable kind
of story concerning some of the persons deceased. To the credit of our
frail humanity be it recorded that nine-tenths of this testimony was
favorable. There are few finer traits in human nature than those which
prompt us to speak only good of the dead. The eagerness of those who
have known not only the virtues but the faults of living men to pass
lightly over the faults and emphasize the virtues of these same men
when they are dead is not only a manifestation of the finest sort of
love of fair play in refusing to accuse those who cannot make answer,
but is also an exhibition of one of the noblest impulses of the human
spirit.
Even the tendency of ministers to lie like gentlemen on funeral
occasions is not to be too unsparingly condemned. It springs from a
belief that the better part of a man's life is the truer part of him,
and that a man has a right to be judged by the best that is in him not
only of achievement but even of defeated aspiration.
William Allen White is fond of relating a story concerning a funeral in
Kansas. The minister was in the midst of his eulogy when a man who had
come in late and had not heard the beginning of the discourse tiptoed
down the aisle, took a long look into the coffin, and returned to his
seat. The minister, somewhat disconcerted by this proceeding, addressed
him, saying, "The opportunity to view the remains will be given later."
"I know that," replied the man, "but I had begun to suspect that I had
gotten into the wrong funeral."
One who has had much experience with funerals and with attempts to
make dead men appear better than the same men living actually were or
appeared to be, knows that these efforts are not usually the result of
deliberate falsehood. They grow out of generous impulses and an easy
tendency to exaggeration. But some people do actually lie, and this
fact also is not wholly to be forgotten.
With these reminders of human frailty and human generosity and of the
uncertainty of all things human, we proceed to examine in some detail
the vast and contradictory mass of evidence which after the death of
Abraham Lincoln was published concerning his faith or the lack of it.
* * * * *
What is in some respects the foremost example of platform and pulpit
oratory concerning Lincoln is the oration of Bishop Charles Henry
Fowler, deceased, of the Methodist Episcopal Church. It illustrates at
once the excellency and the defects of works of this character. The
oration had its beginning in a eulogy delivered in Chicago on May 4,
1865, the day of Lincoln's burial at Springfield. From time to time as
years went by, Bishop Fowler had occasion to deliver other addresses on
Lincoln, which, in 1904, he reshaped into something like the final form
of the oration. First delivered in Minneapolis, it was repeated in many
cities and before great audiences. It became the Bishop's best known
and most popular address. It is the first and easily the greatest of
the five that make up the volume of his Patriotic Orations, the others
being on Grant, McKinley, Washington, and The Great Deeds of Great
Men. Of that large book it fills more than a hundred pages. It was too
long ever to be delivered at one time, but it was completely written,
and fully committed to memory, so that he chose at each delivery what
portions he would utter and what he would omit. Even with the omissions
he rarely spoke less than two and one-half hours, and sometimes
occupied three hours, his audiences hearing with sustained interest to
the close. Of it his son says, that "through its delivery in various
parts of the country, and by the natural process of accretion and
attraction, new facts were added and others verified, until in 1906 it
was put in this final form."
Here is an address whose composition occupied a strong and able man
for thirty-one years. It thrills with admiration for its subject. It
is alive with patriotism and religion. It deserved, in many respects,
the attention which it received. Men have been known to say that having
heard this address they would never spoil the impression by listening
to any other address on Lincoln.
And yet it would not be safe to quote this lecture in any of its
substantial parts without further investigation of the authority
on which Bishop Fowler relied. He was a truthful man, and a man of
ability, and if he had been asked what means he took to verify his
statements, he would probably have said that he admitted no statement
to his lecture which he did not find attested by some competent and
truthful witness. Doubtless so, and most of the lecture is true, and
the impression which it makes as a whole is substantially true, but
that is not enough. Doubtless Bishop Fowler read in some book or
magazine article by a truthful writer that on the day Lincoln submitted
the Emancipation proclamation to his Cabinet, he first read in the
presence of the Cabinet a chapter in the Bible. It would not have
required very much of investigation to have convinced Bishop Fowler
that what Lincoln really read was not the Bible, but Artemus Ward. He
did not intend to lie about it. He picked up the account from some
other speaker who had heard or read that Lincoln read a chapter from
some book, and thought that the Bible was the proper book to read on
an occasion of that character. Neither the speaker nor Bishop Fowler
intended to be untruthful, but neither of them had any training in or
inclination toward historical investigation. It would be easy to guess
that a thousand Methodist preachers and some others have retold the
story on the authority of Bishop Fowler. And that is far from being the
only inaccuracy in the lecture. Indeed, it shows throughout how much
it grew "by the natural process of accretion and attraction" and how
little by the verification of the facts.
This lecture is cited because it is in many respects the very best
of its type, as it is probably also the most noted, and one that was
delivered to more people than any other on Abraham Lincoln.
It does not suffice to rely upon any second authorities in
investigations of this character, nor to accept the statements of even
truthful witnesses without some sifting of the evidence.
With this in mind, we come to what is the most crucial and difficult of
all the incidents bearing upon our inquiry--the incident reported to
Dr. Holland by President Bateman.