The Fiery Trial_ Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery - Eric Foner [24]
Democrats charged that Whig economic policies favored the rich and well connected. They warned that “non-producers” such as merchants and bankers sought to use government to advance their own interests at the expense of honest workingmen. Active government appeared to Democrats as a threat to personal liberty, and they preferred to allow individuals to pursue economic advancement without outside interference. Their hands-off economic policy complemented moral laissez-faire. Democrats adamantly defended the separation of church and state and insisted that government should not impose any single definition of morality on a heterogeneous nation.6
Of course, many exceptions existed to this general pattern of party support. Lincoln, who had grown up on a farm in the backwoods of Indiana and never embraced revivalist religion, seemed to fit the Democratic mold. Certainly, he did not share the evangelical outlook so prominent among northern Whigs. Lincoln had a deep familiarity with the Bible, which he quoted frequently in his speeches. He attended religious services but, quite unusually for a Whig, never became a member of a church. Lincoln’s religious views evolved over time, but they had more in common with the deism of the Enlightenment, which posited a God who did not regularly intervene in human affairs, than the personal Jesus of revivalist Protestantism. According to local lore, as a young man in New Salem, Illinois, where he lived from 1831 to 1837, Lincoln read Tom Paine’s great attack on revealed religion, The Age of Reason, and wrote a manuscript denying the divinity of the Bible, which he then destroyed at the urging of friends. Lincoln’s one public statement about his religious beliefs before the Civil War came in 1846 during his campaign for Congress. His opponent Peter Cartwright, a Methodist preacher, accused him of infidelity. Lincoln responded by publishing a handbill denying ever speaking with “intentional disrespect of religion in general.” What is remarkable about this document is that nowhere in it did Lincoln actually affirm any religious faith except for a fatalistic “doctrine of necessity” whereby “some power” worked out mankind’s destiny in ways human beings could not fathom. It was hardly the statement of a devout Christian.7
Lincoln may have differed from most northern Whigs in his religious outlook, but he found appealing the party’s vision of an integrated, modernizing economy that offered opportunities for hardworking individuals to rise in society. He always considered himself one of the self-made men celebrated by Whig ideology.
Lincoln’s early life coincided with far-reaching changes in transportation, the early development of manufacturing, and the growing dominance of a cash economy. Despite the rapid spread of market relations, however, farm families like the Lincolns in the southern Northwest still concentrated on growing food for their own needs. During Lincoln’s youth, little money circulated and the barter of labor and goods was common. The Indiana farm where Lincoln grew up lay sixteen miles north of the Ohio River, quite a distance given the primitive state of transportation. Stocked with hogs, cattle, horses, and sheep, and growing wheat and corn, it was basically self-sufficient. The family tanned leather, sewed clothing, and made its own cloth. The surrounding