Abraham Lincoln: Redeemer President (Library of Religious Biography | LRB)

by Allen C. Guelzo

Publisher:

Eerdmans

, 2003

Overview

An enlightening “intellectual biography” of Lincoln, Allen Guelzo’s peerless account of America’s most celebrated president explores the role of ideas in Lincoln’s life, treating him as a serious thinker deeply involved in the nineteenth-century debates over politics, religion, and culture. Written with passion and dramatic impact, Guelzo’s masterful study offers a revealing new perspective on a man whose life was in many ways a paradox.

Since its original publication in 1999, Abraham Lincoln: Redeemer President has garnered numerous accolades, not least the prestigious 2000 Lincoln Prize. As journalist Richard N. Ostling has noted, “Much has been written about Lincoln’s belief and disbelief,” but Guelzo’s extraordinary account “goes deeper.”

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Key Features

• Examines the life of America’s most beloved president through an idealogical standpoint
• Presents a compelling, dramatic style to the narrative
• Explores the role of ideas in Lincoln’s life

Contents

• The American System
• The Costs of Union
• The Doctrine of Necessity
• The Fuel of Interest
• Moral Principle Is All that Unites Us
• An Accidental President
• War in a Conciliatory Style
• Voice Out of the Whirlwind
• Whig Jupiter
• Malice Toward None

Top Highlights

“Lincoln insisted all through his life that he did not believe in free choice, but rather in a ‘doctrine of necessity.’ Intellectually, he was stamped from his earliest days by the Calvinism of his parents. But he rebelled vigorously against that influence in adolescence, declined to join his parents’ church, and turned instead toward the Enlightenment as his intellectual guide, toward ‘infidelity,’ ‘atheism,’ and Tom Paine in religion, to Benthamite utilitarianism in legal philosophy, and to ‘Reason, all-conquering Reason’ in everything else.” (Page 19)

“And yet he would come at the end of his liberal’s progress to see that liberalism could never achieve its highest goal of liberation and mobility without appealing to a set of ethical, even theological, principles that seemed wholly beyond the expectations and allowances of liberalism itself. While he would hold organized religion at arm’s length, he would come to see liberalism’s preoccupation with rights needing to be confined within some public framework of virtue, a framework he would find in a mystical rehabilitation of his ancestral Calvinism and an understanding of the operations of divine Providence.” (Pages 20–21)

“The Puritans of Massachusetts Bay imported a fairly straitlaced predestinarian Calvinism as their official theology, but they also imported a highly decentralized and well-nigh uncontrollable Congregational church order which licensed any individual congregation to revise Calvinist theology as it saw fit. And revise it they did, as the intellectual allure of Enlightenment rationalism persuaded New England’s established leadership to shuck off Calvinism for the more prestigious and ‘rational’ religion of the deists and unitarians.” (Page 11)

Praise for the Print Edition

One of the subtlest and deepest studies of Lincoln’s faith and thought in many years . . . Seldom has the complex connection between Lincoln’s predispositions and Lincoln’s achievements been more insightfully studied than in Allen Guelzo’s superb book.

—The Weekly Standard

This co-winner of the 1999 Lincoln Prize is a subtle, insightful, and convincing analysis of Abraham Lincoln. . . . Guelzo’s analysis is sound and generally convincing . . . This is one of the most important books in a decade rich in Lincoln scholarship.

—The Filson Club History Quarterly

Abraham Lincoln: Redeemer President is the best study of Lincoln’s religious thought, and all the better because it situates that thought in the context of Lincoln’s whole career. Guelzo’s purpose is to take Lincoln seriously ‘as a man of ideas.’ He succeeds admirably. . . . But it is in his analysis of Lincoln’s religious ideas that Guelzo makes his most important contribution.

—Times Literary Supplement

Is it possible that amid the voluminous literature on Abraham Lincoln, there is room for yet another study? Allen Guelzo’s Abraham Lincoln eloquently proves that there is, since religion has been sorely neglected by historians of Lincoln and the Civil War.

—Publishers Weekly

Product Details

• Title: Abraham Lincoln: Redeemer President
• Author: Allen C. Guelzo
• Series: Library of Religious Biography (LRB)
• Publisher: Eerdmans
• Publication Date: 2002
• Pages: 528

About Allen C. Guelzo

Allen C. Guelzo is Henry R. Luce Professor of the Civil War Era at Gettysburg College in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. He was formerly dean of the Templeton Honors College and Grace F. Kea Professor of American History at Eastern University in St. Davids, Pennsylvania. He received his PhD in history from the University of Pennsylvania.

Dr. Guelzo is the author of several works including Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation: The End of Slavery in America, winner of the prestigious Lincoln Prize.