Abraham Lincoln and the Two Peters

One of the Sangamon County, Illinois, spots "sacred" to the renowned Methodist itinerant preacher, Peter Cartwright, was the Spring Creek camp ground six miles west of Springfield. Also known as "Watter's Camp-Ground" after an early owner of the land, Spring Creek featured "the first church ... ever built in Sangamon County [1823]," a Methodist meetinghouse known as Salem—"really a log-cabin, about eighteen feet by twenty"—on the adjacent grounds of which "many, very many, glorious camp meetings were held" between 1825 and the Civil War.[1] Spring Creek had everything natural that was necessary to an encampment: good water, timber, and open meadows, where the people could pitch their tents and the church could erect an ample preaching shed. Cartwright loved the place dearly, because, as he recalled, "several of my children were converted [there]," along with "many of my best friends." During his years as Presiding Elder for the Sangamon District of the Methodist Episcopal Church, Cartwright favored Spring Creek for the autumn quarterly gathering of preachers and church members. These were three-day outdoor events, sociable picnics and serious camp-meeting revival services where the preachers worked long into the night to harvest the souls of those who had lately harvested the hay and corn and wheat. Cartwright had of course led camp-meetings at "Watter's," and with considerable success; but on one particular occasion he was to be a silent watcher at a remarkable performance by this greatest Illinois Methodist rival, Peter Akers.

The date was August 13, 1837, a Sunday. Peter Akers was at the time superintending the Ebenezer Manual Labor School, a Methodist-sponsored seminary located on the Akers farm four miles Page  [End Page 27] northwest of Jacksonville. He had come to Spring Creek camp meeting to preach at the invitation of the Sangamon Circuit pastor, George Rutledge.[2] Having transferred to Illinois from Kentucky in 1832, Akers had in five years become widely known and appreciated for his learned if lengthy sermons—often running over three hours and full of large allegorical applications of scripture. While this was not the sort of sermonizing we would expect westerners to admire—and far from the emotional whirlwinds of Cartwright—Akers enjoyed a revivalist reputation equal to or, in the eyes of some of his Methodist fellow preachers, even exceeding the other "Uncle Peter's." One of these, who as a young man had heard Akers many times, and later became both a Methodist bishop and an authority on the American pulpit, went so far as to deem him "the greatest Bible preacher that ever preached on the continent." [3] William Henry Milburn also marveled at Akers's ability to reach a western audience: "You wondered how his massive thoughts, his lofty line of reasoning, mighty unfoldings of the deep things of the holy Scriptures (for almost every sermon was an apocalypse, an uncovering of the mysteries), could hold as with a spell the plain, unlearned people of the border." [4]

There was another young admirer of Akers in the audience that day: William Rutledge, in training for the ministry and the son of the circuit preacher whose camp meeting it was. William, at seventeen, was a student at Ebenezer, [5] and had come over to Spring Page  [End Page 28] Creek on a kind of unexpected holiday, a good opportunity for him to hear the preaching and visit his father. Rutledge sat (or more likely stood) near the front of the large open area for the crowd, close to the preaching platform and altar. He was in the company of five other Ebenezer students, three of them Chippewas being trained for missionary work in their nation. Eager and interested as he and his comrades were, they could not have foreseen how memorable the event would prove to be. The young Rutledge was sufficiently moved by what he saw and heard that he remembered it graphically all his life, though he waited more than fifty years to write his account of the events at Spring Creek. It is his memoir from 1890 that forms the basis of this narrative. While not the earliest version of the events, it is the most detailed, comprehensive and coherent; and, as we shall see, it is the most nearly verifiable. Precisely for what audience Rutledge originally spoke or wrote is not clear. Perhaps he was attempting to correct or amplify an earlier account he may have seen in a newspaper; or what he published may have been based on a speech given at some sort of ceremonial event, such as a Grand Army of the Republic encampment, or a Memorial Day or Fourth of July celebration. All we know for sure is that Rutledge says he was "writing" his piece "in sight of" the Lincoln monument in Springfield, which presumably means at Oak Ridge Cemetery. The text, quoted in full in the notes, appeared in the July 17, 1890, number of the New York Christian Advocate. [6] Page  [End Page 29]

Likewise in attendance at the Spring Creek camp meeting was Abraham Lincoln. He had come out from Springfield in a party of ten, including two physicians who were also local Methodist min- Page  [End Page 30] isters, Jacob Early and Francis McNeill. [7] Rattling along in a "band wagon," the horses and human company had been the objects of "a most humorous criticism" from Lincoln, teasing that they en- Page  [End Page 31] dured until "Dr. McNeal [sic] ... reminded him of the grave errand on which they were going." Lincoln took the rebuke kindly, for according to Rutledge he "cherished a profound respect" for McNeill, and the group spent the rest of the trip putting on their best faces, serious or pious as the case might individually be.

When they reached the campground, the "warm up act" had already begun: the Rev. John T. Mitchell delivering "a strong sermon on the Divinity of Christ." When Mitchell ended, the crowd heard a scripture lesson, sang a hymn and watched expectantly as Akers took the stand. He announced his text, Zechariah 9:9–10:

The subject of the sermon was to be Christ's dominion, with the late Old Testament prophet Zechariah providing the adumbration. Akers's pulpit presence, as described on two separate occasions by Milburn, was remarkable: "His height was not far from six feet, perhaps a little over; in the pulpit he looked seven, for his power made him grow upon the eye to enormous size. His frame was large, bony, muscular, with no undue flesh; arms and legs of unusual length. His head was very large, even for a man of his size, covered with wavy hair growing somewhat thin. The forehead was broad and high." And: "Dr. Akers was tall and massive in frame, somewhat loose-jointed and awkward in attitude and movement.... His face expressed seriousness, gravity, indeed some thought sternness, for his great and devout spirit seemed often withdrawn from it gazing with rapt vision upon Him who dwells between the cherubim...."[8]

Though Akers spoke to his Spring Creek congregation for a full three hours, ringing changes on the Zechariah text and introducing other prophetic matter from Isaiah, Ezekiel, and Revelation, Rutledge listened to it all "with fixed attention." He took notes throughout, as a dutiful student would have, and these, preserved over the decades as an aid to his "excellent memory," would have allowed him even in old age (Rutledge was seventy in 1890) to "reproduce the entire sermon" had he wished to do so. Instead, he concentrated—because this was what most interested history and his audience—on the section of Akers's address "that elicited from Mr. Lincoln for the first time ... the expression, oft repeated afterward concerning his own life-work, that some regarded as superstition."

Akers asserted that despite this fallen world's worst efforts to degrade humanity utterly, "Babylon's" time was almost over, for a "Son" had been anointed and enthroned, and henceforth "'the government shall be upon his shoulders.'" But who was this "Son" and what would be the mission of his "government"? In standard Christian biblical typology, the Old Testament prophesied what would be fulfilled in the Gospel: the messiahship of Jesus. Yet this Page  [End Page 33] linear connection between prefigurement and realization is not what Akers is claiming. In quoting Ezekiel 21:27, "I will overturn, overturn, overturn it, and it shall be no more, until he comes whose right it is; and I will give it him," Akers alters the prophet's "I" to "He" and the "it" that will be given to "reign": "He will overturn, overturn, till He shall come whose right it is' to reign."

Hence there are two agents of the Lord God coming: one to "overturn" Babylon by scourging it, the other to redeem the world and initiate the "kingdom" (chiliastic or heavenly). Further to complicate the perspective, Rutledge makes Akers the prophet's prophet, his text now from Revelation 18:9–19): "So he [Akers] led us to the heights that overlooked her [Babylon's} overthrow and 'the smoke of her burning:'"

Biblical Babylon was consumed because of its "whoring"—which is not to be taken merely as its creatural sins but rather as the political sins of injustice and opposition to the church. Akers now extended the historical allegory to fit the moral and political condition of the world, and the United States particularly, in the decades following his standpoint in time, 1837:

To William Rutledge, in his own late patriarchal years, as to thousands of aging Union veterans in the Grand Army of the Repub- Page  [End Page 34] lic, history, their history, appeared to have precisely fulfilled this vision of an American apocalypse. The slaveocracy's Babylon had burned, though it had taken the holocaust of the Civil War and the martrydom of Lincoln to "overturn, overturn." When he thought back to the day of Akers's sermon, the fifty-plus years of accumulated myth, legend, and history of the Civil War, as compiled and interpreted by the victorious North (Rutledge was a founding member of the Grand Army of the Republic, and is given credit for the concept of that organization), made the meaning of Akers's allegory clear: he had preached the first abolition sermon ever heard in central Illinois, and it had caught the Spring Creek crowd and Abraham Lincoln up in its prophetic vision. [9]

Rutledge recalled that "men cringed and cowered under words so plainly spoken, for it was near the time of the terrible Lovejoy tragedy in Alton, and a majority of that audience were from Southern States and had been directly or indirectly connected with slavery." The typical upland southern settler in Illinois viewed abolitionism and its proponents as Yankee meddling and meddlers. Even when ex-southerners such as Cartwright despised slavery and had emigrated to escape its shadow, they often hated abolitionists more, or at the very least thought their policies counterproductive to the end they sought (Lincoln and Cartwright were in this latter group). Throughout the summer of 1837, Illinois had been facing a minor political and social crisis brought on by "Yankee" abolitionist activity. In the town of Alton, abolitionist editor and Presbyterian minister Elijah Lovejoy, having crossed the Mississippi from St. Louis in 1836 to live in a state where he assumed his civil right to publish what he believed was protected, had spent much of his time facing down mobs and buying new printing presses to replace the ones successively dumped in the river. Lovejoy's recent Page  [End Page 35] difficulties in the slave state of Missouri had become national news, and it is safe to say that Illinoisans, whatever their views on slavery, were anxious about what his removal to Alton portended. But despite strong opposition, and careless of personal danger, Lovejoy had continued publishing his antislavery newspaper, the Alton Observer, until he was shot dead by unknown assailants, members of a mob attacking his offices, on the night of November 8. With the abolitionist editor safely dispatched, they tumbled his last press, the fourth, into the muddy deep.[10]

Perhaps Akers prophesied more imminently than he knew. Elijah Lovejoy's "martyrdom" three months after Spring Creek became a national rallying point for abolitionism in the north. On that August Sunday in 1837, Rutledge declares, Akers touched the people's conscience concerning the gravest moral, social, and political issue Illinois and the United States had ever confronted, and one that would take another quarter of a century to resolve. They were "dazed and overwhelmed" in the wake of his prophetic eloquence, rose to their feet and "stood in silence" when he finished his three hours' speaking. And so deep and lasting was the impression upon the community, that folks talked of the event for years afterward: and they recalled Peter Akers's words "as they tearfully girded their boys for battle in 1861–62."

What Presiding Elder Peter Cartwright thought of the sermon and its galvanic effect on the people we do not know. Ever since his own conversion in the Kentucky Revival in 1801, he had cherished the evangelical even as he deplored the apocalyptic. One of his early ministries had been against the Shakers's "big lie" of the imminent kingdom, and for more than thirty years he had preached against the humbug of false prophets who claimed they and they alone knew from God that the second coming was at hand. Thus we would expect him to react negatively to the Peter Akers prophecy, which he probably did—in private. Yet because Akers was a colleague and a sometime friend, as well as a rival for preaching pre-eminence in the Illinois Conference, Cartwright kept his opinion to himself. The Autobiography is silent concerning Spring Creek. The only known documentation linking him to the camp meeting is a laconic report he submitted to the Illinois Conference, fulfilling his presiding elder's duty: "P. Cartwright writes Aug. 23rd, '37, that Page  [End Page 36] on Sangamon Circuit was a good camp-meeting and about 50 obtained religion."[11]

William Rutledge's story is sincerely told as true and has a convincing air, both in outline and in detail. And since the principal actor in Akers's vision of a coming national drama was supposedly present and listening attentively, we would like to agree with Rutledge that the sermon occasioned a kind of epiphany for Abraham Lincoln—the narratives of biography and history are the more compelling for this kind of foreshadowing. But the last and most important part of Rutledge's testimony, concerning Lincoln's reaction to Akers, came at second hand, heard after the event from a "Brother Arnie Robertson." Riding back to Springfield that evening, Lincoln had sat in silence as the others, the doctor-preachers and the lawyers, mulled over Akers's discourse. Finally, when asked directly for his opinion, Lincoln "thoughtfully" responded:

Abraham Lincoln "strangely mixed up with" God's coming redemption of the world? This is a startling correspondence with something Orville Hickock Browning said about the early Lincoln. The young man he was coming to know had shown "a strong conviction that he was born for better things than then seemed likely or even possible."[12] If Lincoln actually said these sentences, or something close to them, he was by 1837 far from the "infidel" he was said to have been in the New Salem and first Springfield years (and which Cartwright continued to accuse him of being a decade later in the congressional race). But before examining the possible consequences of this "religious" side of the man to Lincoln biography, we should examine Rutledge's report as skeptically as we can in order to see if it deserves credibility. Page  [End Page 37]

Some of Rutledge's narrative details are indisputable: the camp meeting did occur when and where advertised, Peter Akers did speak, Rutledge and his fellow-students from Ebenezer were present (he even notes the names of the Chippewas). And his later character as a minister, Civil War chaplain and founding-member of the Grand Army of the Republic all bolster his claim to be a reliable witness. What he says he saw and heard we can therefore take as very probably true, including both the contextual details of the camp meeting and the scriptural texts and substance of Akers's long sermon.[13]

Lincoln's place in the narrative is more problematic, however. In a negative sense, he could have been present, since he is not reported as being anywhere else. [14] The mention of Lincoln's facetiousness on the way out to Spring Creek sounds typical (his making fun of the poor nags drawing the bandwagon is a suggestive detail), for his friends often noted such joking as the yang to his melancholic yin, and his "betters" sometimes called him down for a lack of seriousness. But positive evidence, especially concerning Lincoln's surprisingly personal response to Akers's preaching, is hard to come by. Rutledge recalled that he learned that Lincoln had attended the meeting from "one of the number" who rode out from Springfield, but he does not name this source. Both of the men he does name, though, were bona fide Methodist ministers and physicians then living in Springfield, and one of them, Francis McNeill, is named in other sources as a Whig acquaintance and a political supporter of Lincoln, perhaps justifying to an extent Rutledge's remark that Lincoln "cherished a profound respect for Dr. McNeal." [15] As for what Lincoln allegedly said on the return trip to Springfield, Rutledge's information, as noted above, came from Page  [End Page 38] a source who Rutledge implies was among the party (which Rutledge himself clearly was not). "Brother Arnie Robertson," while not yet conclusively identified, is very probably Arnold R. Robinson, a long-time Springfield resident, minor public servant, leader among the local Masons, and active Whig. From his many offices and civic activities in Springfield between the 1830s and the Civil War—crier of the United States courts, election clerk, militiaman, temperance society official, to name the most important—Robinson seems to have been the sort of person likely to have been included in the wagon trip to hear Akers at Spring Creek. Also in favor of his identification is Robinson's Masonic membership, which might explain Rutledge's referring to his "Arnie Robertson" as a "brother," even though he was not a fellow Methodist preacher.[16]

Taken altogether, then, there is reason to believe that Rutledge's entire story, including the secondhand part is true as told. Would this mean that Lincoln, after his epiphany of August, 1837, saw Page  [End Page 39] himself propelled toward a destiny of "changes and revolutions," ordained by a Christian, even a Calvinist God? Did Lincoln's strangely confessional response to his companions on the road back to Springfield indicate that the Akers sermon had somehow moved him from a belief in a blind sort of fatalism ("the doctrine of necessity," as Lincoln himself referred to it) to one of Christian providential design? And what was it about Akers's matter and manner of preaching that had inclined Lincoln toward him, where he had mercilessly ridiculed Cartwright in their pamphlet war over Illinois public schools in 1834, and showed not the slightest sign of taking his brand of Methodist evangelism seriously? Of the two "Uncle Peters," in other words, why was Lincoln susceptible to Peter Akers and impervious to Peter Cartwright?

Politics was surely basic to Lincoln's "visceral" reaction to Cartwright, the "Democracy's" local gadfly, whose irritating presence Lincoln could not escape as they both so frequently traveled through the same space in Sangamon and neighboring central Illinois counties—respectively circuit riders of man's and God's law. But Akers was evidently not much of anything politically, except polite. And he had no public persona outside the Methodist Episcopal Church. Just as adamantly anti-slavery, just as committed to Methodism, Akers kept a much lower profile than Cartwright, and to the extent that Lincoln knew of him it was through his reputation as an educator and a preacher. And that is why Lincoln could listen to him: as an avuncular teacher and a man of ideas. The religion Lincoln had heard from Cartwright emphasized individual conversion: personal, confessional, "experimental"—all awash in a torrent of emotion that was both cause and effect of self-surrender and the (temporary) annihilation of reason. To Lincoln this was ridiculous if not pernicious, and entirely unsuitable to his rationalist temperament. But what he heard from the Akers pulpit was general and intellectual: religion should be a matter of "rational belief," the application of which tended toward discovering what was true here and hereafter: in this case an allegorical reading of scripture in order to foresee how and when God's historical design would be fulfilled.

Cartwright insisted he could choose; Lincoln desired to be chosen. And Akers's flight of prophecy seemed to validate that desire ("Thou marshall'st me the way I was going.") through a providential scheme in which he could both lead and be led. It is interesting that some other accounts of the Akers sermon go so far as to say that the preacher made his allegory apply explicitly to slavery Page  [End Page 40] and indicated that the chosen "Son" upon whose shoulders the civil task of purging the horrid institution from the land stood right there listening among the congregation. As Francis Grierson embellished the scene in Abraham Lincoln: Practical Mystic (1919), Lincoln is to be the "anointed one."

Prophetic sermons such as Akers's vision of an American apocalypse ran the risk of slipping into a vulgar Calvinism, which is probably why one encounters so few of the kind among Methodist preachers, and why Rutledge was so intent on denying that Akers presumed to be a prophet ("let none think that this humble man of God ever posed as a prophet—never.") But even if Akers was speaking as "a student of prophets" rather than as one himself inspired, his interpretation of scripture was undeniably prophetic and to his audience more important (because so close to home) than the texts themselves. And what Akers's medley of Old and New Testament prophets is covertly announcing, with Akers deciphering, is that God has foreordained a crucial intervention into American history and elected someone human to do this superhuman job.

During his boyhood days in Indiana, Lincoln had received regular doses of Baptist Calvinism at the Regular Baptist Church of Pigeon Creek, whose creed included an article of predestination: "we believe in Election by grace given in Jesus Christ Before the world began & that God Cawls regenerates & Sanctifies all who are made meat for Glory by his special grace."[18] And if the Christianity of Page  [End Page 41] Baptist Calvinism didn't take with the boy, the fatalism inherent in it did: Lincoln the young man brooded over the problem of free will and human action in a universe apparently determined; and as much as he wanted, in his "free thinking" New Salem days, to throw off the unreasonable burdens of a religion and a church that had him damned or saved, chosen or disregarded, "meat for glory" or meat for Satan, in accordance with "God's eternal decrees" given even before the world and time began, he did not yet know how to create a meaningful self from the existential fact of freedom and the power of the human mind to make something of it. Though drawn to Cartwright's doctrine of free choice for humankind and free grace offered from God, he could stomach neither the emotionalism associated with conversion nor the "group-think" of camp-meeting crowds; at the same time, though troubled by Calvinism's predestinarian tenet, so anti-democratic and socially unprogressive, he found its metaphysics fascinating and intellectually engaging. Throughout his life he remained a fatalist. And not just in theology: his "doctrine of necessity," as Allen C. Guelzo has pointed out, extended from "God's eternal decrees" right through the material universe and into the human mind, forming a consistent philosophy much like the radical determinism of Jeremy Bentham: everything was caused, and everything human caused by self-interest. Given this dark encroachment of fate, how could he live a life of autonomy in a self-authorizing democracy—something he wanted for himself and his fellow citizens—yet play an important part in a grand design transcendently set? Both of these "lives" required being elected, but only political office involved a vote of the people (though paradoxically in a Calvinist world the latter would determine the "democratic" outcome of the former). He would never be able to solve this philosophical dilemma, as who indeed could? [19]

Sometime in early September 1862, with the war going badly for the North, his commanding general McClellan driving him to distraction, and a decision to make on promulgating the preliminary Emancipation Proclamation, Lincoln, in a mood of profound depression, set down the following paragraph, perhaps as a note for his reply later in the month to the two ministers who presented him with a "Chicago Emancipation Memorial," or perhaps as a private "Meditation on the Divine Will:" Page  [End Page 42]

The Civil War must be God's will; otherwise such horror wouldn't be happening, couldn't be happening from mere human agency. As he prepared to give the preliminary Emancipation Proclamation to the world (Lincoln had it in a desk drawer within reach when the preachers were presenting their case) he was "almost ready to say" that the conflict was God's will, and he the chief among the "human instrumentalities" of the divine. From the standpoint of the "Meditation," Lincoln's powerful mind would not need to travel far to reach the "rational belief" that not only was there a providential design in punishing the South for the sin of slavery, but also that he and his soldiers were wielding the "mighty scourge" in a cause divinely just. The Second Inaugural Address's peroration has soft and sentimental parentheses wrapping a fierce and implacable core. The neat quatrain (lineated here to make the point): "Fondly do we hope,/Fervently do we pray,/That this mighty scourge of war/May speedily pass away;" and the famous final paragraph, beginning "With malice toward none; with charity for all," and ending with the call to a lasting peace. But in between fond hope and reconstruction came the warning that if God wills it this war already four years long would continue until the South was annihilated, until "every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn by the sword," for "'the judgments of the Lord, are true and righteous altogether.'" That is where Abraham Lincoln, as we say, came down, on March 4, 1865. Was this final belief in Providence in any way predictable from where he stood intellectually in the 1830s?

Five and a half months after the Spring Creek camp meeting, on January 27, 1838, Lincoln stood before the Springfield Young Men's Lyceum—a kind of literary and debating society for the improving would-be leaders of the community—and delivered a sermon of his own. Known to historians as the "Lyceum Address," it was formally entitled "The Perpetuation of our Political Institutions," and was a sermon on political religion (a phrase he actually employed in the discourse) replete with a biblical text (though announced only at the end of the sermon), jeremiad, and prophecy. [21] Lincoln's text was Matthew 16:18, Jesus's declaration to Peter (here quoted in full), "And I say unto thee, That thou are Peter, and upon this rock I will build my church, and the gates of hades [Lincoln: 'hell'] shall not prevail against it." Lincoln's "church" was the American Republic, Page  [End Page 44] covenanted to the people by the blood of the Revolution and the wisdom of the Founding Fathers as embodied in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. The jeremiad warned that the outbreaks of "mobocracy" prevalent in the 1830s—all his instances are of violent injustice to those on the social margins, especially slaves and people of color: Lincoln denounces recent lynchings in Mississippi and St. Louis, though the unmentioned Lovejoy murder hovered over the audience like a ghost of conscience—direly threatened the rule of law, which was the essence of the republican covenant and which could be sustained only through "cold, calculating, unimpassioned reason." And Lincoln prophesied that if the rule of law were not universally restored in the Republic, and soon, the people would become alienated from their government, indifferent to politics, and finally unwilling to keep vigilant in defense of freedom. Such a deplorable rending of the covenant would make America ripe for a dictatorship, for the appearance of some "towering genius" of vaulting ambition, one who might not be evil but would certainly act amorally:

Many generations of readers of the "Lyceum Address" have naturally wondered whether Lincoln had any particular person in mind as his "loftiest genius" who would "spring up among us" and proceed to pull down the Republic. A few "depth psychologists" have thought that Lincoln was warning America against himself and his own ambition, which Herndon memorably described as "a little engine that knew no rest;" [23] others have argued that, Page  [End Page 45] just as he knew his Springfield audience would be thinking of Lovejoy's martyrdom as he indicted "mobocracy," they would also readily identify Stephen A. Douglas as the nation-devouring beast-to-come from the "family of the lion, or the tribe of the eagle."[24]

But the valence of allegorical prophecy is always changing its sign: like a drawing-compass with one foot anchored in eternity, the other temporarily fixes its point in ever-new historical contexts; and reading an allegory entails that, for every compass-point in history, we measure and analyze both the distance between time and the timeless and the arc of circumference the compass describes between historical events—Lincoln at Spring Creek in August, 1837, Lincoln in Washington, in March and April, 1865. We may say therefore that Lincoln's genius of great ambition could be himself and any of several men of his acquaintance who, like Douglas, were driven by a will-to-power too anarchic to be in the harness of the Republican Covenant and its founding documents. Yet they can be so identified only because of their positive or negative relation to the archetype, in this case the civil-religious counterpart of Revelation's "Antichrist." Yet, again, as all three of our Spring Creek actors—Akers and Lincoln and Cartwright—knew, what makes prophecy so ambivalent is knowing whether any particular historical manifestation or interpretation of the archetype is positive or negative. "God can not be for, and against the same thing at the same time." And what God could not be, humankind could not be: Lincoln's rationalism would not allow him to repeal the law of contradiction, though so many dilemmas in life and politics required "both/and" rather than "either/or." In the late 1830s we see in the young man in his late 20s the emergence of a kind of "active agnostic:" one who willed his mind to search despite the opacity of the subject, God's will, which in turn his humor and intelligence told him might well be willing him to will himself. Calvinist election is an occasion of hubris: the candidate cannot know, and for all Lincoln, or Akers, could tell, the Son soon to come might as likely be the Antichrist as the Savior. For his part, Cartwright satirized such rational pretension as moral blindness: the world had already been redeemed through Christ's atonement; but the only way to participate in this miracle was by experiencing conversion, Page  [End Page 46] an emotional cleansing of the heart that banished doubt from the mind: "Who feels it knows it, Lord."[25]

If Cartwright was a purer Methodist than Akers, the two Peters did have a patch of common ground on which they, and Lincoln, could safely stand together. This common ground was the field of republican ritual drama, where the paradox of Whitman's epigraph to Leaves of Grass, "One's self I sing, a simple, separate person,/Yet utter the word Democratic, the word En-Masse," can be held for a moment out of time in resolution (the law of contradiction not repealed but suspended). For Cartwright, it was a matter of tending to the health of individual souls—though they be multiplied by thousands at camp meetings—whose beautiful regeneration was expressed in a single spontaneous shout—though echoed and amplified throughout the crowd. For Akers, the work was introspective, the quiet and patient singular mind finding out God's will in order to do it. Surely Lincoln was here closer to Akers's Christianity than to Cartwright's. But in terms of civil religion, he was with his old antagonist: while Peter Akers's eyes were generally on heaven and transcendence, Peter Cartwright preached a continuous republican renewal based on the civil-sacred reenactments of the Revolution. After all, Cartwright's father had fought and bled for the new nation while serving in the Virginia Continental Line. As Harry V. Jaffa provocatively suggests, "for Lincoln ... the moral and political teaching of the Gospels had an apocalyptic fulfillment in the American founding."[26]

In the progress of the American Republic, there would be lots of small-apocalypses along the way to the big A (if any). This is what William Henry Milburn meant when he said of Peter Akers that his "every sermon was an apocalypse"—from the Greek "to uncover," the revelation of a mystery, not the end of mystery: the fullness of time, time and again, rather than the end of time. In this sense, even the Civil War would be an apocalypse, though it consume its anointed Son. If Abraham Lincoln was really there at the Spring camp-ground on August 13, 1837; if he really said what Rutledge recorded about the effect of Akers's sermon on him; then we must conclude that the experience would have made an impor- Page  [End Page 47] tant difference in his self-development. Dark doubts concerning his ability and purpose in life would of course continue to impinge. But to the extent that he now believed his was a special destiny, Lincoln could move forward as one elected, chosen: "It is wonderful that God has given such power to men." Page  [End Page 48]

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