When word of Abraham Lincoln’s death on April 15, 1865, swept over the country, his reputation underwent an immediate metamorphosis.  Long gone—at least among Republicans in the North, but also vanishing quickly for northern Democrats and even some in the Confederacy—were the judgments once made by members of his own party: for example, that his administration manifested only “weakness, imbecility, and absurdity.”  Even more quickly suppressed was the opinion once voiced by Southerners, occasional northern Democrats, and even a few radical Republicans who had called for someone like John Wilkes Booth to step forward:  “Assassination is a horrid crime … but to slay a tyrant is no more assassination than war is murder” (Richmond Dispatch).

At his bedside at 7:22 on the morning of Holy Saturday, April 15, Secretary of War Edwin Stanton spoke through tears, “Now he belongs to the ages.”  The next day, Northern pulpits resounded with sermons explaining how “the ages” would look upon the slain president.  In New York City, the pastor of All Souls Congregational Church provided a typical example.  In Henry Bellows’ words, “Heaven rejoices this Easter morning in the resurrection of our lost leader, honored in the day of his death; dying on the anniversary of our Lord’s great sacrifice, a mighty sacrifice himself for the sins of a whole people.”

Later a few strict Protestants would wonder why, if Lincoln was so saintly, he was attending the theater on Good Friday, while a few European traditionalists pondered about his presence in a theater on Good Friday.  More intensely, debates continue among scholars concerning the constitutionality of Lincoln’s war-actions, the wisdom of his directives that pushed toward the all-out destruction of “total war,” and the feasibility of his plans for Reconstruction that the assassination rendered moot.

Yet careful analysis of such questions has been difficult because of the filiopietism that—from Easter Sunday 1865 forward—has so densely surrounded all aspects of Lincoln’s life.  This 150th anniversary perhaps affords an opportunity, not to dismiss reasons for why this filiopietism exists, but to say a little bit more.  For myself, after many years reading Lincoln and about Lincoln (though not reading nearly enough), I have come to two tentative conclusions, one complicated but the other quite straightforward.

First, Lincoln exercised remarkably effective political leadership in fulfilling his resolve to restore the Union.  A never-ending torrent of books floats many different interpretive boats, but almost all support the conclusion that he displayed consummate skill as he managed friends, outmaneuvered foes, and (eventually) selected the leaders who could put the nation back together.  Above all, the best scholarship underscores the steely determination that sustained his deep commitment to a United States.

Yet from the first it was obvious that for Lincoln the Union meant not only a political nation with unsurpassed economic opportunity and similarly unbounded potential for personal betterment.  It was even more a moral ideal with universal significance; the United States was “a new nation, conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that ‘all men are created equal’.”

As a practical strategy to sustain this political-moral vision that Lincoln drew from the Declaration of Independence, he began with a strictly defined goal of restoring the Union (August 1862:  “If I could save the Union without freeing any slave I would do it, and if I could save it by freeing all the slaves I would do it”).  With the Emancipation Proclamation (January 1863) he next declared slaves in the Confederate states free.  Then with the 13th Amendment (early 1865) he pushed Congress to eliminate slavery throughout the whole nation.  Last, but only in fragmentary hints and only in the last weeks of his life, he sketched a path toward equitable citizenship for African Americans.

Frederick Douglass, whom the Emancipation Proclamation had transformed from a critic of Lincoln to a supporter, put his finger on the enduring difficulty of this sequential strategy:  “The slave having ceased to be the abject slave of a single master, his enemies will endeavor to make him the slave of society at large.”  That is, underlying the exceedingly difficult political problem of slavery was the even deeper cultural problem of society-wide racism.  Leaving the hardest problem to the last risked not addressing it at all.

Several scholars, led by James Oakes of the City University of New York, have made the well-documented argument that Lincoln, along with other leading Republicans, deliberately crafted a strategy, evolving from electoral politics to warfare itself, aimed expressly at the destruction of slavery.  They have also shown that at least some of those strategists hoped for a society where racism no longer betrayed American ideals of “liberty for all.”

Even granting this understanding of Lincoln’s long term aims, however, his presidency strengthened one of the most important factors that has made it so difficult to move from the formal end of slavery to the realization of genuine social equality.

That factor was his sanctification of the United States as a unique creation of Providence.  Lincoln ended his remarkable report to Congress of December 1, 1862, with a memorable expression of that belief.  The report had argued passionately for compensated abolition (payment to slaveholders in return for manumitting slaves).  It closed by claiming that through this, or some other necessary means, “We shall nobly save, or meanly lose, the last best hope of earth.”  A similar statement of American civil religion defined the similar hope expressed at the end of the Gettysburg Address:  “that this nation, under God, should have a new birth of freedom—and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”

Lincoln—with the sharpest, cleanest, most expressive prose of any American leader ever—on many occasions exalted the moral exceptionalism of the nation itself.  Unlike most of his northern peers during the war, and unlike most white Americans (South and North) after the end of Reconstruction, Lincoln occasionally also called that moral exceptionalism into question.  (See especially the Second Inaugural Address.)  Yet for later American history, a sense of the nation as God-guided and God-guarded sprang easily from the most memorable commentary of the nation’s most beloved leader.  The result has been a history in which the civil religion of a unified nation under God has regularly blinded Americans to the moral failures of our own society.

I can make my second point quickly by agreeing with the closing words of Michael Burlingame’s 2,000-page biography, which was published in the Lincoln bicentennial year:  “despite a childhood of emotional malnutrition and grinding poverty, despite a lack of formal education, despite a series of career failures, despite a miserable marriage, despite a tendency to depression, despite a painful midlife crisis, despite the early death of his mother and his siblings as well as of his sweetheart and two of his four children, he became a model of psychological maturity, moral clarity, and unimpeachable integrity.”  Lincoln as a person seems to me an even better exemplar than Lincoln the national leader, however extraordinary that leadership admittedly was.

Mark Noll, Francis A. McAnaney Professor of History, is the author of The Civil War as a Theological Crisis (University of North Carolina Press, 2006).