| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 109.3

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 109.3 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

Joseph R. Fornieri. Abraham Lincoln's Political Faith. DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press. 2003. Pp. 209. $38.00.

Joseph R. Fornieri has written a useful book on the religious contributions to Abraham Lincoln's political vision, but it is also a volume that will be more readily appreciated by Fornieri's fellow political theorists than by historians. The central argument is that Lincoln's public philosophy constituted a "biblical republicanism" in which trust in divine revelation balanced the prudential exercise of reason and for which Lincoln drew together commitments to antislavery, the Declaration of Independence, and the Union into a coherent political perspective of compelling ethical force. Fornieri is an unabashed partisan for the political philosophy that he finds in Lincoln. In his view, Lincoln's "biblical republicanism" far outshone major contemporary alternatives, including the self-serving proslavery theology of southerners, the enervating appeal of Stephen A. Douglas to popular sovereignty, and the politically suicidal ultraism of radical abolitionists. Fornieri is equally dismissive of modern interpreters who view Lincoln as anything but a principled defender of sound principles. Historians who project Lincoln's personal psychological history onto his politics misunderstand the integrity of his intellectual commitments; Straussian doctrinalists give too little credit to Judeo-Christian religion; and southern conservatives misread Lincoln's blend of shrewd practice and moral wisdom as dangerous millennialism. Against such interpretations, Fornieri holds that Lincoln rooted himself in the soundest traditions of American politics, especially the link drawn in George Washington's Farewell Address between religious practice and republican integrity, and the egalitarian principles enshrined by Thomas Jefferson in the Declaration of Independence. Lincoln's particular contribution, in this reading, was to expand upon the founders' republican basis with a sensitive use of the Christian scriptures and put it to use along lines following Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas rather than Immanuel Kant or modern moral relativists.

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