| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 109.1

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 109.1 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

Stewart Winger. Lincoln, Religion, and Romantic Cultural Politics. DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press. 2003. pp. viii, 271. $38.00.
In this book, Stewart Winger provides an informative and provocative interpretation of Abraham Lincoln's religion and politics. He seeks to shed new light on the sixteenth president's thought by placing it in historical context as a combination of nineteenth-century Whig politics and Romantic Protestantism.	1
Winger begins his book with a fresh look at Lincoln's "Second Lecture on Discoveries and Inventions," an obscure speech delivered in 1858, ostensibly on the topic of scientific progress. When placed in its proper cultural and political milieu, however, he shows that it is actually a Whig satire of Young America: an antebellum movement dedicated to the principles of "literary nationalism," "manifest destiny," and "modernist capitalism" (p. 19). One of the chief expositors of this movement was George Bancroft, the renowned nineteenth-century historian and a leading public intellectual of his time. Bancroft's Romantic vision of American destiny exalted the will of the people as an infallible expression of the will of God. In the strongest section of the book, Winger traces the influence of this vision on the Democratic Party, and on Stephen Douglas, whom Bancroft served as a close advisor. Winger correctly shows how the Young American movement extolled an ideology that justified policies of imperialism and slavery extension (p. 107).	2
Lincoln's political theology may be seen in this context as a romantic response to the triumphalism of Young America. According to Winger, American Romanticism gave rise to two different potentialities: a more secular strain of democratic idealism represented by Young America and the Democrats, and a more religious strain of Augustinian piety represented by Lincoln, the Whigs, and, subsequently, the Republican Party. "Democrats made it easy on themselves: vox populi, vox dei. Whigs questioned this equation and therefore found themselves drawn to history and religion. Thus the Whig Review criticized the American way of life on theological grounds in a manner antithetical to George Bancroft and the Young American movement" (p. 96).	. . .

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